64 pages • 2-hour read
You Killed Me First
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Themes
The Tension between Appearances and Reality
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes descriptions of physical and emotional abuse, mental illness, suicidal ideation, and self-harm.
Deception and illusion are commonly used ideas in the mystery genre, as building uncertainty propels the plot to a climax that often reverses course or takes unusual directions. You Killed Me First is no exception, but Marrs takes the idea a step further by using the veneer of suburban life to mask the three women’s secrets. The story is set in a seemingly idyllic, suburban town that is heavily populated by families with children. Even Margot, Anna, and Liv, despite their differences in character, mostly conform to this pattern. However, the expectation of normalcy and calm that the setting exudes is completely subverted as the women’s pasts are revealed to contain sordid affairs, hidden trauma, and violent or coercive crimes. Even the maneuvers that the women orchestrate against each other are fraught with the toxic residue of lies and manipulation, as when Anna secretly sends Margot hate mail, or when Liv uses underhanded tactics to blackmail the other two women. Marrs frequently uses the suburban setting to mask the hidden ugliness of this ostensibly welcoming and genial world.
Each of the three main characters also conforms to this theme, for their initial portrayals are left deliberately incomplete. Margot is depicted as an insensitive, self-centered, and bored housewife, while Anna plays the part of a timid, mild-mannered woman who naïvely fawns over the once-famous Margot. Finally, Liv embraces the role of the wealthy, sophisticated newcomer who disrupts the status quo. However, all of these initial impressions are overturned when more information comes to light about the characters’ backgrounds. Margot’s past life as a pop star and a former gang member destroys the relative sophistication of her public image, and Anna’s murderous history clashes sharply with her innocuous persona, proving her innate capacity for deception. Likewise, even Liv has resorted to morally and legally questionable ways to make money. Thus, Marrs’s initial descriptions of the main characters serve as red herrings to hide the fact that each woman is guilty of far more wrongdoing than she will easily admit.
The gap between appearances and reality serves a larger purpose than merely keeping the mystery alive for the sake of the plot. As the characters’ backgrounds are revealed, Marrs suggests that the women have all, at one point or another, occupied the roles of target and perpetrator. Specifically, Margot was involved in the death of Anna and Drew’s parents and almost killed Liv at one point; however, she was also publicly hounded by the press for years and was almost killed herself on Bonfire Night. Similarly, Anna’s parents were murdered, but she went on a murderous spree of her own later in life, and although Liv blackmailed people to make her money, she was later framed for a murder that she did not commit. By constantly switching these characters’ roles, Marrs shows that all three women are deserving of both sympathy and censure. He therefore exposes the gap between appearances and reality and demonstrates that the relationship between these two concepts are complex and ambiguous at best.
The Fragility of Relationships
The story is narrated entirely in first-person point of view, but the chapters alternate between the perspectives of Margot, Anna, and Liv. This pattern firmly establishes this particular trio as the central characters while simultaneously introducing them as being inherently unreliable. Because each woman is so deeply invested in her own perspective, Marrs uses their intersecting storylines and interactions to explore the inherent fragility of relationships—especially those based on façades rather than on mutual trust.
Extreme tension exists between the three women from the outset. Liv judges from their first interaction, picking up on her bullying tendencies toward Anna. By contrast, Margot’s envy of Liv’s wealth, beauty, and lifestyle renders Liv’s constant barbs all the more painful to her. Yet despite these toxic dynamics, Liv and Margot are constantly brought into each other’s orbit because of Anna, who serves as the connecting link between them. No only do both of them seek out her friendship, but they also attempt to control her in their own ways. Whereas Margot makes disparaging comments to Anna, Liv attempts to win her over with generosity, and in both cases, they leverage their positions in the social hierarchy to try to achieve their own selfish goals. These fraught interactions show that power games are a built-in feature of the group dynamics, setting the stage for the conflicts to follow.
Despite these issues, the women also show flashes of real solidarity. For example, Liv extends her business connections to benefit Anna’s jewelry endeavor and pays for her spa day as well. Similarly, Margot cares for Anna when she finds the latter engaging in self-harm. Even Margot and Liv show each other moments of such friendship, as when a guilt-ridden Margot agrees to help Brandon look after the children during Liv’s hospitalization. These flashes of warmth and community solidarity humanize the three women, creating more nuanced portraits of their actions and motivations.
However, Marrs also uses these glimpses of connection to drive home the fragility of the women’s friendships, for when they are faced with the question of their own survival, they revert to their selfish, destructive instincts. The initial tension between the women quickly escalates from mean barbs to violence. Liv, for instance, progresses from tricking Margot into paying at the spa to blackmailing her outright. Likewise, Margot goes from hiding Liv’s cat to almost killing Liv herself in a hit-and-run. However, Anna is the ultimate example of someone who prioritizes survival over friendship or any kind of relationship at all. Despite Liv’s kindness toward her, Anna comes up with the idea to frame her for Drew’s murder, thereby eliminating Liv as a threat. When she kills Margot, betraying the pair’s complicated but strong alliance, she does so out of sheer pique rather than revenge, proving just how far she has traveled from a self-righteous mission of revenge. Thus, without a solid foundation or bond of actual friendship, this triad breaks down entirely, and Marrs uses the three characters to explore the fragility of relationships that are sacrificed in the name of survival.
The Slippery Slope of Violence
With murder at the heart of the book, Marrs focuses much of the story on an exploration of the escalating nature of violence, especially when revenge is the motivating force. The opening scene and the book’s title set up the idea of revenge at the outset, and as the characters’ backstories are revealed, Anna and Drew’s viciously calculated mission of retribution is portrayed as being almost justified. They both experienced life-changing trauma as children when they witnessed their parents’ murders and narrowly escaped with their own lives. Anna’s resultant mental health challenges are a direct result of these experiences, and, when she turns to murder, her attempts to get even can easily be read as a deeper quest for some lasting form of peace.
However, as Anna’s killings progress and the retrospective chapters finally align with the present-day timeline, the true complexity of her actions comes to light, revealing that although Anna’s killings are motivated by revenge, they are orchestrated or encouraged by the succession of “voices” or personas that she hears in her mind. Although Marrs never clarifies whether these voices come from actual hauntings or from Anna’s imaginings, one potential interpretation is that the voices are essentially the manifestation of Anna’s darker self, melded with the residual twinges of her conscience. In any case, this distinctive psychological quirk is designed to show that an overpowering need for revenge can warp a person’s sense of accountability. By insisting that the voices compel her to act violently, Anna sees her actions as not only justified, but almost outside of her own control. However, although Marrs’s portrayal of Anna’s mental illness is central to the plot, it also runs the distinct risk of reinforcing social stigmas and falsely implying that all people with mental illnesses are inherently dangerous to others.
Marrs also uses Anna’s devolution to suggest that over the course of time, her taste for violence grows strong enough that she does not need to invoke revenge as her justification. The murders of Zain, Jenny, and Warren are targeted and well-planned as part of the original revenge plot, but beginning with Ioana’s death, Anna veers off-track. Rather than pursuing simple revenge, she pushes Ioana out the window in a fit of anger because the other woman refuses to cooperate with her. Similarly, Anna kills Drew when he threatens to blackmail her, and she later kills Margot simply because she believes that Margot is not raising her daughter properly. The escalation of Anna’s violence—and her increasingly weak rationalizations for committing murder—suggest that taking revenge has become such an all-consuming force in her life that she now finds excuses to continue to engage in such behavior. Thus, Anna’s own moral code is eventually compromised over time. She becomes increasingly desensitized to violence and continues to resort to it even when there is no logical reason to do so. In the end, her taste for violence takes on a life of its own.
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