Women the world over are brought up to hope, even expect, to find the man of their dreams and live happily ever after. When Stephanie Wood meets a former architect turned farmer she embarks on an exhilarating romance with him. He seems compassionate, loving, truthful. They talk about the future. She falls in love. She also becomes increasingly beset by anxiety at his frequent cancellations, no-shows and bizarre excuses. She starts to wonder, who is this man?
When she ends the relationship Stephanie reboots her journalism skills and embarks on a romantic investigation. She discovers a story of mind-boggling duplicity and manipulation. She learns that the man she thought she was in love with doesn’t exist. She also finds she is not alone; that the world is full of smart people who have suffered at the hands of liars, cheats, narcissists, fantasists and phonies, people enormously skilled in the art of deception.
In this brilliantly acute and broad-ranging book, Wood, an award-winning writer and journalist, has written a riveting, important account of contemporary love, and the resilience of those who have witnessed its darkest sides.
Source: Fake by Stephanie Wood
I listened to Claudia Karvan’s reading of Stephanie Wood’s Fake after watching the series, featuring David Wenham and Asher Keddie, first. Although the series differed from the book in that it is set in Melbourne, whereas the book is set in Sydney, the story of deception was the same.
It was interesting to compare the way each medium presented the story. For example, there are elements about her relationship with her mother that Wood only shares at the end of the novel, whereas in the TV Series, we are presented with this relationship as soon as Heather Mitchell enters the picture. I also feel that Wood explored more of the why in the book. This involved bringing in various textual quotes, speaking with experts about such things as personality disorders, as well as retelling a number of other similar stories.
All in all, it was an insightful and sad book. Not because Joe got caught out, but that such people exist. Although Wood’s ends thing in an optimistic manner, I cannot help but feel for all those caught up in similar tales.
Marginalia
2. The Other Woman
With a dopamine reward system in such a state – stirred up, as Richard says, in ‘very wonderful and strange ways’ – how could anyone possibly be expected to make sensible decisions? And yet, as Richard and Jacqueline continue their intercontinental explanation of a brain in love, I learn that it’s not just the dopamine reward circuits in my brain’s flighty limbic system that have gone crazy. That calculating frontal lobe has let me down, too.
sit on the couch touching. We sit. We touch. We. It is the most wonderful personal pronoun. It is the cruellest personal pronoun.
Perel’s thoughts reflect those of American clinical psychologist Sue Johnson. ‘Inevitably we now ask our lovers for the emotional connection and sense of belonging that my grandmother could get from a whole village.
To feel whole, we need people in the vicinity who know us as well, sometimes better, than we know ourselves. Without love, we lose the ability to possess a proper identity, within love, there is a constant confirmation of our selves.’ I am not known. I have longed to be known.
4. A Mansion in the Country
Yet there are things my psychologist cannot know: our sessions do not allow time for the sharing of the minutiae of the relationship, the to-and-fro of messages in text and word, the nuances of his language and declarations, the details that build up in increments to form a picture, the expressions on his face.
7. Disordered
You gradually discover that almost nothing about Nigel or his story was real. Every last little thing that bothered you was actually part of a puzzle that you can only now assemble. You’ll learn other things about Nigel as time goes on.
One day on @narcissistfreenow there’s a post that gives you a chill. It’s a photograph in which a sleeping man lies curled up in bed with a grotesque creature that looks like something out of The Walking Dead. ‘If you could see people’s energies you wouldn’t sleep with just anyone,’ reads the caption. Then, on another of the Instagram accounts you follow, @Narcissistic_abuse, you read a quote that makes you weep. ‘We eat lies when our heart is hungry.’
8. Who the Hell Are You?
Experts believe that all personality disorders have the same underlying causes: first, a hardwired genetic component; and second, environmental factors – how someone has been shaped through their life experiences, particularly in early childhood when the serious psychological process of ‘attachment’ takes place. ‘Very early on in our lives we need to learn whether or not we can trust others and ourselves enough to feel secure,’ says Grenyer. It is no surprise to learn that the types of environments that can lead to other mental-health issues are also implicated in the development of personality disorders: childhoods in which trauma, chaos and fear are frequent visitors; childhoods in which there might be physical or sexual boundary violations or abuse, or intense bullying, or being witness to domestic violence, or verbal and emotional abuse, or stress because of poverty or absent parents or abandonment in one form or another. Childhoods in which a growing person’s sense of self and trust in others have been continually violated.
9. All the Similar Stories
His was a high-wire act with his wits the only safety net; an exhausting, ad-libbed theatre sports of sorts as he wildly grasped for ideas to keep his fantasies afloat.
Maria Konnikova in a New Yorker article, ‘Donald Trump, Con Artist?’, published eight months before the 2016 presidential election. ‘But the profit need not be financial. Often, it isn’t. Underlying almost any con is the desire for power – for control over other people’s lives. That power can take the form of reputation, adulation, or the thrill of knowing oneself to be the orchestrator of others’ fates – of being a sort of mini-god.’
Adulation, that’s what Joe’s ugly appetite craved. And I was complicit, a handmaiden to his ego. I allowed myself to be controlled and manipulated; I subsumed my own character, my own story, my own needs. I let him drain my well to fill his hollow soul.
11. The Getting of Wisdom
What is it with this embedded, maladaptive behaviour; this tendency to sketch fairytales, to place weight in ideas and dreams rather than reason and facts gathered over time; this tendency to take little things, mere specks of dust, and polish them, and invest them with meaning, and mistake them for the future?
The lesson: apply Kondo-esque principles to your daydreams – declutter them, discard every last word of flattery. Whatever you do, do not dwell on the flattery he has ladled out until he has dished up multiple deeds to match.
