The Widow’s Husband’s Secret Lie is a parody, humorously exaggerating typical features of thriller novels in order to poke fun at the genre. Tense plots that constantly twist and shift, keeping the reader guessing about what is really happening to the characters, are a hallmark feature of thrillers. The first third of the novella sets up an initial premise full of tension: A pregnant widow has the disconcerting feeling of being watched and then discovers that someone who looks exactly like her recently deceased husband is following her. Alice’s status as a widow and her supposed pregnancy make her seem doubly vulnerable in this unnerving situation, making her a sympathetic protagonist.

The narrative is a parody, though, and so despite the seriousness of Alice’s situation, the text’s tone is far from grave. One technique that creates ironic humor is the constant introduction of well-worn plot tropes. This introduces the story’s theme of Repetitive Tropes and Arbitrary Plot Twists in Thrillers. The story’s premise is studded with thriller tropes: the sensation of being watched, the watcher who appears to only one character but is never seen by others, the reappearance of someone who is supposed to have died, and the unexpected pregnancy after a partner’s death are all plot conventions most thriller readers will have encountered several times. Marnie’s appearance at the end of this section introduces yet another trope—the secret family—into the narrative.

Another source of plot tropes in this section of the novella comes from Alice’s commentary about her home’s attic. The idea of secrets hidden away in attics is an often-used device in mysteries and thrillers. This trope began with Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre, in which the protagonist learns that her husband has secretly imprisoned his previous wife, Bertha, in the attic. Grant’s first wife’s name, “Rebertha,” is an obvious allusion to this. Changing the character name slightly to something that sounds like “rebirth” suggests that Grant’s first wife is a modern incarnation of Brontë’s Bertha. Although this seems like obvious foreshadowing, it will later prove to be a red herring, as there is actually no one in the attic, at all.

In a roundabout way, however, Alice’s recollections about the way Grant would talk about the noises coming from the attic do hold some significance: When he tells her that moaning and screaming sounds are just the normal noises all older houses make, he is clearly trying to undermine her sense of reality. This foreshadows the later revelation that Grant is actually controlling and emotionally abusive. A husband trying to convince his wife that she is losing her grip on reality is yet another plot trope. It was first popularized by the 1944 film Gaslight, which was based on the 1938 play Gas Light by Patrick Hamilton.

Plot tropes are not the novella’s only technique for poking fun at the thriller genre. The story abounds with character tropes, as well. Alice is a caricature of the ineffectual, naive wife character often seen in thrillers. She is repeatedly overwhelmed by simple tasks like choosing a shampoo or vitamins. She does not investigate obviously troubling signs—in recounting the story of her home’s attic, she confesses that she “always wondered why [Grant] never bothered to update the topmost floor of the house, but […] didn’t probe too deeply” (8), and when she hears “thumps and moans and […] something that sound[s] very much like a scream,” she simply accepts Grant’s explanation that these are the noises all old houses make as they settle (14).

Grant is also a well-worn character type: He is the husband who appears perfect to others—rich, handsome, attentive—but who is secretly a monster. Willie is the seductive household staff member with a dark secret in his past. Eliza is the comically and inconveniently nosy elderly employee. Poppy is the improbably obtuse but loyal and supportive best friend: Despite her long-standing and close friendship with Alice, she does not know that Alice hates casseroles and tea, and she cannot see beyond the facade of Grant’s supposed perfection. Although at this point in the story the reader is still unaware of Grant’s flaws, Poppy’s lack of awareness about Alice’s dislike for tea and casseroles is repeatedly emphasized, foreshadowing the fact that there are many other things she does not know about her close friend Alice. This introduces another of the novella’s themes: The Difficulty of Genuinely Knowing Others.

The Widow’s Husband’s Secret Lie is a parody of thrillers but not a rejection of the genre. Mundane details of Alice’s life—the tea and casseroles, the shampoo and the prenatal vitamins, and so on—are presented as irksome burdens. The repeated offerings of tea and casseroles Alice does not want and Alice’s description of her perpetual confusion about which shampoo to buy stress the banality of everyday life. The bizarre events following Grant’s death sharply contrast with the small, ordinary gestures that Poppy means as comfort and the tasks of shopping and providing for a household; in this juxtaposition, the novella makes an argument for Thrillers as an Escape from the Mundane.

Both the novella’s parody of thrillers and its implied justification for them as a welcome escape from ordinary existence are metafictional elements—the novella is, essentially, a narrative about narratives. The book begins with a metafictional Prologue, in which the narrator is aware of writing for an audience and irate at the audience’s imagined claim to already know who the story’s killer is. This Prologue humorously nods to the fact that author McFadden is known for her plot twists and ironically pretends to accidentally give away the killer’s identity. Since there is not actually any character named Steve in the entire novella, this is one of the text’s instances of “unreliable narrators” (1). The claim that none of it matters because no one reads prologues is yet another piece of comic irony, as anyone encountering the claim must, of course, be a prologue reader.

The story is also full of self-referential allusions. In Chapter 2, Alice is reading McFadden’s novel The Boyfriend. In an ironic self-referential allusion to the novella’s prologue, Alice claims to have immediately guessed the plot of The Boyfriend. She describes Freida McFadden’s books as “The kind with short chapters and lots of twists that are shocking but also kind of completely out of nowhere”—an accurate description of The Widow’s Husband’s Secret Lie itself (12).

The snowflake necklace that Poppy calls attention to in Chapter 6 is an allusion to two more of McFadden’s works: Such a necklace features in both The Inmate and The Wife Upstairs. Readers have pointed out that not only is this detail repeated from story to story but that, in The Inmate, it is mentioned over and over in a way that points obviously to its importance. McFadden’s use of the snowflake necklace in The Widow’s Husband’s Secret Lie is a parody of her own works; she slyly emphasizes this with Poppy’s dialogue when Poppy asks “The same snowflake necklace two different times. On two separate occasions. What does it mean?” (30)

Alice assures Poppy that it means nothing at all, and the two argue briefly over whether it has any symbolic significance. This argument comments satirically on the practice of reading elaborate meanings into trivial details in fiction and foreshadows the fact that the necklace is, actually, meaningless in the novel’s overall plot. Calling so much attention to it, however, implies falsely that it does have meaning and is one of the red herrings the prologue promises.

McFadden’s works have also been criticized for their repetitive and clichéd language. The Widow’s Husband’s Secret Lie is comically full of such language. Alice mentions over and over that she has never been allowed into the attic. She mentions again and again that she remembers Grant’s funeral, describes her own hair color multiple times, and cannot seem to stop talking about her heated toilet seat, adding “It’s quite a special toilet—I can’t emphasize that enough” for good measure (18). On page 9, McFadden parodies the clichéd language she has been accused of using in her books: “I try to smile,” Alice says, “although I suspect the smile doesn’t touch my eyes or even my nose” (9). The addition of the surprising and amusing phrase “or even my nose” is an example of paraprosdokian and indicates an awareness of the emptiness of the clichéd idea of a smile that does not touch the eyes. The clichéd and repetitive descriptions of characters’ physical appearances are so frequent that they cannot be interpreted as accidental—they are yet another example of the metafictional ways in which this novella parodies not just thrillers in general but McFadden’s own works specifically.