Keep Your Friends Close

The novel’s opening chapters establish a narrative structure built on fragmentation and subjective reality, immediately immersing the reader in the theme of The Unreliability of Perception in a World of Deceit. By structuring the story with alternating timelines and shifting first-person narrators, the text eschews a singular, objective truth in favor of a collage of incomplete and biased perspectives. The initial accounts of Kiersten’s death are deliberately contradictory. Jade’s recollection of Brooke frantically pounding on Kiersten’s chest and cracking a rib presents Brooke as acting on uncontrolled, violent emotion, describing her demeanor while performing CPR as “frantic and wild” (37). In contrast, Brooke’s memory emphasizes Whitney’s emotionally driven interference, which disrupts the CPR effort. This dissonance asks the reader to play the role of an investigator, constantly re-evaluating events and motivations—in this case, the characters’ relationships with Kiersten and one another, as well as how those relationships might have contributed to Kiersten’s death. In addition to creating suspense, the narrative’s refusal to offer a stable ground of fact serves a thematic purpose, suggesting that truth is contingent on who is telling the story.

In introducing the West Hollywood Moms’ Club, these chapters also introduce the theme of The Performance of Motherhood and Social Status. Although Whitney claims the members of the group are “just trying to survive the early-mom stage” (7), her explanation of the club to Detective Perez reveals it to be a mechanism of social exclusion and control. Rigid rules govern the group in place of mutual support, with Whitney explaining that members must meet “certain membership criteria” and sign “a nondisclosure agreement” (6). This framework treats friendship as a transactional arrangement designed to protect wealth and status. Brooke’s emotional outpouring at the park meetup disrupts this carefully curated social performance, which is why Whitney reacts to Brooke’s raw grief over Abby’s betrayal with judgment: Brooke’s pain is incongruous with the group’s unspoken demand for polished perfection, revealing an environment in which any deviation from the idealized maternal image becomes a threat.

Whitney’s reflections on Kiersten further illustrate the intense pressure the women are under while showing how that pressure intersects with another theme: The Corrosive Power of Secrets in Friendships. Pressed on how much Kiersten had been drinking before her death, Whitney recalls how Kiersten, coming from a family of politicians, was careful never to appear drunk in public. In private, however, she would let “all her pretenses fall away” while drinking (10)—a remark that suggests Kiersten had difficulty setting aside her social performance without the assistance of alcohol. The implication that this could have played a role in her death highlights the unhealthiness of an environment that provides no day-to-day outlet for emotions. That Whitney relished these moments of authenticity—she “felt special” when Kiersten allowed her to see this side of her—further underscores the environment’s dysfunction. The word choice frames their relationship in exclusionary terms, hinting that when honesty is the exception rather than the rule, it itself fuels social competition and hierarchy.  

The initial characterizations of Brooke, Whitney, and Jade further establish the motif of secrets and lies. Each narrator’s perspective hints at secrets that dictate her actions and warp her perception of others. Brooke attributes her calmness in the face of death to being “unshockable” after the secret trauma of her marriage’s collapse. This hidden pain renders her behavior illegible to the other women and the police, making her an immediate suspect, even as her internal monologue reveals a vulnerability invisible to her supposed friends. As the novel’s first instance of betrayal, Abby’s infidelity and abandonment of Brooke also hint at the ripple effects of broken trust; by precipitating Brooke’s emotional crisis, Abby’s actions destabilize the entire friend group. Meanwhile, Whitney performs the role of the devastated best friend, but her grief is intertwined with social policing and a history of judgment against Brooke in a way that hints that her motivations are more complex than they appear. Lastly, Jade adopts the mantle of the reluctant peacemaker. Yet underpinning her narrative are her own secret anxieties about her family’s precarious financial situation, suggesting that her actions are motivated less by altruism than by a desperate need to maintain her standing. The constant undercurrent of deception evokes an environment in which authenticity is impossible and every relationship is conditional.

The swimming pool symbolizes the deadly duality that characterizes the women’s relationships and lives—one of danger lurking beneath a pristine surface. A site of leisure, it becomes the stage for a violent death. That Kiersten, an expert swimmer, dies in this controlled environment signifies that this very control is dangerous: The threat is internal to the women’s insular world. The image of her body floating, her white gown obscuring death’s violence, reinforces the idea of a beautiful facade concealing a fatal truth.