Never Simple: A Memoir

Liz Scheier's mother was a news junkie, a hilarious storyteller, a fast-talking charmer you couldn't look away from, a single mother whose devotion crossed the line into obsession, and - when in the grips of the mental illness that plagued her - a masterful liar.

On an otherwise uneventful afternoon when Scheier was eighteen, her mother sauntered into the room and dropped two bombshells.

First, that she had been married for most of the previous two decades to a man Liz had never heard of and, second, that the man she had claimed was Liz's dead father was entirely fictional.

She'd made him up - his name, the stories, everything.

Those big lies were the start, but not the end; it had taken dozens of smaller lies to support them, and by the time she was done she had built a fairy-tale, half-true life for the two of them.