I wanted readers to be genuinely unsure as to whether she's telling the truth or lying. It meant making her partly sympathetic, and partly unsympathetic, which wasn't easy.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing.
When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.
In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.
I will say that the idea of a woman being deceptive came from that original discussion with critics and reporters about if woman could do that kind of thing. Evelyn, herself, grew out of the discussions about how capable women are of deceit and lying and manipulation.
Truth is a demure lady, much too ladylike to knock you on your head and drag you to her cave. She is there, but people must want her, and seek her out.
One of the questions writers bump up against in their work, whether they know it or not, is about lying. Because fiction is a form of deceit, and one's abilities are measured by how convincingly one can persuade readers that these events really happened.
There never was a woman who did not prefer an oblique compliment to a straight truth - if the latter were unflattering.
The story line was done in a way that's organic and was doled out very slowly in little bites. We think that's authentic for this character, that her feelings are very deeply buried or she never felt them.
I have always loved truth so passionately that I have often resorted to lying as a way of introducing it into the minds which were ignorant of its charms.
Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.