THE LONG LIE
NOVEL TO BE RELEASED AUGUST 2025
When a celebrity self-help guru starts receiving anonymous letters blaming her for a fan’s suicide and threatening public exposure, she’s forced to unravel the obsessive, one-sided bond that formed between her and the fan, and confront the equally unsettling relationship developing with the letter writer.
Main Character:
Maya Ashen (48) – A respected self-help guru, engaged to her future third husband. On the outside, she is polished and in control. But when alone, she compulsively reads old news articles about her first husband, who died mysteriously.
Narrative POV:
Limited third-person, tightly from Maya’s perspective. Unreliable narrator with memory gaps indicative of someone who drinks.
ACT ONE
Chapter One
Maya Ashen, celebrated grief guru and media mogul, delivers a masterfully choreographed keynote at Lincoln Center titled “The Architecture of Reinvention.” Radiant in a silver pantsuit and perfectly polished performance, she tells her audience that her journey began six years, three months, and eleven days ago—the day she lost her husband, Greg. The crowd hangs on every word, particularly when she flashes her engagement ring and announces her upcoming marriage, signaling that she’s not just healed—she’s thriving.
But beneath the applause and the glamour, Maya harbors darker truths. Her reinvention wasn’t just personal—it was strategic. She’s built a brand around curated grief and emotional detachment, monetizing her pain with precision. The vulnerability on stage is carefully constructed; the pain she pushes out with each breath is real, but privately weaponized.
Backstage, her loyal assistant Jenna hands her a bottle of water and a packed schedule. Everything appears seamless—until an intern delivers a white envelope, labeled “urgent.” Inside: a stark message typed in a generic font—“I know you killed him.” No name. No context.
Maya brushes it off as a troll, joking to Jenna, “Trolls need to stay online.” But once alone in her hotel suite, she can’t shake it. The letter stirs buried doubts about Greg’s death and her past. She pours herself a drink, opens a file labeled “GREG,” and then closes it without clicking a single photo.
Tomorrow, she’ll smile for the cameras. Sell reinvention. Sell resilience. But tonight, in a quiet room that smells faintly of whiskey and old perfume, Maya sits with the letter and the memory of a man she might have loved—and might have destroyed.
Chapter Two
She goes to a morning TV show interview, nails it, but back in the greenroom, she finds a hand-delivered envelope with a single sentence: “You killed him.” Her assistant, Jenna, sees this and asks if she thinks this is about her dead husband, but she laughs it off unconvincingly, “It is about no one. Trolls need to stay online.”
Chapter Three
Maya receives another letter, this time while tasting wedding cakes. This letter includes a detail only someone close to her husband would know. But it doesn’t mean this is about her dead husband. She pulls out a box of letters from decades ago. One letter is from her lover back then and his threats of suicide. Another is a stack of letters from a stalking fan who raves about her first self-help book and his desire to meet her. Inside the latter letter is a newspaper clipping about that fan dying in a car accident. Flashbacks reveal cracks in her marriage—her husband was charming, controlling, and may have known about Maya’s affair.
Chapter Four
Tension escalates as Maya hides the letters from her fiancé. She starts doubting her own memory of her husband’s death, and the doubts are woven in with moments that should be happy wedding planning moments.
ACT TWO
Maya uses her connections to find out if any of the three men’s cases have been re-opened and searches the internet for recent discussions about them. She decides to trust her assistant to help.
The letters continue and the stress of wedding planning grows. Maya begins spiraling, drinking again, and locking herself in hotel rooms to obsess on her memories: old social media, the box of letters, anything and everything that locks her into her past and completely absent from her future.
Her assistant confronts her and she fires her.
Anonymous letters escalate: they now include photos of her recent sins: a more recent affair, being cruel to a fan, etc.
She believes this is about her dead husband but weird coincedences come up about the lover and fan. Why can’t she remember so much of this time frame? Why is her only memory in this box of letters?
ACT THREE
Maya confronts her assistant, believing she may be the one sending the letters. The assistant denies it and reveals she was the one who found all three bodies and saved Maya from jail.
A memory resurfaces: her husband leaving her.
Final letter: a flash drive with an audio file. It's a recording of Maya herself saying, “I can’t succeed like this. I need to be alone.” She listens in horror. It’s her voice. Her words. Is it fake?
In the final scene, Maya goes live on her podcast, confesses everything she knows, and turns the mic off, giving us a final moment of Maya’s true authentic self. The mic off, the make up removed, the lights dim and a long, relieved, grieving sigh.
Themes:
The coin sides of grief and guilt
Weaponized memory and narrative
The trap of performative authenticity