Big Little Truths
By Liane Moriarty
Penguin Random House
There are a handful of contemporary writers whose work I love so much that when they publish a new book, I nab a copy, no questions asked. Admittedly, it’s a pretty short list: John Green, David Sedaris, Malcolm Gladwell, Patrick Radden Keefe, Lindy West, Taylor Jenkins Reid, and Australian novelist Liane Moriarty.
The latter has been my main go-to fiction author for many years now, largely thanks to her gripping and funny 2014 bestseller-turned-acclaimed HBO series, Big Little Lies. So have I been anticipating Moriarty’s follow-up, Big Little Truths, all year long?
Why, yes. Yes I have.
But it’s finally here, and I’m happy to report that it was well worth the wait. Like its progenitor, Truths’ central story is told from multiple characters’ perspectives, but everyone is ten years older now. (It seems more than a happy accident that Moriarty’s readers are 12 years older, too, thereby making it all the easier to relate.) Many of the moms we got to know in Lies — wry everywoman Madeline, gorgeous Celeste, young Jane, tightly wound Renata, and woo-woo yoga teacher Bonnie — are now staring down the humbling challenges of middle age (except for Jane, who became a mom at 20), and their formerly young kids are now closed-off teens with ideas and aims of their own.
As Madeline tells herself early on, “Nearly every woman she knew was battling their hormones in some way, and menopause was openly discussed in the media these days, like, a lot, which was great but also kind of … invasive? She sometimes felt like saying, Shhh, that’s enough now, we don’t want the men to hear, it’s not … pretty. Certainly everyone agreed it was just wonderful to simultaneously be dealing with hormonal changes, disdainful teenagers, and elderly parents. Why was being a woman so dreadful? Just because Eve gave Adam the apple? The man was probably hungry. The woman was always in charge of organizing the fucking snacks.”
This, in a nutshell, exemplifies so much of what I love about Moriarty’s voice. The passage concisely provides a sense of the challenges Madeline and her friends are facing in this phase of life, and it does so in an intimate, feminist-adjacent, hilarious way — as if your funniest friend were whispering asides in your ear.
But Moriarty also masterfully braids each of the primary characters’ personal struggles (Madeline’s concerns about her oldest daughter’s engagement, Celeste’s increasingly dotty and invasive mother-in-law, Jane’s resistance to have another child, etc.) into a more suspenseful central plot that gives the book its page-turning momentum.
I won’t share any spoilers, since slowly uncovering the dark plot boiling beneath this Australian beach town’s surface is a big part of the book’s fun, but I can say that one of the book’s starting points involves a severed human finger, sent by mail to the local high school.
“Phones across the Pirriwee Peninsula vibrated with the ping-ping-ping of parent WhatsApp group notifications. These were caring, involved, hands-on parents. … All they asked was transparency. If a severed finger had been sent to the school, they should be informed without delay. Their children, meanwhile, were euphoric about this ghoulish interruption to their day, and the theater kids, who felt things deeply, wept and fainted, or did their best to faint. It was one of those days from their childhood every student would remember: that sunny spring day when somebody gave their school principal the finger.”
Yes, this particular punchline is almost painfully on-the-nose; but it hints at the way Moriarty’s prose, no matter how dark her story gets, is almost always leavened with these moments of humor. And for me, that’s one reason that even her less-accomplished novels are still an enjoyable read.
Finally, I should note that Moriarty includes an introductory note before her story gets underway, explaining that Truths takes place in the world of Lies, the book, not the HBO series, so story changes made for the show are not necessarily aligned with Truths. That said, the author also admits the show inspires her to enlarge the roles played by Renata and Mary-Louise, since they were so indelibly portrayed by Laura Dern and Meryl Streep.
I had to read a summary of Lies before getting too far into Truths, it had been so long since I’d read it. But once my memory was refreshed, it was like enjoying the company of close friends again.
Follow Midbrow Detroit on social media:
Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, X.
