Necessary Lies by Diane Chamberlain Published by St. Martin's Griffin on October 7, 2014
Pages: 372
Format: Paperback
Where to buy: Affiliate Link
It is 1960 in North Carolina and the lives of Ivy Hart and Jane Forrester couldn't be more different. Fifteen-year-old Ivy lives with her family as tenants on a small tobacco farm, but when her parents die, Ivy is left to care for her grandmother, older sister, and nephew. As she struggles with her grandmother's aging, her sister's mental illness, and her own epilepsy, she realizes they might need more than she can give.
When Jane Forrester takes a position as Grace County's newest social worker, she is given the task of recommending which of her clients should be sterilized without their knowledge or consent. The state's rationalization is that if her clients are poor, or ill, or deemed in some way "unfit" they should not be allowed to have children. But soon Jane becomes emotionally invested in her clients' lives, causing tension with her new husband and her supervisors. No one understands why Jane would want to become a caseworker for the Department of Public Health when she could be a housewife and Junior League member. As Jane is drawn in by the Hart women, she begins to discover the secrets of the small farm―secrets much darker than she would have guessed. Soon, she must decide whether to take drastic action to help them, or risk losing a life-changing battle.
Necessary Lies is the story of these two young women, seemingly worlds apart, but both haunted by tragedy. Jane and Ivy are thrown together and must ask themselves: How can you know what you believe is right, when everyone is telling you it's wrong?
Necessary Lies by Diane Chamberlain is a historical fiction novel set in North Carolina in the 1960s. It’s not a feel-good story, and it’s not exactly a feel-bad story either (hey, don’t laugh at me—words are hard), but it’s a little bit of both.
The 1960s were a challenging time for women in general. Married women had to get permission from their husbands to be prescribed the newly available birth control pill, effectively placing their bodily autonomy and medical decisions in someone else’s hands. For many women—and for men whose bodies were also policed through racist medical and social systems—this meant that even deeply personal health choices were subject to control. That alone was troubling enough. But for poor people of lower economic status, and for those with mental or physical health issues, the consequences were far more severe.
Just a little white lie, like needing an appendix removed because it was “for their own good,” they’d say. All it took was a social worker submitting a case for review. If approved, sterilization was often carried out without consent—and sometimes without the person even knowing the procedure had happened at all.
This book takes us into the lives of two women from very different worlds. Jane is a well-to-do social worker married to an arrogant and well-to-do man—a doctor, no less. Then there’s Ivy, a young sharecropper living and working on a struggling tobacco farm, trying desperately to make ends meet. Her family depends entirely on her ability to work: her sister, a young unwed teen mother with mental and cognitive health issues; her young son, who is also not meeting his developmental milestones; and their ailing grandmother. All of them rely on Ivy to put food on the table, care for the baby, and hold the family together.
This book could have easily gone much darker than it did, and yet I feel the author did a wonderful job alluding to those darker abuses without forcing us to witness them directly through the characters we were growing to love. Don’t get me wrong—Ivy had it rough. But some of the other women’s stories were far darker, and while there is a time and place to tell them, this book captured the era’s despair and unethical practices in a way that still left room for love to prevail. Because sometimes, that’s what we need to keep going.
We know the bad is there, and we should never turn a blind eye to it—but we also need hope.
It reminds me of how Samwise so eloquently tells Frodo that there’s still good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for. Yes, I’m a Tolkien nerd, and some of you may not get that reference—but it means something to me. To put it more simply: this book is about hope. It’s about love, and about how sometimes we have to fight for what we believe is right, even when everyone else insists it’s wrong.
This book tugged at my heart, and I shed more than a few tears—some out of sadness, some out of happiness, and some during the bittersweet moments in between. The ending felt a little rushed, but I understand the reasoning. The author needed to bridge a time jump to bring us into a more current era, when the eugenics program had been abolished, and the victims were (and still are) being identified. Because of that, I can forgive the rather abrupt shift.
I loved this book. Truly. I don’t often say that—especially about a book that borders on sappy (after all, my heart is practically black according to my mother). But if my heart really is cold and dead, I’m pretty sure Jane and Ivy managed to breathe a little light and love into it.
CW / TW:
This piece contains references to:
Pregnancy, Suicide, Racism, Rape, Death, Death of a parent, Sexual content, Cancer, Fire/Fire injury
Recommended Age: 18
