Introduction

THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER, FROM THE AUTHOR OF BIG LITTLE LIES, now an HBO series.

Winner of Goodreads Choice Award for Best Fiction
Entertainment Weekly's “Best Beach Bet”
A USA Today Hot Books for Summer Selection
A Miami Herald Summer Reads Pick

“Here’s the best news you’ve heard all year: Not a single page disappoints....The only difficulty with Truly Madly Guilty? Putting it down.” ?Miami Herald

“Captivating, suspenseful…tantalizing.” ?People Magazine

Six responsible adults. Three cute kids. One small dog. It’s just a normal weekend. What could possibly go wrong?

In Truly Madly Guilty, Liane Moriarty turns her unique, razor-sharp eye towards three seemingly happy families.

Sam and Clementine have a wonderful, albeit busy, life: they have two little girls, Sam has just started a new dream job, and Clementine, a cellist, is busy preparing for the audition of a lifetime. If there’s anything they can count on, it’s each other.

Clementine and Erika are each other’s oldest friends. A single look between them can convey an entire conversation. But theirs is a complicated relationship, so when Erika mentions a last-minute invitation to a barbecue with her neighbors, Tiffany and Vid, Clementine and Sam don’t hesitate. Having Tiffany and Vid’s larger-than-life personalities there will be a welcome respite.

Two months later, it won’t stop raining, and Clementine and Sam can’t stop asking themselves the question: What if we hadn’t gone?

In Truly Madly Guilty, Liane Moriarty takes on the foundations of our lives: marriage, sex, parenthood, and friendship. She shows how guilt can expose the fault lines in the most seemingly strong relationships, how what we don’t say can be more powerful than what we do, and how sometimes it is the most innocent of moments that can do the greatest harm.

Editorial Review

An Amazon Best Book of August 2016: Many writers have trouble plumbing the depths of a single character’s soul. Moriarty effortlessly dives deep in six different characters—the three married couples at a backyard barbeque in Sydney that goes horribly wrong. Chapters jump in time between the day of the barbecue and its aftereffects in the present, with the ripples of that evening disrupting and destroying relationships. The exact nature of the shock isn’t revealed until midway through the novel, and I admit, I kept thinking to myself, “Given the buildup, this better be a wonderfully awful revelation.” Moriarty comes through, fitting the seemingly unrelated puzzle pieces together into a tight and harrowing picture. She even wraps up a long-ago tragedy that befell a crotchety neighbor in what is perhaps a too-neat moment that adds an unnecessary bow on top. While it would do the book a disservice to call it “light,” it’s so briskly paced that the pages flash by, aiming the reader, ultimately, toward a gleam of hope at the end. --Adrian Liang, The Amazon Book Review

Excerpt

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“This is a story that begins with a barbecue,” said Clementine. The microphone amplified and smoothed her voice, making it more authoritative, as if it had been photoshopped. “An ordinary neighborhood barbecue in an ordinary backyard.” ... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

1. Discuss the novel’s title. Why do all of the characters feel so guilty? Should they? How do they deal with their guilt?

2. The epigraph is a Claude Debussy quote: “Music is the silence between the notes.” What does that mean to you? How significant are silences and the unsaid in this novel?

3. Erika’s psychologist tells her, “You’ve got to get this idea out of your head about there being some objective measure of normality. …This ‘normal’ person of whom you speak doesn’t exist!” Do you agree? Do you think this relates back to Tolstoy’s famous quote, “Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”? Is the real normal that, once you scratch the surface, no family is normal?

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Weblinks

»	Publisher's Book Info
»	Author's web site
»	Follow Liane Moriarty on Facebook

Book Club Recommendations

Recommended to book clubs by 8 of 14 members.

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