Truly Madly Guilty

“Wherever she went, whatever she did, part of her mind was always imagining a hypothetical life running parallel to her actual one, a life where, when Erika rang up and said, ‘Vid has invited us to a barbecue,’ Clementine answered, ‘No, thank you.’ Three simple words. Vid wouldn’t have cared. He barely knew them.”

Moriarty relies on foreshadowing to build tension and suspense. The reader does not know what happened at the barbecue, but it’s evident that Clementine keeps imagining an alternative timeline where it didn’t occur. Additionally, Clementine believes the barbecue’s outcome could have been avoided had she declined Erika’s invitation. This passage signals Clementine’s latent guilt.

“No matter how much time poor Sam gave her, it would never be quite enough, because what she actually needed was for him and the kids to just temporarily not exist. She needed to slip into another dimension where she was a single, childless person. Just between now and the audition.”

Clementine feels a conflict between her existence as a wife and mother and as a musician. She believes that Sam can’t understand what she needs, in part because he wants another child and loves being a father. Although Clementine loves her children, she doesn’t want to sacrifice her music just to be their mother. She thinks she’s selfish for not wanting to be a parent all the time. Clementine’s feelings about her own needs and desires shape her character arc in this book.

“He and Clementine weren’t going to separate. They were fine. And yet there was something strangely appealing about that word: ‘separate.’ It felt like a solution. If he could just separate himself, detach himself, remove himself, then he could get relief. Like an amputation.”

Although Sam is thinking about his relationship with Clementine and how strained it has gotten since the barbecue, the feeling behind these thoughts is a symptom of his PTSD. He has been doing his best to detach himself from his emotions about the incident, and because of that, he has been detaching himself from his wife, his job, and his present reality. What he hasn’t been able to separate himself from is his emotional response to the event and anything that reminds him of it and how helpless he felt. That is the “separation” he desires.

“‘Come on, Muscles,’ she’d said.”

Sam remembers Tiffany saying this to him at the barbecue and uses this memory to castigate himself. Sam feels guilty for being susceptible to Tiffany’s physical prowess, and this speaks to the motif of sex and desire. This line is repeated later in context, and Moriarty uses repetition to connect the alternating timelines.

“‘She’s not toxic,’ Clementine had said. ‘Don’t you have friends who annoy you?’ She thought everyone had friends who felt like obligations.”

Clementine and Erika’s relationship form the center of this story, and this excerpt thematically introduces The Complexities of Friendship. Although Clementine complains about Erika to her other friends, she does not see dropping Erika as an option. The reader learns that Clementine feels as though Erika is her burden to bear because this has been the dynamic of their friendship since childhood.

“Oliver registered certain things: Harry’s socks weren’t matching. One black. One gray. His glasses had sunk into his face as if they’d been pressed firmly by an unseen hand into soft, yielding flesh. His white hair was still as neatly combed as ever. A tiny swarm of busily buzzing flies.”

The author uses imagery to emphasize the impact of Oliver discovering Harry’s body. Mundane aspects like the mismatching socks remind us of Harry’s humanity—not too long ago he was a living person, putting on socks. The juxtaposition between the neatly combed white hair and the flies reminds us of the injustice of the situation. Moriarty illustrates the pitiable yet senseless inevitability of death while building suspense for the reader. We later learn that Harry fell to his death while trying to alert someone of Ruby’s accident.

“‘It was so accurate. Every single note precisely where it should be. I would have guessed it was an arrogant twenty-year-old whiz kid, straight out of the Con.’

‘And I say again, so what? If she played like that, she’d absolutely get through to the next round,’ said Hu. ‘I’d put her through for sure. You would too. I know you would.’

‘Maybe, but I don’t think it would get her through the second round. There was something almost—don’t take this the wrong way, Clementine—but there was something almost robotic about it.’”

Clementine’s emotions are related to her ability to perform music. After the barbecue, she makes time to practice and gain technical mastery over her audition pieces, yet her music sounds mechanical. Clementine has tamped her emotions down to become a perfectly dutiful daughter, wife, and mother—as much as her family will let her—and has lost something essential to her musicianship. This moment illustrates how Clementine rejecting selfishness is not a solution to her problems. In the end, she must accept that her “selfishness” is a strength. She can use it to take care of herself and her family and pursue her goals as a musician.

“‘Erika, you’ve got to get this idea out of your head about there being some objective measure of normality,’ her psychologist kept telling her. ‘This “normal” person of whom you speak doesn’t exist!’”

Erika doesn’t feel normal. Her mother has a hoarding disorder, and Erika’s childhood home was unsanitary. As an adult, Erika constantly questions herself and experiences self-doubt. Her “objective measure of normality” is Pam and Clementine, and she tries to shape herself in their image.

“When they were thirteen, Erika and Clementine had studied German at school and developed a love of German insults. They enjoyed the brutal snap of those Germanic syllables. Sometimes they’d shove each other at the same time: just enough to make the other one nearly but not quite lose her balance.

It was one of their few shared passions.”

Although this aspect of Clementine and Erika’s relationship involves insults, shoving, and is described as “brutal,” it repeatedly appears in the book as a marker of their true affection and understanding for each other. Their friendship is made up of many years of shared experiences, both good and bad. These interactions show that they do also take pleasure in each other’s company and feel like they can be themselves around each other. In the end, Erika shares a German insult with Clementine, signifying that they have come to terms with their complex friendship.

“It was like coming upon a slum in a suburban home. The stuff: skyscrapers of old newspapers, tangles of coat hangers and winter coats and shoes, a fry pan filled with bead necklaces, and piles of bulging, knotted plastic bags. It was like someone’s life had exploded. And the smell. The smell of rot and mold and decay.”

This is a description of Erika’s childhood home as Clementine sees it for the first time. The comparison to a city slum and skyscrapers emphasizes that the mess is overwhelming. Clementine describes household objects that toe the line between useful and garbage, and the stench signifies that the objects have become the latter. Clementine’s point of view builds upon Erika’s backstory and sheds light on Erika’s neuroses.

“‘No. I don’t want to do it. I mean that’s my first instinctive response. Just, no. I don’t want to do it. This sounds so awful, but I just … hate the thought of it. It’s almost … repulsive to me. Oh God, I don’t mean that, I just really don’t want to do it.’

Repulsive.

Erika closed her eyes. No amount of therapy or long hot showers would ever get her clean enough. She was still that dirty, flea-bitten kid.”

Clementine’s reaction to Erika’s egg donation request is emotional, and her response reflects her perceived obligation to Erika. Clementine also has a secret: She does not want any more children. Erika overhears Clementine’s response and internalizes the negativity. She believes that she is what repulses Clementine and torments herself with the idea that she will never escape her childhood stigma.

“But then she thought of Holly and Ruby, and suddenly she’d been overwhelmed by the most extraordinary desire. Her own Holly or Ruby. Suddenly this abstract idea she’d been working toward for so long became real. Ruby’s beautiful green cat’s eyes with Oliver’s dark hair. Holly’s rosebud lips with Oliver’s nose. For the first time since she’d begun the IVF process she felt true desperation for a baby. For that baby. She wanted it as much as Oliver did. It almost seemed like she wanted Clementine’s baby far more than she’d ever wanted her own baby.”

Erika is ambivalent about having her own children, but the prospect of having one of Clementine’s babies is alluring. Although she is unaware of her own motivations for feeling this way, Erika is obsessed with having a piece of Clementine’s “perfect” life for herself. This obsession manifests in other actions, such as Erika secretly stealing from Clementine. Erika’s fleeting desire to own a baby with Clementine’s DNA demonstrates the depths of her fixation and of her self-loathing.

“So this is how it happens, a part of her thought as she rocked and begged. This is what it feels like. You don’t change. There is no special protection when you cross that invisible line from your ordinary life to that parallel world where tragedies happen. It happens just like this. You don’t become someone else. You’re still exactly the same. Everything around you still smells and looks and feels exactly the same. She could still taste Vid’s dessert. She could still smell the roast meat from the barbecue. She could hear the dog yapping endlessly and she could feel a thin line of blood trickling down her shin from where her knees had smacked hard against the pavers.”

Moriarty lets us deep into Clementine’s internal monologue as the crisis at the barbecue occurs. This narrative choice builds tension and allows the reader to experience the traumatic moment through a series of sensory details.

“Never take your eyes off them. Never look away. It happens so fast. It happens without a sound. All those stories in the news. All those parents. All those mistakes she’d read about. Backyard drownings. Unfenced pools. Children unsupervised in the bath. Children with stupid, foolish, neglectful parents. Children who died surrounded by so-called responsible adults. And each time she would pretend to be non-judgmental, but really, deep down she was thinking: Not me. That could never really happen to me.”

Clementine realizes that her privilege has blinded her to reality. She believed that child accidents resulted from negligent parents until a traumatic event occurs within her family. This revelation forces her to face her own fallibility as well as own preconceived bias. This has implications for her relationship with Erika as well. Until now, Clementine believes that in some way, Erika deserved the childhood she had, while Clementine had deserved her better one. Now, Clementine wonders who Erika would have been if she hadn’t had a mother with a mental health disorder. Privilege made Clementine believe she deserved the charmed life she had, but in facing the truth that she has simply been lucky, she begins to see the complexity around her.

“Erika pinched Ruby’s nostrils together again, bent her head and exhaled a silent scream of fury into Ruby’s body. YOU DO AS I SAY, RUBY. YOU BREATHE. It was her mother’s voice, her mother at her most manic and vicious and terrifying, her mother when she caught Erika trying to throw something out. YOU BREATHE RIGHT THIS INSTANT, RUBY, HOW DARE YOU IGNORE ME, YOU BREATHE, NOW, RIGHT NOW.”

Erika associates loss of emotional control with her mother, Sylvia. Although Erika is sharp and critical, she doesn’t often show her real feelings. In this excerpt, Erika explodes with feeling and draws upon her mother’s ferocity to save Ruby. Erika views her mother’s intense emotions as harmful, but unlike her mother, Erika uses her own aggression to help, not hinder, a child. Immediately after Erika experiences these intense feelings, Ruby finally begins to breathe again. Through Erika, Moriarty suggests that what we perceive as our greatest weakness can also be our greatest strength.

“Clementine’s mother thought their marriage was a problem that could be fixed with a good dose of common sense and elbow grease. Marriages were hard work! But what could they say to a counselor? They weren’t fighting over money or sex or housework. There were no knotty issues to untangle. Everything was the same as before the barbecue. It was just that nothing felt the same.”

This excerpt develops the theme of The Trials of Marriage. Clementine struggles with her inability to “fix” both her marriage and her family in the aftermath of the barbecue. Although Clementine usually abides to her mother, she dismisses her mother’s advice because she feels isolated in her family trauma. Clementine avoids her guilt and is subsequently unable to see her marital issues clearly.

“It was interesting that fury and fear could look so much the same.”

Tiffany thinks this about her neighbor Harry. She only sees Harry as a curmudgeon until Harry’s grandnephew reveals that Harry had a family who died in an accident. This character insight suggests that Harry’s rage is based in fear. The parallels between rage and fear are mirrored in Sam’s story. He also processes his fear and helplessness as anger. But at the root, both his and Harry’s acts of irritable rage come from feelings of profound fear and helplessness.

“Clementine shook her head at her. She knew that Sylvia had been a terrible mother to Erika, that she had said and done unforgivable things over the years, and that was all in addition to the hoarding problem, but Clementine had always felt traitorously affectionate toward her. She enjoyed Sylvia’s subversiveness, her outlandish comments, her meandering stories and snarky, sly little digs. In contrast, her own mother always seemed so staid and earnest, like a well-meaning minister’s wife.”

Clementine and Erika’s differing perspectives of their mothers become clear. Erika, who feels burdened by her mother, longs for a life like Clementine’s and a mother like Pam. Clementine, never fearing the loss of her stability and her mother, finds Sylvia exciting and different. This contrast highlights Sylvia and Pam as foils. Pam expects her daughter to be selfless and responsible. Clementine internally rejects her mother’s domineering and embraces Sylvia’s subversive and fun-loving approach to life.

“‘I’m your best friend, Erika,’ he said sadly. ‘Don’t you know that?’”

Moriarty highlights an ideal of marriage: genuine friendship. No matter what Erika has tried to make of her life—a good life with a good marriage and an uncluttered house—she still believes she is the same “flea-bitten” child she used to be. Erika’s first step toward letting go of her traumatic childhood is accepting that Oliver genuinely chose her as his partner and best friend. In turn, Erika can start to value herself and dethrone Clementine in her mind.

“Maybe Erika was her wolf tone. Maybe Clementine’s life would have lacked something subtle but essential without her in it: a certain richness, a certain depth.”

Clementine is making a parallel between her wolf tone—a sound that occurs in her cello when the note played is particularly close to a strong natural frequency of the body of the instrument—and Erika. When she attempted to get rid of the wolf tone, her instrument didn’t sound like itself. Erika has shaped Clementine’s life, and for the first time, Clementine wonders if Erika has made her life more emotionally full and interesting rather than damaged.

“She’d always suspected this about herself, that right at the center of her soul was a small unbreakable stone, a cold, hard instinct for self-preservation.”

Moriarty contrasts Clementine and Erika. Whereas Clementine is “creative” and “bohemian,” Erika is “conservative,” “the designated driver.” However, these superficial contrasts intentionally subvert the truths of the characters. Clementine’s core nature is described with negative adjectives like “cold” and “hard,” yet these attributes are strengths that allow for “self-preservation.”

“Somewhere along the way she’d forgotten it was about the music, the pure, uncomplicated bliss of the music.”

As a musician, Clementine believes she needs intense emotions to perform. After the barbecue, she is unable to process her overwhelming emotions and loses her ability to play. It’s only when she finds self-acceptance that she can truly devote herself to her music again.

“In Oliver’s world, people never stopped. His parents had said they’d stop drinking. Erika’s mother had said she’d stop hoarding. They truly believed it at the time. He got that. But they couldn’t stop. It was like asking them to hold their breath. They could do it for only so long before they had to gasp for air.”

Due to his own childhood trauma, Oliver holds onto the perception that people can’t change. Despite this viewpoint, Oliver chooses to not give up on Erika even after he discovers her stealing. Oliver’s rigid expectations is an example of trauma adversely affecting someone’s worldview.