Truth and Storytelling

Truth and storytelling lie at the heart of Great Big Beautiful Life, structuring both its plot and its moral questions. The novel constantly returns to the tension between narrative and reality or, in other words, between the stories people tell to survive and the truths those stories obscure. From Margaret Ives’s carefully managed public image to Alice’s career as a journalist, every major character grapples with how to represent a life truthfully when truth itself is subjective and changeable. Early in the book, Alice reflects, “There’s an old saying about stories, and how there are always three versions of them: yours, mine, and the truth” (5). This line becomes the novel’s moral compass, suggesting that truth is never singular but an unstable convergence of perspectives and intentions.

Margaret’s long concealment of her daughter’s birth and her reinvention as a...