Auguste Renoir, In the Meadow, 1888–92, oil on canvas.

Although I have never seen a ghost, I have claimed to have seen one. This was when I was a child, and mistakenly believed this sort of lie gave me a certain obscure cachet. I wasn’t a habitual liar—I was never very good at it. In fact, as an adult I believe I can remember every lie I ever told. At the time, I was very troubled by my own wickedness. At six, I remember telling my reading group that I was going to be a flower girl in a wedding—I think there was a little boy I wanted to impress with my importance—and then, when I did end up at a rather crummy and impromptu wedding party later that summer, I grabbed a bunch of flowers off someone’s lawn, and threw them, just to make my lie true.

There was a girl on my block who was an inept and inveterate whopper-teller. Her name was Emily. She wore a lot of pink sweat suits and had a long, reddish braid. I knew she was “disturbed,” as we said in those days—something to do with her parents’ “bad divorce”—and I had been told to be nice to her, but the foolish and incessant nature of her mendacity irritated me. She’d do things like claim to have seen The Blue Lagoon and to have been in near-fatal helicopter accidents, or that her house—which I’d been to—had an improbable number of rooms. Obviously she was one of the first people I knew to say she had a mythical boyfriend. “He gave me a diamond necklace,” she told me once. “I’ll show it to you. My mom’s going to say it was from my grandma, but that’s just because she doesn’t want me dating someone older.” I did not like being taken for a fool; I despised her. We were probably eight.  Read More