A memorial consultant at a suburban crematorium takes a pair of bolt cutters to a body nobody has claimed, wraps one finger, and posts it to a high school principal. Asked later why, she explains without embarrassment that she wanted an actual finger pointing at somebody. She is calm, apple-cheeked, wearing a blouse with a bow at the neck, and she quotes Gandhi on revolutions beginning with a single act of defiance. She learned the quote, she adds, from the teacher she is trying to have investigated. It is the most sensible thing any adult does in Big Little Truths by Liane Moriarty.
That is the police plot, and it sets the terms for everything else. Every act of care in this novel arrives with a dosage nobody has checked, and the damage always turns up later, wearing a different name.
Everything Here Is a Side Effect
Ten years have passed since the trivia night. The Pirriwee Public children are Year 10 now, and the mothers have simply migrated one group chat upward. Madeline is fifty and being crowded by every generation at once: a mother with a broken hip, a daughter getting engaged, a son on the other side of the world, and a husband midway through treatment for lymphoma.
Ed’s cancer is doing what cancer does. Big Little Truths by Liane Moriarty is unsparing about the logistics, the ports and the scans and the oncologist who swans between two offices so that he never has to wait for a patient. What frightens Madeline is that Ed has begun to speed up. He talks too fast, threatens the local gangster by telephone, starts conversations with strangers in car parks, and one night takes his office apart looking for a phone number. She is certain the disease has reached his brain. His oncologist tells her to stay off the internet and suggests, with immense patience, that she try counselling.
Meanwhile Celeste’s mother-in-law is buying cars she does not need and forgetting which decade she is in, and everyone has quietly filed her under dementia. Both diagnoses are wrong in the same direction, and the corrections, when they come, are ordinary and pharmacological. A steroid prescribed to make chemotherapy bearable. An antihistamine taken two at a time. A teenager in the counselling transcript names the pattern out loud as the Law of Unintended Consequences, and her friend supplies the textbook case: China killing its sparrows and getting locusts instead, a chain that ran from a pest eradication campaign to a famine. She learned that one in history class too.
Almost every conversation in Big Little Truths by Liane Moriarty contains something a character learned from Melody Montclair.
The Most Helpful Woman in Pirriwee
Melody is the new Year 10 history teacher. Within a term she is inside every house on the peninsula. She gets Madeline’s biopsy moved forward by making one phone call to someone she happens to know. She spends an afternoon with a boy who has refused to leave his bedroom for months and walks him back through the school gate. And she takes a woman who has not danced since she was nineteen out dancing in the city. She buys a painting for a friend who admired it. She hires a lonely fifteen-year-old for a confidential paid job, teaching her husband to read.
Renata, alone among the adults, keeps asking the obvious question about what all this generosity is for, and is treated as the difficult one for asking. She is right, and being right takes her most of the novel and costs a child more than it costs her.
The subject of Big Little Truths by Liane Moriarty, once it stops circling, is the organised sexual exploitation of teenage girls by a woman who has made herself beloved by their mothers first. Moriarty writes the revelation as a wall of voices, testimony cut against testimony until the separate stories become one story arriving faster than the listener can absorb it, and the effect on a room full of parents is the most sustained piece of writing in the book. What lands hardest is not the crime. It is the four hundred preceding pages of evidence that this woman was kind, and the reader’s own share in having accepted it.
Big Little Truths Belongs to Its Teenagers
The structural gamble is a transcript. One hour of school-mandated counselling, six students, a patient professional called Brenda, and no adult supervision of the narrative whatsoever. The kids talk over each other, correct each other’s idioms, claim credit, allocate blame, and dispense their findings to the reader well before their parents receive them.
They are extremely funny, and Big Little Truths by Liane Moriarty never softens them into cuteness. One of them is collecting trauma the way another child might collect facts about volcanoes. One is guarding a kill switch with his body and hoping to be arrested, on the grounds that his mother is a lawyer. One of them barely speaks, and the shape of that silence is the novel’s best-managed effect.
It matters that they get the moral clarity. The adults in Big Little Truths by Liane Moriarty are competent about the wrong things, and the parents heard arguing in the car park afterwards about whether fifteen-year-olds are old enough to know what they were doing are the same parents who spent the novel not looking. The child at the centre of it says she consented. The book neither contradicts her nor accepts it, and the sentence it uses to hold both at once is the finest thing in four hundred and sixty pages.
The comedy is running the whole time and never breaks tone. A principal with four postgraduate qualifications sends the entire parent body an email intended for one recipient, then sends a second email asking them to disregard it. The group chat, informed that its contents may become evidence, produces four deleted messages, three agreements, and a query about band practice.
What Big Little Truths Cannot Explain
The reservations about Big Little Truths by Liane Moriarty are real, and they cluster:
- Melody has no interior. No chapter, no point of view, one hinted fragment of her own history. She works as a space other people fill, which is a defensible choice and still leaves the antagonist thinner than the group chat.
- The coincidences pile up. The single person in the country investigating her begins dating one of the four friends; his daughter is reachable by the students; the crematorium worker is a former pupil. The novel acknowledges the pattern and does not solve it.
- The ending administers its own justice on a wet road, which spares the courtroom the last chapters had promised.
- There is simply too much of it. An engagement nobody saw coming, a Harley Davidson, an elderly woman parted from her savings by telephone, a schoolboy retailing nicotine, and a semi-retired underworld figure with a straw hat. All good company; none of it holding weight.
The other cost is entry. Ten years of friendship are assumed, not built, and a reader arriving without Big Little Lies will find a well-populated novel with the current switched off.
Readers who want Moriarty working the same nerve should go to Here One Moment, which is likewise about a community deciding what to do with information it cannot verify. Those who came for the social warfare of the school gate will find a cooler, glossier version in Mean Moms by Emma Rosenblum. And the necessary prerequisite remains Big Little Lies, shorter and tighter than its sequel, and improved in hindsight by it.
What It Leaves Behind
The final chapter belongs to Mary-Louise, who was book one’s small domestic villain and is here given grief, a sense of humour, and the last word. She is driving before dawn to collect somebody from an airport, and part of the way through the journey she works out that the person she is collecting has been dead for years.
What follows is at once the coldest and the most humane passage in Big Little Truths by Liane Moriarty. She feels a shard behind her ribs dissolve. She shouts at her son, who cannot hear her, about the life he threw away. Then something happens on the road, and she does not look in the mirror.
From now on, she has decided, she is only looking forward. It is the one line in the book that could be a resolution, a confession or a threat, and Moriarty declines to say which.