Keep Your Friends Close

The revelation that the “Mothering Award” trophy is the murder weapon crystallizes the central critique of The Performance of Motherhood and Social Status. The trophy, an award for excelling in the competitive sport of West Hollywood motherhood, becomes the murder weapon Jade uses to silence Kiersten. This narrative choice forges a direct link between the pressures the novel explores and the story’s violence. Jade’s confession makes it clear that the murder wasn’t driven by rage so much as panic and fear that her affair and financial manipulations would be exposed, and that the life she had arranged for herself would unravel. Her entire identity is built on careful image-crafting, and the killing is an extreme attempt to keep that image intact.

Brooke embodies a different kind of maternal desperation. The novel employs Brooke’s behavior as a red herring, juxtaposing her public emotional turmoil with Jade’s concealed criminality. From the outset, Brooke’s erratic actions, broadcast through social media and desperate voicemails, make her a suspect. In contrast, Jade maintains a composed exterior that masks a calculated, long-term deception involving her own child. However, the dichotomy between the two is not clear-cut. Ryan’s accusation that Jade has “learned the right language so [she] can look like a good fake human” exposes the danger of equating external composure with moral integrity (253). Meanwhile, the climax exonerates Brooke of one murder only to implicate her in another immediately—a twist suggests that while the group was wrong about Kiersten’s death, their fear of Brooke’s capacity for violence was ultimately justified, blurring the line between victim and perpetrator.

These final chapters systematically dismantle Whitney’s reality through a cascade of revelations, reinforcing the theme of The Unreliability of Perception in a World of Deceit. The spy app, the accidental voicemail, and the final DNA test results function as irrefutable correctives to the subjective narrative Whitney has told others and herself. Having built her identity around her lifelong bond with Kiersten, Whitney must now confront that this foundational relationship was predicated on deception. Her stunned realization—“Had everything and everyone in my life just been a lie?” (264)—articulates the instability of truth in a world saturated with secrets. The final flashback from Kiersten’s perspective completes this arc, transforming her from a victim into the perpetrator of a deep betrayal. This reveal makes it clear that no character is entirely who they appear to be.

Kiersten’s betrayal is part of a broader pattern that serves as the narrative’s primary engine, unfolding in escalating layers that chart the complete collapse of the community’s social fabric. The affair between Colin and Jade represents a dual betrayal of both marriage and friendship, which is compounded by Colin’s betrayal of Jade when he flees with their stolen money. Ryan’s decision to give the police the incriminating voicemail is a betrayal born of personal vengeance and thus of Jade’s own betrayal. This chain reaction culminates in the posthumous revelation of Kiersten’s actions. By secretly using her best friend’s embryos, she commits a violation that transcends financial or romantic deceit, particularly in a community in which motherhood is prized so highly. The betrayal also strikes at the heart of the stakes that have underpinned the novel’s various deceptions: identity and image.  

Even prior to this, the novel’s violent conclusion offers a bleak resolution, suggesting that the cycle of deception and violence will continue. Jade’s arrest for Kiersten’s murder provides a moment of conventional narrative closure. However, this resolution is immediately rendered moot by the discovery of Abby’s brutal murder at the hands of Brooke. This final act of violence is not born from the intricate web of lies that defined the central plot, but from a more primal, desperate rage born from maternal instincts. The image of a bloody, intoxicated Brooke nursing Julian in the bathtub brings the theme of performative motherhood to a grotesque conclusion. It serves as a monstrous inversion of the earlier scene in which the mothers collectively nursed him after Abby took him away. What was once an act of communal support now exposes the fractured bonds at the heart of the novel. It also becomes Brooke’s final declaration that she stands outside the twisted ecosystem these women have created. By reclaiming Julian in this way, she rejects the distorted version of “support” they offer one another and marks herself as someone who no longer wants, nor needs, to belong to their circle. At the same time, the novel ends not with justice but with the initiation of a new tragedy, implying that the corrosive environment these women created continues to produce new victims and perpetrators.