Verity was telling the truth in her letter because her explanation was clear and consistent throughout the story.
When Verity first began writing, she was not used to writing from the antagonist’s point of view. Her publisher recommended a writing exercise in which she journals her own life, but from a villain’s mindset instead of her own. This was the beginning of Verity’s autobiography; she started writing it as practice for her books. This is what she writes in the letter previous to her death. The major question of the book was, did she write this letter to try and save her own life? Although Verity’s letter is skeptical, I believe that she was telling the truth because her explanation is clear and consistent throughout the story.
Writing from a perspective different from one’s own is challenging, especially when they have completely opposite ideas. Some find it hard to believe that Verity was able to channel someone with different ideas than her own in her writing. This leads to the accusation that Verity was not telling the truth in her letter to Jeremy. Wondering how she was able to think of the awful things that she wrote about her children has a very simple explanation: she was a best selling author. Typically authors that get prestigious awards are very intelligent and are able to think out of the box. This is what made her such a great writer, practicing her writing skills in all areas of her life.
Verity’s letter was not aimed to save her life, the purpose of it was to explain to Jeremy why she was going to take Crew. Although she never had the chance, she explained that the manuscript was practice for her writing and that she could never do that to her children. She was appalled that he would even think she was capable of doing something like this. She made herself look like a victim in this letter, that she was taking Crew in order to protect herself and him. Even though this looks like another manipulation tactic, by making him the villain, she did have the right to be scared for her life. In the end, Jeremy did kill her.
Verity was grief ridden after the death of her daughter Chastity. She died from anaphylaxis. She was allergic to peanuts, and one night during a sleepover accidentally ingested some. After this, she and Jeremy were never able to recover. Shortly after, their second daughter, Harper died in a tragic lake accident, in which she drowned. Verity wrote about both of these occurrences in her manuscript and wrote them down as if she thought that Harper had killed Chastity, so she killed Harper when she tipped over the boat. She explains later that this was how she dealt with her grief. She thought that if she was able to blame the deaths of her daughters on a fictional character, then she would not blame herself. It was a way of coping for her, like therapy, she was able to stop blaming herself and start moving forward.
In the end, Jeremy may have killed an innocent woman. Although it was mostly Verity’s fault for hiding the manuscript in the first place, Jeremy did not have the faith in his wife to trust her and ask her about it, instead he plotted her “suicide attempt”. Their relationship was fragile when the manuscript came into light and it broke their relationship. Verity had many reasons to write the manuscript, if she only would have told Jeremy about it, she would have lived.
Writing from a perspective different from one’s own is challenging, especially when they have completely opposite ideas. Some find it hard to believe that Verity was able to channel someone with different ideas than her own in her writing. This leads to the accusation that Verity was not telling the truth in her letter to Jeremy. Wondering how she was able to think of the awful things that she wrote about her children has a very simple explanation: she was a best selling author. Typically authors that get prestigious awards are very intelligent and are able to think out of the box. This is what made her such a great writer, practicing her writing skills in all areas of her life.
Verity’s letter was not aimed to save her life, the purpose of it was to explain to Jeremy why she was going to take Crew. Although she never had the chance, she explained that the manuscript was practice for her writing and that she could never do that to her children. She was appalled that he would even think she was capable of doing something like this. She made herself look like a victim in this letter, that she was taking Crew in order to protect herself and him. Even though this looks like another manipulation tactic, by making him the villain, she did have the right to be scared for her life. In the end, Jeremy did kill her.
Verity was grief ridden after the death of her daughter Chastity. She died from anaphylaxis. She was allergic to peanuts, and one night during a sleepover accidentally ingested some. After this, she and Jeremy were never able to recover. Shortly after, their second daughter, Harper died in a tragic lake accident, in which she drowned. Verity wrote about both of these occurrences in her manuscript and wrote them down as if she thought that Harper had killed Chastity, so she killed Harper when she tipped over the boat. She explains later that this was how she dealt with her grief. She thought that if she was able to blame the deaths of her daughters on a fictional character, then she would not blame herself. It was a way of coping for her, like therapy, she was able to stop blaming herself and start moving forward.
In the end, Jeremy may have killed an innocent woman. Although it was mostly Verity’s fault for hiding the manuscript in the first place, Jeremy did not have the faith in his wife to trust her and ask her about it, instead he plotted her “suicide attempt”. Their relationship was fragile when the manuscript came into light and it broke their relationship. Verity had many reasons to write the manuscript, if she only would have told Jeremy about it, she would have lived.