Biography
Ashley Elston worked for many years as a wedding photographer before turning her hand to writing. She lives in Louisiana with her husband and three sons. Elston has written six young adult novels.
First Lie Wins, her adult debut, was a number one New York Times bestseller.
Biography—from interview
What made you want to pursue a career in writing?
Prior to writing fiction, I was a wedding photographer. But with three young boys who were starting to play sports, I hated that my weekends were consumed with work. I took a step back from that and suddenly had more free time on my hands, and I’ve just always loved to read. My first book was terrible, but I felt more equipped after writing it. The next book I wrote was published and sold. No one was more surprised than I was that I became an author.
What was the inspiration for First Lie Wins?
Because of my background in photography, I’m a very visual person. I could see a group of people sitting around a table and began imagining what they were discussing. Then I thought, what if someone was there that shouldn’t be? I continued to “what if” as the story progressed until the plot had developed.
How does Louisiana and southern culture play a part in the novel?
I love it when the setting is like its own character. I might not call the city by its name, but someone familiar with the area would be able to tell what city I’m talking about because of the description. There are also parts of the book that just aren’t likely to happen anywhere else other than the South, like when they go to a Kentucky Derby watch party.
Publications
Young adult books
10 Truths and a Dare (2021)
10 Blind Dates (2019)
The Lying Woods (2018)
This is our Story (2016)
The Rules for Breaking (2014)
The Rules for Disappearing (2013)
Cast of characters
Evie (Evelyn) Porter (1st alias)
She was born Lucca Marino, lived with her mother in a single-wide trailer in a small town until her mother died of cancer. She never finished high school, but has a GED. To pay for her mother's medical bills, she began stealing jewelry and high-value items, which caught Mr. Smith's attention.
When she's caught skimming credit cards at a charity auction, he bails her out and offers her a job.
Her mother supported them as a seamstress, creating pageant gowns and prom dresses with a flair for the dramatic. Evie learns from her how to create an image, or a disguise, using clothes, makeup, and jewelry.
Her whole identity is a lie by design, and she needs to keep it that way to get the job done. However, as the novel opens, Evelyn's real past and real identity seem to have caught up with her, and she finds herself developing real feelings for Ryan.
Later in the novel, because of the many identities she's adopted to do her various "jobs," she calls herself a "ghost" passing through her own life. What does she mean by this statement?
Cast of characters
Ryan Sumner
A professionally successful financial advisor in a brokerage firm, he has inherited his grandfather's house, bank account, and business, including his Thursdays business venture that started as a legitimate trucking firm, Glenview Trucking, that Ryan now uses it to resell high-value stolen goods.
He has a close-knit group of friends—Allison, Beth, and Sara--to whom he introduces Evie.
To some degree, Ryan is a split personality, the boyhood friend to the faithful group of childhood friends, lover to Evie, but also a black market dealer in stolen goods. So he too is playing a role.
Throughout the novel, he's consistently on Evie's side, supports her even when he's not sure what she's doing, loyal, faithful, trustworthy. But at the end of the novel, he's still also the dealer in stolen property.
Which one is real, or are they both?
Cast of characters
Amy Holder—one of Evie's previous jobs. Amy has blackmail materials on Victor Connelly, member of a well connected crime family, that Evie is to retrieve. But, as she later learns, the blackmail materials also implicate Mr. Smith, who has been embezzling or money laundering for his own profit.
Supposedly Evie set fire to the hotel room in Atlanta that Amy occupied, killing her and destroying the evidence. However, Mr. Smith saw Evie entering a bank shortly after and assumes that she has deposited those blackmail materials in a safety deposit box. Those materials contain information on him as well, and his dealings with Connelly.
In fact, when Evie knows Mr. Smith wants her jailed or killed, she meets with Amy and they devise a plan, with Devon's help, to foil Mr. Smith's plans. So Amy gets into a laundry cart and is shuttled away by Devon before Evie starts the fire.
But Mr. Smith has photos and gives these to the Atlanta police as evidence against Evie, which is why they want to talk to her.
Cast of characters
Rachel Murray—a lawyer, and one of Ryan's group of close-knit friends. Accompanies Evie when she goes to the Atlanta police.
Devon—Evie's high tech friend who helps her engineer the final plot to expose Mr. Smith, along with Amy.
George—throughout most of the novel, he's a messenger who brings Evie packages from Mr. Smith. But as we learn at the novel's end, he is in fact Mr. Smith. Evie actually develops a kind of friendship with him during the course of the novel, not knowing who he really is.
James Bernard—one of Ryan's long-time friends, with drug and alcohol problems, who hits up Ryan and others in the group for money.
Lucca Marino—James's girlfriend, but an imposter set up by Mr. Smith to check on Evie, and adopt her original identity so that Evie can never reclaim it. He has both James and the woman posing as Lucca killed in a car accident off a bridge.
"Jobs"
As the book progresses, Evie fills us in on the various "jobs" she has completed for Mr. Smith, her unknown employer who keeps his identity secret and contacts her only through a mailbox, messenger-delivered instructions, or a last-resort burner phone number.
He defines the "job" progressively; initially she knows only the name of the person who is her "job." He passes information on a "need to know" basis as she becomes more involved, but often she has no idea what the real "job" is. He keeps her in the dark as much as possible.
Mr. Smith also keeps the process competitive always, is stingy with praise, and delivers threats when she has not completed the job to his satisfaction. So, one of the continuous narrative threads is finding out who he is, which she succeeds at by the end of the novel.
When the book opens, Evie's "job" is Ryan. She's knows the "who" but doesn't know why or what Mr. Smith intends her to do. Mr. Smith has done business with Ryan a couple of times in the past, considers it a valuable business to own, and want Evie to get financial info and client lists.
As she gets ready to move into Ryan's place, she sets up an apartment, a rather shabby one, to make it look like she has been living there and is just now moving out.
"Jobs"
In one of the book's many flashbacks, Evie tells the story of the Tate job; she was asked to steal a painting that turned out to be bizarrely complex. Evelyn had figured out that the job was a test Mr. Smith set up to test the people working for him, specifically Amy and Evie.
With Devon's help, they manage to figure out everyone who had attempted the test and learned that almost all of them were dead. Presumably, they failed and were killed by Mr. Smith. The only ones still alive are Evelyn and Amy Holder.
Realizing Mr. Smith can't be trusted, Evie contacts Amy and convinces her they need to get rid of Mr. Smith before he decides to get rid of them.
"Jobs"
On her first job, as Isabelle Williams, Izzie, Evie is nanny for Greg and Jenny Kingston, and their son Miles. Her job is to retrieve a red flash drive with a blue cap from the safe in Jenny's bedroom.
After a couple of initial failures keying in the right code, Evie succeeds, but Jenny catches her in the act. Drunk and doped up, Jenny falls and bangs her head, but Evie fears for Miles, left home alone, if she flees. So she calls Greg, tells him to come home, and then flees.
Miles is also the first for whom she creates, and leaves, a white origami swan. When she checks in on him some time later, she sees the swan prominently displayed on his book shelf.
"Jobs"
Recalling another "job" As Regina Hale, Evie recalls the Amy Holder/Victor Connelly assignment where she used the alias Regina Hale. While Evelyn/Regina worked the job, Amy revealed that her blackmail materials were actually about Mr. Smith, not Victor Connelly.
Evelyn/Regina ended up confronting Amy in her hotel room, but there was a fire. Mr. Smith inquires about anything Amy might have about him personally, but Evelyn/Regina reports back to Mr. Smith that she wasn't able to recover anything from the fire and didn't get anything about him or Victor Connelly from Amy.
"Jobs"
Six years before the present time in the novel, Evie, as Mia Bianchi, was assigned to find compromising information on Andrew Marshall, an up and coming politician with aspirations for the governorship. But he was an honest, honorable, upstanding man.
So Evie/Mia gained his trust and used the opportunity to entrap several other powerful men in compromising positions with women. She collected those images for future use, referring to the incident as "Hilton Head 2017."
When she needs to get out of jail in Atlanta, she uses these photos to blackmail a local judge into ordering her release.
When she meets Andrew Marshall again, Mr. Smith is there as George. He's always felt that Evie had "dirt" on Marshall that she kept from him. So, he's rattled by seeing the two of them together. Marshall has given her his private cell number to call when she needs help.
"Jobs"
As Wendy Wallace, Evie's job is to get Mitch Cameron, head coach of a major football program in central Florida, out of his job, without scandal to the sports program or the university, and without financial damage to the program or Mitch himself.
In the process, she gets to know star player Tyron Nichols who says that Coach Cameron told him he was leaving a week before Evie gets the job. She realizes then that Mitch is probably the client for this job since he's the one who wants to get out of his own contract. It's the one job where Evie felt sure of who the real client was.
She reaches out to Mitch, asking for money, and enrages him so much that he calls Mr. Smith—exactly what she wanted him to do so that Devon can get the number.
Evie also advises Tyron to be careful what he says because his house is bugged, and to make the deal he wants. Later, he provides an alibi for her on the night Amy was supposedly killed. Evie has named her look-alike Lucca Marino as the real killer, and the woman posing as Lucca is dead.
Book title
There’s an old saying: The first lie wins. It’s not referring to the little white kind that tumble out with no thought; it refers to the big one. The one that changes the game. The one that is deliberate. The lie that sets the stage for everything that comes after it. And once the lie is told, it’s what most people believe to be true. The first lie has to be the strongest. The most important. The one that has to be told.(p. 27).
“I’m from Brookwood, which is really just a suburb of Tuscaloosa. I went to Bama for a couple of years but didn’t graduate. My parents and I were in a bad accident a few years ago. I was the only survivor. When I was released from the hospital, I realized I needed a change, so I’ve been moving around ever since then.” (p. 28).
Later, p. 291, she tells police that she's using a fake name because she's fleeing from a toxic relationship and is afraid her former boyfriend will follow her. She gives his name as Justin Burns. If they check on him, he's got a record with the police. If they don't find anything, they'll assume his brother on the police force lost the record.
Questions for discussion
Although we get only a brief glimpse into Evie's adolescence, before her mother died, we know that her mother made dresses, costumes really.
"Mothers came from all over North Carolina to have her make pageant dresses, prom dresses, and even the occasional wedding dress for their daughters. When I was little, I’d sit at Mama’s feet and watch these plain girls walk in and then somehow be transformed once she got her hands on them. It was in that moment that I learned you can become someone else with the right hair, the right dress, and the right accessories." (p. 51)
We also know that Evie and her mother dreamed of a big house, with an especially nice garden, including vegetables. And Evie is moved after she's moved in with Ryan when he tells his friends that "we're putting in a garden."
What does this tell you about Evie?
Questions for discussion
Evie’s path to crime began as a way to pay for the medicine her mother needed. She didn't plan a life of crime, but believed she had no other option when her mother was ill.
She begins this career path by accepting Mr. Smith's offer of a job when she's caught skimming credit cards at a charity auction event and he bails her out. Why did she continue this line of work?
Questions for discussion
At the end, Amy (who also used to work for Mr. Smith) refers to Evie as Miss Smith, revealing that they have taken on Mr. Smith’s business, with Evie serving as the leader.
Why has Evie taken on this part to play. Will she be more fair than Mr. Smith or do you see her eventually following the same dark path?
Questions for discussion
Ryan is a well-educated, successful financial advisor. He's inherited his grandfather's wealth, his house, and his grandfather's business reselling stolen property through what was once a legitimate trucking firm.
Why does Ryan take over and maintain that business when he doesn't seem to need the money?
And Evie schemes, deceives, role plays to get Mr. Smith the information he wants, but she also refuses to follow through on his plan to ruin Mr. Marshall with compromising photos. She cautions Tyron about the bugging and advises him to make the best deal. She changes information about Ryan's business deals before turning it over to Mr. Smith who wants to take it from Ryan. And she calls Miles's father rather than leaving the child alone before fleeing.
In other words, both Ryan and Evie are "morally gray," like other characters in the novel.
Why? What's the message here?
Questions for discussion
One of the people who reviewed this novel said that the real plot was not Evie's love affair with Ryan, but was in fact her rivalry with Mr. Smith.
She's adopting false identities, created by him, and playing roles in dramas that will get him information, "dirt," or other evidence against someone that he plans to use for his own purposes, not always clearly identified. He's a manipulator, a con artist, who uses people for his own nefarious ends. And she is complicit. He's the puppet master, and she's the marionette.
Do you agree?
Questions for discussion
Identity plays a significant role in First Lie Wins. Evie assumes various aliases for her jobs and ultimately allows her Lucca Marino identity to take the fall for crimes she didn’t commit in order to protect her future.
"I spent years and years protecting the identity of Lucca Marino. Making sure I could go back there and be that girl. I’ve already bought the land to build the dream house Mama and I planned. Already have the landscaping plans for the garden Mama would have loved. But when that name was threatened, I realized it was just that. A name. I spent years protecting the idea of Lucca Marino, but I’m no longer that naive little girl. While it was hard to finally make the decision to let her go, the truth is she’s been gone a long time. I don’t need to be Lucca Marino to keep the memory of Mama alive. Or to do the things Mama would have wanted me to do." (p. 294)
What does the Lucca Marino mean to Evie? Is a name essential to identity? Will she be happy as Evie Porter.
Questions for discussion
Quotes about creating an identity:
“In the kitchen area, I unzip the black bag and remove four menus from nearby restaurants and three pictures I printed from the kiosk at CVS of Ryan and me, plus seven magnets to hold each item in place on the refrigerator.” (p. 11)
“You live in a home where every single piece of furniture holds meaning for you. A memory. You grew up around these things so they’re a part of you. It wasn’t the same with my stuff.” (p. 18)
"I am Mia Bianchi. Even though I’m only twenty-two, new-hire paperwork shows I’m twenty-seven. The right clothes and makeup are key. I’m a graduate of Clemson University—Go Tigers!—and I excelled in my public policy classes and killed it on the debate team. I can’t even begin to understand how someone was able to add my image into a pic of a debate against UNC a few years ago. But there it was. Just grainy enough that if you were looking for me you’d find me, but not so clear as to draw questions from the students who were actually present." (p. 142)
What defines identity? Is this a good definition?
Questions for discussion
To some degree, this novel is also about identity and survival, like a couple of the novels we've already read. Circumstances in those novels were much more dire, but in First Lie Wins Evie discovers that Mr. Smith intends to kill her, because she has information about his business discrepancies with the Connelly family, which will get him killed when they find out.
He does succeed in killing Lucca Marino, her real identity, thus forcing her to live as Evie Porter.
Do you see other connections?
Questions for discussion
Do you think Evie finally found her family with Devon, Amy, and Ryan?
She says that she has bought the land for the house she and her mother wanted, and has planned the garden? And she's reconciled to her identity as Evie Porter. Has she found what she wanted by the end of the book?
Questions for discussion
Mr. Smith suggests that he and Evie are more alike than she might wish: they both con and manipulate others. Do you think Evie is aware of how much they actually resemble each other?
At the end, it looks like Evie will take over Mr. Smith’s business—do you think that’s really what she wants? Can she do that job and also live happily ever after with Ryan?
Questions for discussion
Evie uses origami swans as a calling card. What do you think these swans mean to her? Why leave a calling card at all in a job that requires complete secrecy?
Summary and Conclusions
House of Mirth
Known for its recreation of the Gilded Age, this novel tragically focuses on the struggle of one woman, Lily Bart, to find a life for herself in this world of parties, affairs, gambling, drinking, money, social status and connections.
It is therefore also a novel about the conflict between personal and social values. It asks about the accommodations someone needs to make within her own personal value system, beliefs, and behaviors to fit into the world that doesn't share those values. In other words, do you maintain your own identity or compromise it to fit into this world. Do you play a role, wear a disguise, to be able to function in that world.
Note, for example, the emphasis on the proper clothes, the proper manners, the proper friends in this novel. The novel brilliantly outlines the bargains and compromises women had to make for that lifestyle, specifically Lily Bart who has been brought up in that world, mastered its rules, and defined herself as inextricably bound to that society. But, as a person, she's reluctant to "buy into ," sell" herself to its rules by marrying appropriately. She's reluctant in some ways to compromise herself by marrying Lawrence Selden, the "right" man for her personally although he doesn't have the social standing or money she thinks she has to have. The end result is tragic.
It therefore has some similarities with First Lie Wins, Lily is playing a part, trying to fit into the society she believes she belongs to, but the real Lily is conflicted, can't concede to following their rules and deny her own personality. She's about conflicted identity. Just who is she, really?
Magnificent life of Marjorie Merriweather Post
A biography as much as a piece of historical fiction because of the focus on life achievements, including collections, but less on her personal life, husbands, daughters, with very little on her as a person.
So, she is known now because of what she did for the Post company and for her collections, her rich lifestyle, homes, designer sense. She is representative of the lifestyle of the "rich and famous." We see very little about the choices or compromises she made to live this life.
Librarian of Burned Books
This book is about the importance of storytelling. The burning of books in Nazi Germany was Hitler's attempt to rid the world of ideas he did not agree with. Books, and storytelling in general, expose readers to new ideas, engage them with characters they haven't known, explore the possibilities of life, and encourage them to think on a much broader range than the small world they inhabit.
People who can read, and engage with ideas, threaten the fascist dictate that there's only one correct way of thinking.
Storytelling, and reading, enlarge and enrich the lives people live in. The ASE books featured in this novel did just that and encouraged the education boom that followed WWII.
Cemetery of Untold Stories
In this novel, Alma, the protagonist and author, has lived her life without publishing all of the characters and their stories that her imagination created. Her failure to bring them to life through publication haunts her, so she decides to literally bury them in graves, after burning the manuscripts.
But the characters haunt her as well, they want their stories known, their manuscripts don't burn, and so they rise up from the cemetery. The most dominant of these specters of the imagination are Bienvenida Trujllo—wife of the dictator, and Manuel Cruz, Alma's father, whose stories are based on real people.
At the end of the novel when Alma has died and Pepito is managing her literary legacy, he publishes the stories and the characters leave the cemetery. Publication has given them life as they move from creative imagination to reality when their stories are told. They are, so to speak, given life when published because they have moved from the imagination of their creator into the hearts and minds of readers where they will now live once their stories have been told.
This is testimony to the creative power of the imagination, Shakespeare, and more recently Maggie O'Farrell with her novels Hamnet (Anne Shakespeare) and The Marriage Portrait (Lucretia de Medici)
Julia Alvarez is doing the same thing, in a very different way—acknowledging that what began as imaginative creations—"airy nothingness"—become "real," are given "life," when their stories are told and/or published. They acquire "a local habitation and a name."
People of the Book
Story of the Sarajevo Haggadah—story more of a people rather than an individual and the importance of maintaining cultural and in this case religious heritage.
Also about the people who preserve that cultural heritage for centuries because it is so dear, important to them. Their personal identity hinges on that cultural history—to some degree, it defines them
Book of Lost Names
This novel picks up that theme—degree to which cultural heritage should define a person's life choices. Eva loves Remy, but he's Catholic. Her mother favors Joseph, nice Jewish boy, but a traitor.
Theme is also original identity, because Eva and Remy are documenting the original birth names of the children for whom they forged false identification papers that will enable them to escape the Nazis. By doing so, they may be able to help children find their birth parents after the war and regain their cultural heritage as Jews.
In this case, those birth names are their true identities. The forged names are disguises, facades, fictional roles they adopt to be able to survive. These fictional identities are a social necessity if they want to continue to live.
First Lie Wins
This novel too continues with real versus fictional identities. The protagonist of the novel moves through the narrative as Evie, Evelyn, Porter although her real identity is Lucca Marino.
Because Mr. Smith has given another of his employees her real name as Lucca Marino. Evie can never reclaim it. Mr. Smith has created an identity for the woman portraying Lucca Marino that looks real. He has created all the documentary evidence that she exists, even pasting Evie's childhood photo onto pictures that this imposter claims as hers.
That woman is killed, and with her dies the created identity of Lucca Marino. Evie Porter is a similarly created identity that she will have to keep for the rest of her life.
Coming up!!
Thank you for joining this class and discussing these novels.
Please check back on the website for the list of books we'll read in spring.
https://sites.google.com/udel.edu/novels-as-stories/home
Happy Holidays