One of Us is Lying

The Joshua tree’s name derives from the Biblical story of Joshua, an assistant to and eventual successor of Moses. 19th-century Mormon settlers who crossed the Mojave Desert gave the name to the trees because their unique, upward-growing branches evoked hands raised in prayer.

After a tense lunch with his mother, Nate takes off on his motorcycle and drives all night. He finds himself drawn to Joshua Tree National Park, the one place he vacationed with his parents when he was a child. During that trip, he had anticipated disaster, but his mother was well. Nate recalls that she seemed to connect to the trees. She explained that a Joshua tree is “just a vertical stem” for its first seven years and “takes years before it blooms” (221). Branching stems stop growing after they bloom, leaving a “complex system of dead areas and new growth” (221). For Nate, the trees symbolize his mother, herself a complex system of dead and alive. More broadly, the trees represent each of the four main characters, who bloom into more complex characters over the course of the book.

Early in the book, Addy describes her hair as her best quality and the one that captured Jake’s attention in ninth grade. Though she sees herself as the forgettable “generic best friend,” the sidekick, the runner-up, she acknowledges that her long, flowing blonde locks are exceptional (34). After she breaks up with Jake, she begins to find her hair oppressive. On a whim, she drops into a Supercuts, metaphorically miles away from the high-end salons she typically frequents, and asks a stylist to chop off all her hair. The stylist does not want to, so Addy grabs the scissors and chops it off herself, then asks the stylist to fix it. Later, she dyes her hair purple, a further departure from the stereotypical princess hair she had at the beginning of the novel. At the end, she hopes to grow her hair into a bob, like her sister Ashton’s, representing a middle ground between extremes.

Addy’s hair symbolizes her evolution into a more fully-realized character. At the beginning of the book, her hair fits the stereotype Simon assigns to her in Chapter 1. It is long, bouncy, and blonde, the one feature that she feels most secure about and that she knows Jake loves. Cutting her hair off after her breakup represents accepting that her relationship with Jake is over and that she is no longer the passive, fearful person she was in that relationship. By taking away the one thing she knew he loved and that made her feel confident, Addy breaks away from her mother’s influence and embraces the possibility of growing into a stronger, more independent person. 

Cooperstown is a village in upstate New York where the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum is located. Cooper’s father calls Cooper “Cooperstown,” a reference to the Hall of Fame. The nickname represents the one-dimensional way Cooper’s father sees him: as a potential star baseball player. It encompasses the jock stereotype that Simon assigns to Cooper in Chapter 1 and that he strives to outgrow throughout the book.

When Detective Chang first shows Cooper Simon’s last unpublished post, Cooper is surprised to find it accuses Cooper of using steroids. Cooper expected it to reveal that he is gay. In fact, Simon’s original post about Cooper did out him, but Jake later changed it, because, according to Addy, Jake did not want people to know that his best friend is gay. Cooper fears how people will react to him, noting that only one professional baseball player is out, and he plays in the minors. For context, there are more than 7,500 major and minor league baseball players. Cooper’s fears are realized after he is outed. His father no longer looks him in the eye. His schoolmates and spectators at his baseball games taunt him. Recruiters stop calling him. His Facebook fan page loses all its followers. However, he also receives public support from Nonny, Nate, and Luis. After he saves Addy and Janae from Jake, he is lauded as a hero and has shown that a gifted athlete can be many things, including gay.

Walt Whitman was a 19th-century transcendentalist poet known as the father of free verse. His poem, “Song of Myself,” which is read at Simon’s funeral and from which Addy quotes in a conversation with Janae, explores the expansion and retraction of the self. The self grows through experiences then internalizes those experiences, in an extended, cyclic conversation with the universe. The self is both unique and part of every other self, singular and part of a larger whole.

The line Addy quotes to Janae is, “I am large, I contain multitudes” (171). This line and the poem as a whole capture the journey each of the four main characters is on throughout the book. They seek to experience and expand their selves, transcending the isolating and limiting stereotypes they have absorbed from family and friends while simultaneously seeing themselves in others, the definition of empathy.

Ringu (1998) and Battle Royale (1999) are Japanese cult films whose content resonates with the novel’s subject matter. Bronwyn and Nate watch these films together. Battle Royale tells the story of junior-high school students forced by the Japanese government to fight a death match until only one survivor remains. Ringu follows a fugitive journalist investigating a cursed videotape that causes its viewers to die a week after watching it.

The death match of Battle Royale evokes the destructive force of gossip, specifically the way it erases people (as Jake tries to erase Addy) and prevents them from being whole. Ringu’s journalist seeks to decode secret messages, reminiscent of the way the four murder suspects attempt to decode Simon’s last words, the Tumblr posts, and the evidence as a whole. In another sense, Nate’s preference for horror films in which rebels resist a social order represents his willingness to go against the grain. The most positive instance of this is when he stands up for Cooper.