Book Review - 'Completely Normal (and Other Lies)'

After a series of ‘unconnected events’ that have had a pretty negative impact on her self esteem and sense of self worth, seventeen year old Stella Wilde begins blocking the world out and retreating into herself rather than dealing with her emotions. Her mum is a new therapy convert and encourages Stella to seek professional help, which leads Stella to meet Isaac Calder outside her new therapist’s office. With Isaac, Stella starts to come out of her shell, caught off guard by him and his little sister Paris who both take a genuine interest in her, which is something Stella hasn’t felt in a long time. As Stella and Isaac begin to get closer, their relationship moves away from a friendship and into something more. The problem is, Isaac is dating Stella’s perfect, kind, caring schoolmate Grace Reyes. When Isaac is unexpectedly killed in a car crash, Stella and Grace both have to navigate the world without him, somehow finding comfort and friendship in an unlikely situation. But how long can Stella’s secret stay hidden? What will happen when the truth comes out?

Initially, Completely Normal (and Other Lies) reads a bit like a YA romance with some mental health themes. It’s pretty clear that Stella is pretending not to be upset about recent events in her life, but that she is actually struggling and is attempting to fix the way she’s feeling by completely ignoring all of her problems. The novel is divided into two parts, the first being ‘Stella and Isaac’, the second being ‘Stella and Grace’. In Part One, we come to understand why Stella has been experiencing some anxiety and anger. While Stella feels she’s making great progress as a result of meeting Isaac and being able to finally open up and be herself around another person, she’s still experiencing a lot of confusion. Her relationship has some unhealthy aspects and as a result, while it makes her happy, she doesn’t actually seem to be growing as a person. Her attitudes towards others are skewed and judgemental. We often see her assigning values and judgements to her peers that aren’t likely to be accurate. Much of this is from the influence of her ‘friends’ who just aren’t a particularly nice bunch.

Part Two of the novel shows Stella dealing with Isaac’s death but in the aftermath, she actually starts finding healthier ways to cope. There’s a clear shift in her attitude both around herself, but also around others.

This award winning novel is a standout exploration of mental health, loss, grief, relationships (both platonic and romantic), emotional connections and finding happiness and acceptance from within. It also shows a lead female character’s outward anger and aggression, which isn’t something that we often see in novels. While the book obviously doesn’t condone this behaviour, it does show that it’s ok to have those feelings and that finding other ways to express anger that don’t involve aggression is possible.

Stella is an incredibly complex, messy and human character. Biffy James, the author, writes her so well that she’s somewhat abrasive at first in her harsh judgements of everyone else. She looks at others as if everything they do is an act and that no one does anything without thinking about how others will perceive it. We come to learn that this is due to Stella’s friends who have frightened her into being a completely different person than who she actually is for fear of rejection and humiliation. This, coupled with her feeling that her emotional responses are never ok regardless of what form they take is part of why she’s struggling so much mentally at the start of the book. It’s an insight into the lies we tell ourselves and others, the influence others can have on us and what it truly means to be ‘normal’.