The Lies We Tell Ourselves by Maura Pierlot

Title: The Lies We Tell Ourselves

Author: Maura Pierlot

Genre: Contemporary Young Adult

Publisher: Big Ideas Press

Published: 1^st August 2025

Format: Paperback

Pages: 352

Price: $22.99

Synopsis: The biggest lies are the ones you tell yourself.

When gorgeous new student, Carter, struts into class, Harley knows it’s time to reinvent herself. Before long, she’s shedding not only her weight but her friends, her family and the person she used to be. Betrayed by someone close to her, Harley abandons her only ally, drawn into a dangerous game of self-deception with no rules. Or winner. Spiralling deeper into a world where nothing is as it seems, Harley is desperate to find her way back. But first, she must figure out why her dead grandmother is messaging her. Why her father’s never home. Why the voice keeps making her do things she doesn’t want to do. Why everyone she loves is out of reach. Why everything she wishes for is vanishing before her eyes … or is she the one disappearing

Set in Australia, The Lies We Tell Ourselves is a timely, smart and utterly compelling story of how to piece yourself together when your world’s falling apart. The work tackles issues at the heart of adolescence today: cyber-bullying, and the myriad of ways that young people can fall victim to intimidation; grief and the hole left behind when someone close dies unexpectedly; body image, particularly in a world constantly focussing on the external; and the heady, confusing world of teenage love. Combined, these themes are underpinned by existential tenets, eternal truths that are creatively explored in Harley’s philosophy class. The story won the Children’s Book Council of Australia NSW Aspiring Writers’ Mentorship Program, The Charlotte Waring Barton Award and was shortlisted and named runner up for several other Australian writing awards.

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Harley is fifteen and in year ten at Mount Pleasant High School. She’s uneasy about this year, though, She’s feeling fat, everyone is judging her and her best friend Talia has just come back from a holiday, and feels distant, as though she is pulling away from Harley and closer to Eden, Paris and Sydney, the popular girls at school. Everything seems to be going wrong, until Harley meets new student Carter, who has just moved from the US. Everything changes, and Harley is determined to lose weight, to stop being called fat or pudgy, and is ready to start a new life. She’s also grappling with the grief of losing her grandmother, and a family that feel distant – a father who is always away, a brother who is almost as bad as the kids in her year, and a mother who doesn’t always listen to Harley and her needs.

Harley’s also grappling with an awful betrayal – which sets off her quest to shed the kilos, whilst the bullying and grappling with her mental health continues throughout the book and school year. She’s determined to go to the formal looking thin, but the drastic measures she’s taking are dangerous, and she still doesn’t feel good about herself. She doesn’t see what everyone else sees. Her life is in a constant state of flux trying to navigate teenage relationships, wanting more than what she has, and believing things that people tell her – only to have it thrown back in her face.

It’s set in 2019, the year before COVID, before the world changed for everyone, and Harley’s story gives reader a glimpse into the complexities of being a teenager in a world where social media is the norm. Where you are bombarded with the same messages about your body that previous generations were, but in a more immediate way. It’s something captured and spread online, and because these days, we are perpetually online, it feels like there is no escape from the messages, the emails – anything that makes Harley question herself. At school, the constant presence of phones mean that all her mistakes are recorded. That everyone can see things within seconds of it being recorded, which is harmful at any age. But for Harley, it’s amplifying her doubts about herself, and amplifying the hurtful messages everyone at school is sending her. Even her Nan’s messages, seemingly from beyond the grave, aren’t helping. She’s spiralling, and nobody is noticing beyond criticising her.

The Lies We Tell Ourselves is a timely and important examination of mental health, and the different ways it affects people. It uses an unreliable narrator – Harley – to show how mental health can make us only see what we want to see. Like making people feel like everyone is against us, or that nobody can possibly know how we’re feeling. Harley’s perspective is used to highlight what it is like to be a teenager, bombarded with so many conflicting messages from friends, family and media. This hasn’t changed, but the delivery of the message has. We can no longer “switch off” at the end of the day because our phones and devices are connected all the time. So, there is an expectation that we will be online or available all the time in so many ways. Maura shows how damaging this constant connection with no downtime, no change to recharge is. In the days before constant connection, we could log off and disconnect the dial up. It felt like distracting yourself was easier, because it was easier in some ways to focus on something else, or to write in a journal. Yes, things had to be faced the next day at school or in the next magazine, but there was something about not being constantly connected that could have helped. But in Harley’s life, it’s always in her face, always there to remind her about the things that have gone wrong. Years before all this, it did feel like things were forgotten quicker, depending on what the issue was. Of course, everyone would have had different ways to cope with these back then, and everyone would also have reacted differently. It wasn’t perfect then, and it isn’t perfect now.

Everything in this book – mental health, body image and body dysmorphia, self-esteem, grief, depression, as well as friendship and family dynamics – comes together in this richly layered story. Harley is allowed to tell her story, but there are gaps, because we only see what she sees, and there is always a sense that there is something she isn’t telling us.  But maybe it’s something she can’t articulate, something that only makes sense in her head. Because sometimes it is hard to put feelings into words, especially if they are too complex or big, or ones that we feel like nobody else can understand. It reflects the reality of life, of growing up and finding your way to being who you want to be. But also, being the best version of yourself without being what other people want you to be. This is what helps Harley find her way through the story, through the ups and downs of everything she goes through to fit in, and to be part of the ‘popular crowd’. It’s a complex and layered story for young adult readers that navigates universal experiences of being a teenager within a modern world that readers fourteen years and older will be able to relate to.