What do you think is the definining moment for the main character/person in your book? Why?

The entire story of What I Saw and How I Lied is a coming of age tale for Evie Spooner. She starts the book as an inexperienced and naïve girl, and throughout the book she enters into experiences that strip her of her innocence. Some of these experiences she willingly submits herself to, such as her budding romance with Peter Coleridge. Some, however, are forced upon her, either by Peter, her parents, or fate. She is forced to recognize that her stepfather whom she adores and admires, is not the man she accepted him to be. When he came home from the war, he started his own appliance store with money he said he got from a GI loan. She learns from Peter, however, that the two men came across a warehouse in the war that contained valuables belonging to Jews who had been sent to concentration camps. That's how he got his money.

These little losses of innocence weren't Evie's defining moments. Her defining moment came when she took all of the money Joe had gotten by selling the stolen goods and gave it to a Jewish woman the family had befriended in Palm Beach. Mr. and Mrs. Grayson were vacationing just like the Spooners were, and the two couples quickly became friends. The hotel management eventually found out that the Graysons were Jewish, and bluntly asked them to leave. Evie's reparations, while somewhat ineffective and misguided, were well-intentioned. She told Mrs. Grayson that even if she and Mr. Grayson wouldn't use the money, they doubtlessly knew people who could. Evie was trying to make up for the crime her stepfather committed against some specific Jewish people by paying different Jewish people. Not very effective, but she meant well.