Big Little Truths

Big Little Truths shows that trauma does not inherently resolve itself with time: it continues to shape the lives of people who believe they have long since moved on. Moriarty tracks this persistence across three generations and multiple characters, showing that the original event may belong to the past but its consequences keep arriving in the present. While Perry has been dead for ten years when the novel begins, the impact of his actions continues to reverberate within the community, especially for the three women he harmed most directly. Perry sexually assaulted Jane (leading to Ziggy’s conception) and abused Celeste for years during their marriage. This abuse prompted Bonnie to act in defense of her friend, and push Perry to his death during a school trivia fundraising event. 

Jane carries the pain of being assaulted by Perry, even though she adores her son. She refuses to have another child with Tom, a decision she cannot fully articulate even when pressed. When Tom shows her a video of a toddler calling for its father and she watches his face fill with longing, her internal response is a visceral, unbidden phrase: “You don’t get to do that to my body.” (57) She recognizes immediately that Tom is not Perry, yet the reaction is physiological before it is rational. Later, at their anniversary dinner, as she tries to explain why she cannot agree to a second child, she remembers the obstetrician who performed an episiotomy without consent while she was giving birth to Ziggy. Although Jane has been able to move forward, find love, and embrace motherhood, she is not able to voluntarily accept the idea of having another child. 

Likewise, Perry’s abuse impacts both Celeste and her sons. Celeste’s response to sudden male physical contact is established when Marco grabs her shoulder to steer her out of the path of a swinging fishing rod. She gasps and her breathing will not settle. She watches herself try to normalize this reaction—she lets her boys tease her about being jumpy as if it were simply a personality trait—but the reaction reveals the persistent residue of years of domestic violence. Josh’s school refusal, meanwhile, is eventually linked in part to the information he received about his father at Madeline’s party. He tells Celeste he remembers nothing about Perry and wants to know nothing, yet his immediate instinct when Max reaches toward their mother over a car key is to shove his brother back and shout “don’t hurt her” (126). 

Meanwhile, Bonnie’s guilt over Perry’s death operates not as a repressed memory but as a slowly accumulating weight. She tells Jane that she meant to kill Perry; she knew what she was doing when she pushed him. When Skye discovers this history and turns on Bonnie with adolescent contempt, that self-understanding becomes unbearable. Bonnie’s breakdown at the history showcase event is not a sudden collapse but the end point of a decade of unprocessed grief. Her subsequent diagnosis of major depressive disorder and complex post-traumatic stress disorder confirms what the narrative has been tracing all along: The night of the trivia night never truly ended for Bonnie, it only went underground. In all of these cases, the women are able to achieve closure and healing only when they openly confront the weight of the pain they have been carrying.