“Necessary Lies” by Diane Chamberlain – Fear of Difference

In Necessary Lies by Diane Chamberlain we are introduced to a fifteen year-old girl named Ivy Hart, living on a tobacco farm in North Carolina during the 1960s. She lives in a shack, and what’s more, she must take care of her aging grandmother, her mentally ill sister, her small nephew, and all the while contend with her own epilepsy. 

Quite soon, Ivy realizes that her situation is simply overwhelming, and that’s where Jane Forrester, a recently-married social worker comes into play. 

As Jane gets increasingly involved in Ivy’s life, she learns dark truths she could have lived without, and in an age where being mentally ill meant being institutionalized, she puts it all on the line to try and save the Hart family as best she can.

Though Necessary Lies by Diane Chamberlain may be a fictional tale, it certainly touches on topics that were and still are very real, having broken countless peoples’ lives. In this specific case, it is dysfunctional families and the institutionalization of mentally-ill people and the rampant discrimination against them… a phenomenon which is still all too present to this very day. 

The book shoves us into the harsh rural lands of 1960s North Carolina from the very first pages, and the atmosphere is set for a realistic and grizzly novel, one in which we see in great detail the functioning of a rather disabled family, and the system designed to provide them with help.

The story is told in two alternating perspectives: those of Ivy and Jane, allowing us to see the situation from both sides of the fence. This gives us the ability to not only empathize with characters on both sides of the “conflict”, and perhaps allowing us to understand that the whole system was incredibly flawed due to the fear people exhibit of those with differences and the ignorance of those at the top. 

I found the parts that were told from Jane’s perspective to be a bit more interesting as they allowed me to see the inner workings of the whole social help system and help to better understand what the people who were caught up in it were going through.

In any case, as far as the actual plot goes, the book has a lot of value as a family drama which serves to show how far people are willing to go in order to help out strangers in dire need. If you allow yourself to get emotionally invested in this novel, I guarantee that at one point or another it will have you bawling in tears, at least on the inside. 

Its purpose is to show things from a realistic perspective, and in the real world, unhappy endings are far too common. By the way I’m not implying that the book has a bad ending, but rather, that there are very few indicators pointing to a good one while you are reading it.

All in all, if you are looking for a heavy and emotional family drama based on some very real events with a whole lot of social commentary, Necessary Lies is definitely a book you should give a chance.

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Diane Chamberlain Personal site Diane Chamberlain is an American novelist who has mostly specialized in the writing of adult fiction, with her first novel , Private Relations, having been published in 1993, four years after it was started while waiting in a doctor’s office. Most of her stories focus on the dynamics which control relationships between people.