The Greatest Lie of All
Jillian Cantor
ISBN: 9780778387312
Publication Date: November 6, 2024
Publisher: Park Row Books
A young actress receives the role of a lifetime—playing a
famous romance writer in a major biopic. But when she discovers a shocking
secret about the author’s past, she realizes her own participation in the
biopic is no coincidence. Perfect for fans of The Seven Husbands of
Evelyn Hugo.
Fledgling actress Amelia Grant is at rock bottom when
offered the opportunity of a lifetime: to play world-renowned romance author,
Gloria Diamond, in a biopic. To prepare for the role, she'll spend a week with
Gloria at her secluded Washington estate. It's a chance to get out of L.A.,
away from her cheating ex-boyfriend, and to make her recently deceased mother
proud, who was Gloria's biggest fan.
Amelia's excitement is short-lived, however, once she
arrives at the estate. Gloria is cold, verging on rude, and so different than
her public persona – a widow-turned-romance writer who used her own whirlwind
love story as inspiration for her books. But when Amelia stumbles upon a secret
from Gloria's past, she realizes Gloria's life story is more fiction than fact,
and Amelia’s own participation in the biopic is no coincidence.
Told in alternating points of view—Amelia in the present day
and Gloria in the past—the novel examines what it means to be a woman and an
artist, and what lengths a woman will ultimately go to protect herself and her
passions.
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Excerpted from THE GREATESE LIE OF ALL by Jillian Cantor,
Copyright © 2024 by Jillian Cantor. Published by Park Row Books, an imprint of
HarperCollins.
Prologue
Amelia
Sometimes the end of everything sneaks up on you when you
least expect it.
I read that once, in a Gloria
Diamond novel. Only she was referring to an asteroid. For me, the end came as a
32 DD red lace bra.
It happened on a rare rainy day in LA, two months after my
thirty-third birthday. Two days after my mother had died.
She had collapsed quite suddenly in
her garden, my mother. And forty-eight hours later, I found myself numb and
standing in the open doorway of my walk-in closet in my underwear. I knew I
needed something to wear to the funeral home to discuss arrangements, but I
couldn’t figure out how to step inside the closet and choose what that should
be. Young woman with newly dead mother. It was a role I didn’t yet understand
and didn’t want. I stared at all my clothes blindly, as if I’d never seen any
of them before.
“How about this?” Jase stepped
around me, walked into the closet and pulled out a hanger with a simple black
shift dress. Was it mine? I had no memory of buying it. The tags were still on.
“She hated black,” I reminded him.
My mother had been in love with color, from the pink azaleas in her garden to
the color-splattered abstract art she made in her studio to the bright orange
plates she’d serve us brunch on each Sunday.
Jase raised his eyebrows, and I
took the dress from him, ripped off the tags and quickly slipped into it. I
glanced at myself in the floor-length mirror. The dress was shapeless, and I
looked pale and powerless.
Jase walked up behind me and hugged
me, whispering one more apology over not being able to accompany me this
morning. His shooting schedule was intense. The director would get mad if he
called out last minute.
“It’s fine,” I told him, again.
Work was work. And he had fought so hard to get this far. It wasn’t like I
could be mad he hadn’t planned ahead. No one could’ve expected my healthy
fifty-eight-year-old mother to collapse in her azaleas when shooting schedules
had been made. I’d just wrapped shooting on a supporting role in an indie film,
so luckily my schedule this week was clear. My mother always had impeccable
timing.
“Are you sure?” Jase released the
words slowly, tickling my ear with his breath. When I nodded, he spun me
around, planted a gentle kiss on my forehead. He took a step back, nodded
approvingly as he glanced over the blah black dress, then flashed what I knew
by then was his TV-doctor sexy grin. The smile was an apology, or a promise, or
maybe by then it was more like a tic. Since he’d taken on the role of heart
surgeon/ heartthrob on the überpopular Seattle Med last year, my boyfriend’s
face had become familiar to every woman in America. But it had come to feel
strangely unfamiliar to me.
“I’ll be okay,” I heard myself
saying. And in spite of everything, I was still a good actress. I sold it.
“I know,” he said easily. Then he
shouted after me as I walked out: “Call me if you need anything, though.”
“I won’t,” I yelled back.
But it turned out, I did need
something.
Halfway to Pasadena on the 10, I
realized I hadn’t grabbed my wallet, and I called Jase to see if he had time
before the shoot to drop it off, or if he could at least text me a picture of
my credit card so I had the number to pay. But Jase didn’t pick up, and if he’d
already left for his shoot, he’d be no help.
I sighed and got off the next exit
on the freeway to circle back. I knew I would be late for the appointment now;
my mother had abhorred lateness and, more, she had never understood what she
termed my spaciness—a lifetime of forgotten wallets and missing socks. But then
it hit me, she would never know about this. A dead woman couldn’t get angry.
And suddenly I had to pull off to the side of the on-ramp because I couldn’t
see the road through my tears.
By the time I made it back to our
apartment again, my face was puffy from crying, and I clutched a crumpled
tissue in my hand as I unlocked the door. I was blowing my nose as I walked
inside, so I almost didn’t notice that random red bra strewn across the floor
until my foot caught on it in my path to the bedroom.
And even then, I disentangled it
from my foot, picked it up and tossed it aside. I couldn’t process what it was,
why it was there. I kept on walking like an idiot to my bedroom; all I knew in
that moment was that my wallet was still sitting on my dresser. I opened my
bedroom door and suddenly everything—and nothing—made sense. Jase was lying on
our bed completely naked, a blonde woman with too-bronze skin, also completely
naked, straddling on top of him.
“Jase?” I ran toward the bed and
said his name like I was in some stupid movie of the week, and I was too naive
to understand what was happening. What had been happening, right in front of
me.
The naked woman turned at the sound
of my voice and then I recognized her: Celeste Templeton, Jase’s gorgeous
twenty-two-year-old Seattle Med costar.
I had this weird moment after she
turned where I was nearly eye level with her breasts, and I found myself
wondering if they were real. They couldn’t be. No one had authentic breasts
that large and that perfectly symmetrical. Did they?
“Shit, Melly. It’s not what you
think,” Jase said. But he didn’t move right away, and neither did she. Until
she finally shifted off him to grab a blanket and I noticed her breasts barely
moved. Definitely fake. I was trapped inside some awful cliché, and all I
wanted to do was run. I had to get out.
“I forgot my wallet,” I finally
heard myself saying, my voice coming from somewhere far away, above me, apart
from me, the way it did when I auditioned for a role. I grabbed my wallet from
the dresser and tore out of the room, then out of our apartment.
Just as I stepped outside, it
started to rain. It had been raining on and off all week, and rain had been
forecasted for today too. But I stood there, letting the water wash over me
because, of course, I’d forgotten my umbrella too. And there was no way I was
going back inside for it now.
Water flattened my curls and ran
down my face, pelted my arms and soaked my ugly dress. My skin felt both numb
and raw at once. But I stood there, in the rain, as the understanding hit me,
that everything I was and everything I thought I knew, suddenly it was gone,
just like that.
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