Truly Madly Guilty Book Club Discussion
Last month I decided to start up a book club on the blog. I love to read and devour books pretty quickly, but with two kids and work I was finding it hard to read. So, this little book club came about as a way to ensure that at least get to read one new book a month.
A couple of months ago I stumbled upon What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty. It was literally a thrift store find and I love it. I was quirky and sweet and the author just had a great understand of relationships and you totally got everything she was talking about. Cue to a couple weeks later I picked up The Husband’s Secret and it was amazing! I didn’t even realize at the time that it was the same author. I highly recommend it. Then I went on to read Big Little Lies and while it took me a little bit to get into it I equally loved it.
So, when Liane Moriarty came out with a fresh new book right in time for the start of my book club I knew I had to make Truly Madly Guilty my first pick!
SPOILERS AHEAD
Ah! This is so hard to even write, because I’m such a fan, but I really didn’t like it!
The book revolves around 3 couples. We have Sam and Clementine a married couple with two kids, Erika and Oliver and Vid and Tiffany. Clementine and Erika have been friends since childhood, but they have strange relationship and at times it feels like they don’t even like each other that much, but they are stuck with each other. When they were children Clementine’s mother forced her to become friends with Erika since Erika had a trouble childhood with her mother being a hoarder.
The whole book revolves around a BBQ. Originally Sam and Clementine and their children were only going to get together with Erika and Oliver, but once Erika mentions her plans to her neighbor, Vid he changes everything and invites them both couples and the kids to a BBQ at his house.
Sam and Clementine are happy to attend, because they seem to find Erika and Oliver pretty dull and welcome any new guests. Erika is upset about it, because she was planning on asking Sam and Clementine an important question.
The entire book keeps flashing back to the night of the BBQ and little by little you get more and more information about what happened. They keep eluding that something horrible happened. Something that would change their lives forever. I couldn’t wait to find out what happened and I had to wait a while. Finally we find out what happened at the BBQ. Sam and Clementine’s little girl, Ruby, fell into a fountain, because everyone at the party was a bit distracted. You see Vid’s wife use to be a stripper and at that moment she was doing a little dance for Sam and Clementine and bam the incident happened….
That was it? Seriously? It takes a little longer to find out that everything is okay with Ruby, but what annoyed me is that Liane really sets it up to be something scandalous that occurred between Vid and Tiffany and Sam and Clementine, but really it was just a little dance nothing more.
During the book you find out that Erika and Oliver asked Clementine if she would be an egg donor for them and that Clementine’s original response was disgust, but after Erika ends up being the one that saves Ruby from the fountain Clementine changes her mind. The rest of the book really just focus on Erika and Clementine’s strained relationship and why it got to the place it is now. Yawn!
I personally was hoping for something a bit juicer to have happened during the BBQ. I still enjoy the way that Liane writes, but it almost felt like there was too much she was eluding to with all of the characters and then she really wouldn’t get into. So, you would get to know one of the characters and want to know more but then she would just dance around and elude to the horrible thing that would change their lives forever and not really get more into the character.
She does get to more into the Erika and Clementine dynamic, but I wasn’t loving Erika so, I wasn’t really into their relationship baggage.
So, for me this was a big thumbs down. I still really enjoy her writing style and I will get whatever her next book is a chance, but I won’t be recommending Truly Madly Guilty?
What did you think? Am I the only one that disliked it?
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ON THE BLOG
My living room is one of the rooms that evolved drastically from when we first moved one. Originally I painted the walls chocolate brown and did accents of white, blue and orange. That lasted maybe 2 years.
Our dining room sat empty for months. Okay maybe it was empty for just a handful of weeks and then we couldn’t take it anymore and put in a folding table and plastic outdoor chairs, but in my mind that was still empty.
On the main floor of our house we have a Florida room. Being that it’s a Florida room it is a considered a 3 season room, because there is no heat in the room. The previous owners used it as an indoor patio with outdoor furniture and it looked like this when we moved in.
I totally agree! I loved her other books, but Truly Madly Guilty was a bit of a letdown in comparison. I think The Husband’s Secret is my favorite of hers.
It’s my favorite too! I loved it! What Alice Forgot is totally different than her normal stuff, but it was really good too. More of a fast chick lit read, but I really enjoyed it.
Yes, yes, EXACTLY!!! You took the words right out of my mouth! She had me believing something shocking had happened between the adults and that was the big conflict of the story. Even though I felt let down about the story, I really enjoyed her style of writing and there were moments that made it worth the read. I thought of Harry as a “throw away character” until his sweet and sad back story came to light. He was also the one who desperately tried to bring attention to Ruby drowning. Poor Dakota was heartbroken over how responsible she felt for the accident. While Oliver was so very tender and kind to Holly when she told him how she pushed Ruby. So I do thank you very much Camila for bringing this book and author to my attention : )
I know I wish she had gone more into Harry and more into Vid, Tiffany and Dakota! It just seems like it was too many people and too many different story lines. Normally she is good at weaving them all together, but I wasn’t in love with this one. Her other books are amazing, so I would still give them a read!
ok, maybe the big to do wasn’t that big of a to do, but i think she’s the only writer, really, where you read almost an entire book and you don’t know what happened and to whom. i love that, that she keeps that going. that’s why i liked big little lies. to me, the husbands secret was only good at the end, but it didn’t have the mystery throughout the whole book like these other 2 i mentioned. what’s next on your list? i read a truly disturbing (but really good) book called behind closed doors by b.a.paris.
Maybe I was just expecting too much. I actually really loved The Husbands Secret and liked it more than Big Little Lies. Disturbing sounds good! Wanted to pick something scary for Oct in honor of Halloween. I will be posting the next pick next week.
I’d love to read her latest. I loved The Husband’s Secret.
Brenda
Completely agree. I loved the smart characters and witty dialogue in Big Little Lies, and the balance between drama and humor. this totally fell flat for me on just about every level– characters, storyline, everything. I also thought all the different storylines were really predictable. So disappointing because I was really looking forward to this after reading their others!
I know! I wanted to love it! I really did, but I hated it.
First off, thanks for doing this because it “forced” me to read a book — something I love to do and don’t do enough of! I enjoyed the book, but was also a little disappointed to learn that what happened at the BBQ wasn’t as “big” as I thought it would be. I also got kind of annoyed at the relationship between Erika and Clementine. Very strange friendship. It did teach us a few lessons like perceptions about people. Harry wasn’t so bad after all when we learned what had happened in his life. While this book wasn’t one of my favorites, it sounds like her other books are much better, so I will pick up a few of those to try.
I loved “The Husband’s Secret ” and “Big Little Lies.” They were also favorites of our book club. We were all excited to read “Truly, Madly, Guilty.” Out of 12, only 3 liked it. There was such a build up of what happened at the barbeque, that it was a let down when Ruby fell in the fountain. At one point, I was waiting for something else to happen. Usually the books that we don’t like as much are the ones that initiate the most discussion. This book clearly examines how relationships can change our lives. How you are brought up affects many aspects of your personality. We are manipulated and we manipulate to achieve the results that we desire. There is much to dissect about the characters.
I need some good questions for this book to discuss with my book club tonight if anyone has any please let me know
I thought I would be the only person who didn’t like it!. I thought since it had won the Goodreads Literary Fiction and since I had loved What Alice Forgot and The Husbands Secret that this would be spectacular….I thought it was boring, hard to understand and hard to follow the story.