“Perhaps you can get used to anything. Perhaps you have to.”

Whether she will live by this wisdom or fight it to the death is the test for twelve-year-old Dolores, the relentless protagonist of Liar’s Dice. Set in 1970’s Brazil, Juliet Faithfull’s virtuoso debut novel alternates between Dolores’s life in the Brazilian interior and life afterward in the frenzy of Rio. In Santanesia, Dolores and her twin Margarita grow up wild and inseparable until Margarita becomes ill with incurable fits; in Rio, Dolores attends a lonely school for British expats after her parents institutionalize Margarita in England, never speaking a word about it. Inspired by Juliet’s childhood in Brazil when her own twin was sent away with cerebral palsy, Liar’s Dice follows Dolores’s struggle to find some way to recover her stolen twin, whether by writing letters or with more dangerous gambles.

More than twenty years in the writing, Liar’s Dice is a high-stakes longshot that pays off on every page.

John McClure: Your novel is set in the 1970’s, yet it’s written in present tense. Why?

Juliet Faithfull: You know, I was advised not to use it. I had a beta reader who said it’s already a stretch for some people to go into the psyche of a child. So, I tried putting it in the past tense, but it felt less immediate. I wanted it to be sensual and close to her.

Part of being 12 or 13, the age of my main character, is just being very present tense. That’s why it’s so hard to be 12 or 13! Everything feels like forever! Like what’s happening now will never change. Particularly for Dolores, because she’s illiterate, and the narrative distance of the past tense didn’t seem to fit.

This book pairs Dolores’s loss of her twin alongside her journey to literacy. Why did you marry those two subjects?

Literacy and writing are transformative, right? I know that myself, coming from a mom who’s illiterate, and from not discovering writing myself until I was ten. When I learned, I remember it felt like a magic trick to be able to enter a book and be in this whole other life. Poems and books are saviors.

I think it is this way for Dolores. She has this sense that maybe with her letters anything is possible, that her sister Mita could write back, and they could reconnect in a deep way.

When I first encountered your book, you were afraid it had no plot and was just composed of little scene-lets. Now the plot is so strong, and the shape of the whole feels inevitable. How do you approach revision, especially about something so personal?

I don’t think I knew what revision was. I think that was the biggest thing I had to learn, and for me, it really means reimagining and a different kind of not knowing, a deeper listening to what the novel is trying to tell you. It’s not like drafting a scene where it kind of unfolds in front of you. It’s more like thinking of the whole and what else needs to happen. The structure was the hardest part for me.

You know, I have a twin sister too, and nothing that happens in the novel happened to me, but the story is related. I think the closeness made it harder to play with material. It was easy to write the scenes with completely invented characters. But I revised many, many times, and I learned that layering the revisions helped, just doing one thing at a time, staying with a scene until it felt right and then going to another.

Did the closeness make it hard to let go of scenes that didn’t seem to fit the structure?

Oh, that was so painful. My favorite piece of all—and the favorite of some of my beta readers—my agent suggested I cut it. I didn’t want to cut it, but every time I tried to keep it, it wasn’t working, so I decided I’ll cut it. But I told myself, if I ever sell this, I’ll slide it back in again. And that was how I could cut it. I made myself a promise that I would try to put it back, but by the time I sold my novel, I had added a whole new scene, and my favorite bit really didn’t go. But it helped me to act like I was only pretending to cut it.

The book is set during the Years of Lead, the most repressive period of Brazil’s military dictatorship. In a book so focused on the intimacy of sisterhood and loss, why was the brutality important to include? How did you juggle that contrast in themes?

To me, it didn’t feel like a contrast; it felt like an echoing, like a doubling of the family’s silence with what was happening in Brazil. You had the beauty of Rio and bossa nova and the expat parties happening, but you knew there was torture and people were disappeared. So, I think that’s a mirroring of this family reality where there’s something really wrong, but the people in it pretend there isn’t.

The title—Liar’s Dice—is taken from a game the Dolores’s father teaches her. Why did you choose it?

Liar’s Dice is a poker game based on luck and bluffing, two central themes in the novel. Dolores and Mita are identical, yet one has cerebral palsy while the other doesn’t; their lives diverge because of pure chance. The parents in the book are constantly bluffing: they hide their background, the mother hides her illiteracy, and most of all, their grief is hidden, so even Dolores doesn’t see it.

The Brazilian government too, is bluffing—touting the Brazilian Miracle, Carnaval, and bossa nova music—and hiding the torture, the killings, and the disappearances. Liar’s Dice is a game of risk, and Dolores is willing to risk everything to find to her sister.

Your prose is so lovely and lilting, yet it remains so voice-driven. I’ve heard you say that you write from inside the body. What does that mean and how do you do it?

First, I have to feel in my body to be able to enter the body of my character. So, I always write by hand. I write everything with a fountain pen.

Everything? You mean this entire novel was written with a fountain pen?

Oh absolutely.

How have you approached the transition from private, fountain-pen pages to a product being read by so many strangers?

I think I tricked myself into writing it, believing it would never get published, so I felt kind of safe. Now that it’s getting published, I think I de-center from myself and focus on why did I write this? And it’s because I wanted to read someone like my sister, a disabled person, in a novel. I wanted a story for her to be in the world.

Juliet Faithfull is a Spanish British American writer who grew up in Brazil. Liar’s Dice, her first novel, was a winner of the 2024 Irish Writers Centre’s Novel Fair and a semifinalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. She was awarded a Pauline Scheer Fellowship by GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator program, and her short stories have been published in the Bellevue Literary Review and Urbanus Magazine. A graduate of Harvard University and Smith College School for Social Work, Juliet works as a trilingual psychotherapist and currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her two sons.