The headlines pegged to Stephanie Wood’s book, Fake, focus on the sensational. Here is a story about a scammer, a man who seduced and manipulated women. Here is a story told from inside a relationship with that man, from someone who fell victim to his charms. Here is an insight into the fabrication, the web of lies, the danger of trusting someone – anyone – you meet through the glassy veneer of dating apps. Here is, as they say, a solid yarn.
That focus is not without justification, of course. This sort of story taps into our deepest voyeuristic urges; our fascination with dark, deliberate acts of cruelty, the audacity of calculated deception, and the lines between truth and falsity that become ever more blurred the closer we look at them.
Wood is no stranger to that voyeuristic urge – neither the magnetism of it, nor the delicate matter of telling a story that appeals so deeply to it. A journalist, and a widely respected and long-time features writer for the media organisation formerly known as Fairfax, her stock in trade has been extraordinary stories. It’s just that this time the story was her own.
Fake details Wood’s experience of falling in love, and falling for the lies of, a serial fabulist. The relationship, which began with an online dating match, lasted 15 months, and ended when the snowballs of truth that Wood found herself occasionally pelted with – and knocked sideways by – turned into an avalanche. “Joe” had once been an architect, he said. He now farmed sheep on a property in New South Wales’s southern tablelands. He showed her pictures of it; he wore moleskins. The house he lived in on Sydney harbour he had designed and built himself; he kept it in the divorce, and shared custody with his ex-wife of his two school-aged children.
Yet while Wood readily provides the raw material to satisfy the voyeur’s hunger, steadily winding and unwinding the threads for the reader, she does more than that. She canvasses others who have experienced systematic romantic manipulation, such as former the NBC producer Benita Alexander who was scammed by celebrity surgeon Paolo Macchiarini. She speaks to experts in psychology, and she turns the skills of her trade, her journalism, those tools of self-sufficiency and truth-telling, onto Joe himself. Most importantly, she draws a portrait not only of a liar, but of a woman living in an era that, in spite of all its apparent freedoms, pushes down hard on those who haven’t partnered off, had children or lived conventional lives.
For Wood – single, childless, over 40 – the romantic landscape looked grim. That didn’t mean she fell for Joe instantly. Joe wasn’t “riveting company”, even on their first date: “Something about his conversation, his manner of talking, is strange, shallow even; there is a sense perhaps that he has rehearsed for this moment, or that he is relaying his information by rote,” she writes.
He put her offside repeatedly during their first few interactions, first in person and then over text. He regularly ghosted on her, sometimes in the middle of dates. Yet he reeled her in as often as he pushed her away, deftly wielding the push-and-pull, “treat ‘em mean”-style of cruel romantic manipulation that yields social approval not least because it is glamorised by our romance-saturated storytelling culture.
While telling the story of Joe, Wood simultaneously dissects how her own past made her susceptible to his lies. Her lifelong absorption of those romantic narratives is only part of it; there are also the deeply personal and distinctly gendered feelings of loneliness and childlessness she has written about only twice before: “I am not known. I have longed to be known.”
Years later, she struggles to picture Joe’s face clearly. That facelessness – the slipperiness of his visage in her memory – Wood puts down to his shapeshifting, his abrupt turnabouts of mood and manner, the distinct personalities that he would flick through, the contrasting characters he would inhabit. In a moment on the couch: trustworthy and completely simpatico. Elsewhere: thunderous rage. But it also gives him a malleable quality, allowing her to squeeze him into the space she needs him to fill.This tactic is only partially successful; her frequent bouts of intense anxiety throughout the relationship attest perhaps to her knowing, on some level, that things weren’t right long before she could fully confront it.
In the hands of a lesser craftsperson, such a story – written in hindsight – might find itself bogged down in telling readers what they already know, especially since the book had been foregrounded by another article in Good Weekend. But Wood understands that it’s not enough to tell the reader that someone has lied, even lied deliberately, repeatedly; even that they have creatively fashioned mazes of deception through which they have sent numerous hapless, trusting victims. The true fascination – the voyeuristic pleasure – comes from the unspooling of the lie, the fallout, the dissection of the motivations of the liar and the social fabric surrounding them. Why did they do it? How did they get away with it? And, finally: Have they been brought to justice?
The reader yearns for the unravelling of the deception, to wallow in it. Wood was the victim of it; she more than anyone has the right to exult in the fury, the horror, the revulsion that must come from having one’s trust and intimacy so deeply betrayed. But when she finally details her discovery of the multiple lives Joe has been living – including at least one other long-term girlfriend parallel to herself, and a trail of wrecked people and insurmountable debt – it’s not just the level of detail, the uncovering of deception after deception, and the extraordinary way the fragmented pieces of his life interlock that keep the reader driving through.
Because at the heart of this book is love. It is not just a story about being duped for the love of a man, but a story about finding love for oneself. One senses the sheer force of the personal reckoning Wood must have had in order to write it. The self-flagellation, the tremendous shame – these are feelings of the past. She has built herself a suit of armour with which to face adversity, yes, but more importantly, has found the brilliant core within herself, and the final passages of the book blaze with it.
• Fake by Stephanie Wood is out now through Vintage
