The Lying Game

Leo Buscaglia wrote, “A single rose can be my garden…A single friend my world.” Kate, Thea, Isa and Fatima are each other’s worlds. Their friendship takes precedence in their lives: Even after more than a decade, Kate’s text makes them abandon family, job, and significant others to support each other at Salten. Their unbreakable bond is a central theme of The Lying Game.

The girls’ friendship is born out of their individual needs. Isa is coming from a lonely childhood home: Her mother is terminally ill, her father distracted and remote. She is newly isolated, at boarding school for the first time. Fatima’s parents are away in Pakistan, and Thea’s background, judging from her anorexia, self-destructive behavior, and unwillingness to go home to her angry father, hints at trouble at home. Kate’s mother is dead. The four girls form a tight support group and surrogate family. They strengthen each other and feel that they can solve anything (176).

For Isa, one of the benefits of their friendship is a sense of identity and belonging. Isa gains the approval of Kate and Thea. She gains an outlet for typical teenage experimentation with drinking, drugs, and sex. Isa comments that, with Ambrose, she gains the “father I needed that year” (321).