By: Pedro X. Murphy
There is a moment in Ren Tyson’s memoir The Liar that grips the reader before a single wound is revealed. A brown-haired little girl sits behind a heavy velvet curtain, hidden in the shadows, watching a radiant blonde version of herself shine onstage. The blonde girl laughs freely, moves boldly, and speaks with a confidence that draws people in. She is everything the brown-haired child wishes she could be. Yet the girl behind the curtain knows the truth. The dazzling performer is not her. She is an invention, a mask created to shield the world from what would happen if anyone ever saw the real child.
From that moment, Tyson’s story hooks you with a quiet intensity that never lets go.
Her memoir is not written with polished detachment. It unfolds with the honesty of someone who has survived emotional warfare, rediscovered buried memories, and endured the lingering echo of generational harm. What Tyson offers is a rare look inside a divided mind, shaped by a mother who used fear as instruction and a childhood that blurred the line between identity and performance.
The book’s emotional spine is built around Tyson’s lifelong split between two selves: the liar and the witness. The witness holds every painful truth of her childhood. The liar is the version she created to survive it. Tyson refuses to condemn either one. Both were necessary. Both kept her alive in a world that demanded silence.
As Tyson’s memories unfold, readers begin to understand the true weight of the voices she grew up with. Her mother, both magnetic and merciless, branded her daughter with labels that no child should carry. She told Ren she was born with demons. She insisted love would never stay with her. She preached that real wives deserved homes and rings, while girls like Ren would be lucky to be tolerated. Tyson absorbed those words until they grew roots inside her, shaping every insecurity and every relationship that followed.
It is one thing to survive cruelty. It is another to survive when cruelty comes from the only person who once held your hand.
Tyson takes us carefully into the psychological ruins of that upbringing. She writes about standing at her window as an adult, looking at her neighbors’ orderly lawns and imagining the quiet chaos behind their glass lives. This moment becomes a turning point. She realizes she has spent her life being the invisible girl pressed behind the frame while a polished version of herself played the part others expected. It is a recognition that feels both intimate and universal. Many readers will see themselves in that image, the quiet self hidden behind the curated one.
Her writing is full of sensory memory: the smell of winter air, the hum of fear at nightfall, the way silence feels like a presence rather than an absence. Tyson’s nights are some of her most vivid chapters. She describes how fear wakes with the dark, how memories strike without warning, and how the quiet becomes a place where old voices rise louder than her heartbeat. These scenes do not sensationalize trauma. Instead, they illuminate what it means to live with the shadows of the past long after the events have ended.
One of the memoir’s most compelling elements is Tyson’s honesty about her own mistakes. She does not paint herself solely as a victim. She acknowledges that survival sometimes required lies, denial, or grasping for love in places where none existed. She describes returning to the memory of lying next to an abusive partner, waiting for him to fall asleep so she could press her cheek gently against his back. Not out of romance, but out of hunger for a moment when he was too unconscious to hurt her. It is a chilling scene, yet Tyson tells it not for shock, but to reveal how trauma reshapes desire, hope, and even the meaning of closeness.
Her vulnerability extends to her spiritual life as well. Tyson speaks openly about pleading with God during long drives home, wrestling with guilt, grief, and the fear that she has misunderstood His silence. She does not claim triumphant faith. Her spirituality is the honest kind, filled with questions, confusion, and the stubborn hope that prayers whispered through tears still count.
Grief, too, has its own presence in the book. Tyson writes about visiting Cody’s grave, accepting that the pain she carries will not fade with time. It is a truth she does not romanticize. Instead, she presents grief as a companion she never chose but must learn to live alongside. Her willingness to admit that some wounds do not heal is what gives her writing its credibility and depth.
Despite the heaviness of her story, Tyson’s voice is not hopeless. The breakthrough comes slowly, found not in a single revelation but in her willingness to finally speak the truth she once hid. The brown-haired girl behind the curtain begins to step forward as Tyson confronts the lies she inherited and the ones she created. She realizes that the impostor version of herself, the blonde girl who charmed audiences, was not a rival but a shield she built as a child to survive what she could not name.
The brilliance of The Liar lies in its refusal to pretend that healing is linear or easy. Tyson does not emerge with her past neatly resolved. Instead, she stands in the light with all her contradictions intact. She is the liar and the witness, the storm and the survivor, the little girl hidden behind the curtain and the woman who finally stepped out of it.
Her memoir is not just a testimony of trauma. It is a reclamation of identity. It is the story of a woman who learned that the truth, once spoken, has the power to break generational cycles that silence alone can never touch.
Ren Tyson’s voice is one readers will not easily forget. Her courage lies not only in telling her story, but in telling it without hiding the parts that still ache. She reminds us that survival is not a single act, but a lifelong commitment to choosing the light, one day at a time.
