I have been watching a show on Prime called the Romanoffs. Each of the episodes concerns some aspect of one of their supposed descendants in modern day. Episode 4, “Expectation”, was described as “A woman confronts every lie she ever told over a single day in New York City, talking around what she really means.”

I don’t know what I expected when I read that, but I had thought along the lines of some person, or perhaps a dream, as in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, that would directly confront her. Perhaps if I had been more a more careful reader, I would have noticed that it says the woman confronts the lies, not that she is confronted with the lies.  

The story is of a woman whose daughter is about to give birth. The first scene is the woman and daughter meeting for lunch, that turns out to be confrontational on several fronts. The woman herself is called out for some hypocritical behavior, which of course upsets her.  

The next scene shows the woman meeting with a man, who turns out to be her husband’s best friend. We learn through a series of flashbacks that she had an affair with him years ago and the daughter is actually HIS child, not the husband’s. He would like to have more involvement in his daughter’s life but the wife never told her husband. She made the decision unilaterally and left both men unaware, though the best friend figured it out later.  

The tenuous relationship with the Romanoffs (the last Russian royal family) is that the husband is purportedly a descendent, and the best friend wrote a book on the Romanoffs. There may be more to it than this, and that may be made clear in the remaining episodes, but as for now, that’s all I can see.

The description of the episode says she “talks around what she really means”. This is the confrontation. Truth confronts our lies, because lies are incongruous- they don’t match reality. Truth, by its nature, can’t help but intrude. As reality keeps knocking at the door or the woman’s life, she has to continue to build on the house of lies. Not necessarily by telling more lies per se, but through the maintenance of the lies already told, and the toll it takes on her emotionally.