Look What You Made Me Do

Set among the affluent professional classes of contemporary London, the novel alternates between two first-person narrators, Kate and Phoebe, interspersed with screenplay excerpts from a fictional TV show called Cheating and a magazine profile of the show's writer. The layered structure reveals a chain of deceptions, grievances, and revenge spanning two generations.

Kate Hittlestone opens the novel by describing the private language she shares with her husband Jack Hittlestone, an architect. Their catchphrase, a reference to an old New Yorker cartoon, is "Want your body, disco doll" (8), meaning "hurry up, we're going to be late." Kate introduces Jack's fondness for technology, including a voice-controlled smart home system, and their habit of assigning private nicknames to everyone they know. At a dinner party, they meet Al, a TV agent who mentions a client's new show about adultery called Cheating. After arriving home, Jack goes to check on Ken, a rough sleeper who uses the covered entrance of a nearby development, a quiet act typical of his privately generous character.

That night, Kate finds Jack dead at three in the morning. She enters devastating grief, much of which she cannot remember. Her oldest friend, Daphne, a senior civil servant, tries to coax her back to their book group, but Kate refuses for months. A visit to the National Gallery, where she stands before a painting she and Jack once studied together, gives her the first glimmer of returning strength, and she agrees to attend.

A screenplay excerpt from Cheating shows a married man greeting his mistress with "Want your body, disco doll," establishing that the show draws on Kate and Jack's private language.

The perspective shifts to Phoebe Mull, a TV writer in her early thirties, at lunch with her agent Aloysius (the same Al from the dinner party), who reports extraordinary buzz for Cheating. After lunch, Phoebe visits her mother, Sarah, in a gloomy basement flat in Earl's Court. She describes Sarah as embodying three archetypes of toxic parent: the bitch, the vampire, and the squid, a type who clings and smothers. Phoebe's twin brother Tristan emigrated to Australia years ago, and Sarah cut him off, leaving Phoebe to shoulder all caregiving. The defining wound of Sarah's life was a university relationship that ended disastrously; Phoebe wrote Cheating as reckoning and as a prelude to severing ties with her mother for good. A magazine profile presents Phoebe's public persona: selectively candid but private about family, living with her partner Tony, a primary school teacher.

Three months after Jack's death, Kate lunches with Conor, a man she used to visit through her prison volunteering. Conor, a finance professional from Dublin, was wrongly convicted after a friend stored drugs at his flat and informed police. While in Wandsworth prison, cryptocurrency Conor had accepted as payment appreciated enormously, making him wealthy upon release. He describes his revenge: buying the house next door through a shell company and renting it to party-goers. Kate suggests he buy a second house for the same purpose, and Conor tells her she has a talent for revenge.

Kate attends book group for the first time since Jack's death. The conversation turns to Cheating, and someone quotes "I want your body, disco doll" (101). Kate recognizes her private phrase and feels the floor drop from under her. At home, she watches the first episodes. The show depicts an affair between an older married architect and a younger woman, reproducing intimate jokes, sexual secrets, and private practices from Kate's marriage. Kate concludes Jack had a two-year affair with the writer.

On Daphne's recommendation, Kate begins therapy with Carlos, a psychotherapist whose lack of empathy she finds oddly useful. In sessions, she recounts meeting Jack at Oxford in the mid-1980s. She overheard him in a college bar and felt immediate certainty: "mine" (126). She watched his girlfriend Sarah kiss him possessively and decided the route to Jack was through Sarah. Kate engineered a friendship, and six weeks later, after Sarah stormed off following a party, Kate and Jack were left alone. She invited him in. The next evening, at a formal dinner, they reached for each other's hands, said "Good night" (153) to Sarah, and walked away together. For two weeks, Sarah stalked them and threatened suicide. Then she dropped out of university, and Kate and Jack never saw her again.

In therapy, Kate notices a crucial discrepancy: The show's dialogue is word-perfect, but visual details are consistently wrong, and Jack's love of technology is entirely absent. The writer could hear them but not see them. Kate concludes Phoebe hacked the smart home system to eavesdrop, and that Jack never had an affair. She abruptly ends therapy.

Phoebe's twin Tristan visits from Australia and announces his engagement and plan to relocate to Tasmania, leaving Phoebe permanently alone with their mother. She arrives at the bitter thought that gives the novel its title. Harassment incidents then target Phoebe and Tony: unwanted deliveries, fraudulent credit card purchases, a negative online campaign against Cheating, and anonymous posts accusing Tony of being a pedophile. The police find insufficient evidence to act. Kate arrives unannounced at Phoebe's door, revealing she knows Phoebe is the daughter of Sarah Hadling, Jack's former girlfriend at Oxford, and that Phoebe eavesdropped through the smart home system. Kate tells Phoebe that Jack died before the show aired. Phoebe refuses to show vulnerability. As she leaves, Kate delivers a devastating claim: "I think Jack was probably your father" (232).

Phoebe reveals how she created Cheating: One night she pretended to be a drunk young woman on Kate and Jack's doorstep, exploiting an incident Kate had always treasured as proof of Jack's generosity. Jack took her in for the night, and Phoebe obtained the Wi-Fi codes from the router, gaining access to the smart home system and enabling months of eavesdropping. She obsesses over whether Jack could be her biological father; the dates work. She visits Sarah and asks directly. Sarah stares at her with hatred: "Get out" (241). Days later, police vans arrive at dawn.

Tony is arrested for cryptocurrency theft. His computer shows he transferred approximately 239,000 pounds in bitcoin, with biometric data tying the activity to him. Over the following year, the lawyers twice suggest a guilty plea; both times Tony insists on his innocence. At his three-day trial, the prosecution presents forensic evidence while the defense argues documented harassment could explain unauthorized material on the computer. Phoebe testifies but is made to look volatile under cross-examination. At the end of the second day, Phoebe and Tristan exchange a look: Both know Tony is going to prison.

The final section reveals the truth. Walking with Conor, Kate describes everything she has done. She discovered Phoebe's former surname online, connecting her to Sarah Hadling. She enlisted Conor to orchestrate the deliveries and coordinate automated campaigns using material Kate wrote. Kate independently started the pedophilia rumors about Tony. The claim about Jack's paternity was a deliberate lie, designed as misdirection: While Phoebe argued at the front door with Conor disguised as a delivery man, Kate plugged a USB drive into Tony's laptop, planting fabricated cryptocurrency theft evidence. Kate releases Conor from his debt, and they part permanently.

Kate visits Wandsworth prison in her supervisory role as a prison visitor. Her first assessment is with a new inmate: Tony Mull, diminished and broken, serving two years. Kate reflects that she gave Phoebe a chance to show remorse by revealing Jack's death, and Phoebe chose coldness, removing Kate's last hesitation. As the guard leads Tony away, he turns back and insists desperately that he is innocent. Kate smiles: "Everyone in here is innocent" (288).