An Excerpt From Big Little Truths by Liane Moriarty

Liane Moriarty returns to the addictive world of scandal and secrets in her upcoming novel, Big Little Truths. This story picks up a decade after we first met the unforgettable group of mothers in Big Little Lies. Now, they raise their teenage children while grappling with difficult choices from their past. Read on for an exclusive excerpt from Big Little Truths. 

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On the morning of her fiftieth birthday, Madeline Martha Mackenzie woke to raised, querulous voices and snapped to attention like an elite soldier. She sat up in bed, tossed back the covers in one swift movement, and swung her feet to the floor, ready to launch herself into the familial fray. She would determine who was right or wrong, who needed to apologize, clean it up, or give it back.

But her fifty-year-old left shoulder had other ideas.

The pain was so astonishing, she fell backward as if she’d been shot. Her head slammed into her orthopedic pillow. Oh, calamity.

She had never heard the term “frozen shoulder” until her recent diagnosis.

“It doesn’t sound real,” she’d said to the physiotherapist, who had explained it might take up to a year before her shoulder “thawed.” She was seated on the examination table, while he—muscular, young, unfrozen—sat on a low wheeled stool that allowed him to scoot back and forth between her and his other patient, an elderly man doing rehab after a knee replacement.

“It’s real, all right, very common among middle-aged women,” he said without looking at her, busy scribbling notes on his clipboard, crossing her off his list, content with everything about himself: his youth, his hair, his hormone levels, his plans for Friday night. “My mother had it a couple of years ago. She’s good now.”

This was a new, unwelcome phenomenon. Younger people kept bringing up their mothers as if it were a way to connect with her, as if she were the same age as their mother, which even if she was, she didn’t need to know. She had originally planned to also tell him about the cruel throbbing pain in her left big toe, but now she didn’t bother. He might have recommended a comfortable brand of ugly sensible shoe worn by his mother. He might even have used that word.

“That’s a bunion,” said Renata at Pilates last Tuesday night.

“It is not,” said Madeline as she gingerly moved into plank position. She hadn’t yet known about her frozen shoulder. She thought the pain in her shoulder was yet another symptom of middle age that would disappear on its own, to be replaced by something else. All these minor ailments turned out to be nothing, unless they didn’t, and then you were reprimanded for not having had them checked out earlier. Her whole body protested against the plank. A cacophony of pain: her shoulder moaned, her toe screamed, her stomach muscles said, Not this again, it doesn’t even work.

“My mother has them,” said Renata, her plank as rigid as her opinions. “So does Oprah. You’re in good company.”

“I do not have a bunion,” said Madeline. She pressed her forearms into the floor and watched the varnished gold floorboards of the gym blur. No pain, no gain, but for goodness sake, she had actual tears in her eyes.

“Our feet spread as we age,” said Renata.

“My feet are not spreading,” said Madeline.

“It happens. My mother’s feet doubled in width,” said Renata.

“I have slender fucking feet,” said Madeline.

“Stop it, you two,” begged Celeste, planking on the other side of Madeline. “Don’t make me laugh. My pelvic floor can’t handle it.”

“Nothing funny about bunions,” said Renata grimly. “They’re incurable.”

“Turmeric tea might help with the inflammation,” said Bonnie, in her regular spot, next to Celeste, closest to the open window. “I’ll bring some next week.”

Bonnie had spoken in her normal dreamy voice, as if she were lying lat on her back on a beach towel rather than planking, because she was a yoga teacher, and she did Pilates only to catch up with her friends. They forgave her for her abdominal muscles, in the same way that they nobly looked past her inability to speak badly of anyone. Bonnie was lovely and Madeline loved loving her. She wasn’t even faking it. People who loved their ex-husband’s young second wives were emotionally intelligent.

Obviously, she couldn’t spend too much time with her. There were limits.

“Only twenty more seconds,” said their instructor. “The record for the longest plank held by a woman is over four hours! You can do hard things, ladies!”

An endless second passed as the ladies did hard things.

“Squeezy Time,” commented Renata.

“Squeezy time?” asked Celeste.

“I think that’s what my pelvic floor app is called,” said Renata. “You’ve got to look after your pelvic health. I’ll send you the link.”

Celeste’s plank had buckled at that point, permitting Madeline to give up hers as well.

Jane, on the other side of Renata, had laughed and sworn but managed to hold hers for an impressive few more seconds because she was still in her free-and-easy thirties.

Sometimes it felt like Jane and Bonnie had done it on purpose: cleverly rationed time and stashed away all those extra years to use at their leisure.

Celeste, who was older than Madeline, wore her age like a gorgeous gossamer-thin wrap suitable for an outdoor wedding in Fiji. Madeline, on the other hand, wore hers like a chattering monkey with its hairy little limbs wrapped around her neck.

Renata was the same age as Celeste, but she refused to wear her age at all. She railed against it like poor customer service.

The physiotherapist had told Madeline she could still do Pilates and Beach Boot Camp, and in fact she should do both because exercise was important for her frozen shoulder. She just had to work within her “pain limits.” He also said that she shouldn’t try anything new. “Over-forty-year-olds trying out a new sport have a one hundred percent chance of injury,” he declared.

“Well, that can’t be true,” protested Madeline, but he was already scooting athletically off on his stool to talk to the elderly man.

Now she watched the sunlight wash across her bedroom ceiling and whimpered. She had never believed in suffering in silence. She remembered that little rat of an obstetrician who suggested she “calm down” when she was giving birth to Abigail. This level of pain was outrageous, cruel, truly unkind, it was . . . starting to abate. Just like a labor pain, actually, except no one would hand over a terrifying, exquisite baby at the end of it.

She lifted her head from the pillow. No more raised voices. Whatever it was, Ed had it sorted. There had been no need for her to jump to attention. It was just old muscle memory from when the children were little and there were so many more people in the house (just two more people, but they were such loud people) and she’d felt truly essential. Ed and Chloe were probably arguing over the preparation of her birthday breakfast. Please, not pancakes. Her dress for tonight’s party was formfitting and she wanted to look great in the photos. Ed had got so skinny lately. Was he secretly taking weight-loss medication? It seemed like only a few months ago he’d patted his stomach and said, “Might need to lose a few kilos,” and then he just did. That’s all a man had to do: decide to lose weight.

Maybe Ed had had to drag Chloe out of bed: Get up, it’s your mother’s birthday! He was not coping well with the volatility of Chloe’s moods. One day their daughter was a gorgeous giggly curly-haired sprite in pink silk pajamas, lighting up their lives, introducing them to new music, new language, new ways of thinking, and the next a glowering, hunch-shouldered skulking figure in her brother’s old black hoodie, mistreated and misunderstood, sentenced to live in this cruelly understocked house for a crime she had not committed. “Why is there never any food in this house?” Their definitions of “food” differed. “Why are you both so mean?” Their definitions of “mean” also differed. The murderous expressions that clouded her beautiful face were funny, but you must never, ever laugh. Never make direct eye contact with a premenstrual teenager. This was not Madeline’s first rodeo. Still, her younger daughter was giving her a run for her money.

“What have I done?” Madeline sometimes asked, pitifully, knowing it was the wrong thing to say even as she said it. The ideal parent of a teenager had no feelings or personality, never sang, danced (oh my God, obviously), sneezed, laughed, spoke too loudly in public, accidentally left their phone light on (What’s wrong with you, Mum? Turn it off!), or made embarrassing self-deprecating try-hard jokes about how embarrassing they were to their offspring.

“Oh my God, Mum, would you stop? It’s not all about you!”

The last time Chloe had said that, Madeline was ironing her school uniform and naturally Madeline pointed this out, with some passion. Apparently this proved Chloe’s point, because Chloe didn’t care if her uniform was crumpled: Madeline was ironing Chloe’s uniform only because she wanted to look like a good mother.

Teenage offspring knew their parents’ weak spots. “You’re not as funny as you think you are, Dad,” Chloe said to Ed.

“Oh, of course you’re as funny as you think you are, darling,” comforted Madeline when poor Ed seemed a little stunned by his daughter’s contempt, and she reminded him what Abigail had been like at the same age. She wondered if Ed was thinner-skinned now he was older (and literally thinner!), or if Chloe had more power to hurt his feelings because she was his biological daughter rather than his stepdaughter and his expectations of respect and unconditional love were therefore higher.

Perhaps Madeline had become more sensitive too. She did feel strangely fragile at times, and that was not a word she would have ever used to describe herself.

Or perhaps it was just that the dynamics between the three of them had changed now Chloe was the only child left in the house.

“Can you two please just look at something other than me?” Chloe had said at dinner last night.

Madeline and Ed had exchanged rueful smiles. They’d never had a relationship without a child in the mix. Abigail had come on their honeymoon. Nathan was meant to look after his daughter, but something had come up. Of course it had. Her ex-husband had been reliably unreliable back then.

Madeline thought, What happens when Chloe is gone too and it’s just me and Ed? It will be so quiet! Possibly boring? Will it be great? Will we reignite our passion? Sure. That feels likely. Or will we have nothing to talk about? Will we get a divorce because I can’t stand the sound of that dry cough?

The lingering head cold was not Ed’s fault. A dry cough did not make someone less lovable. It’s just that she would love him more when it was finally gone.

Her phone buzzed on the nightstand and she carefully reached for it. It was her sweet middle child, Fred.

Happy 50th Mum. Love U. Hope tonite is fun!

He was living his best life, studying “supply chain management” at an American college. He appeared weirdly enthralled by this surely uninspiring subject. He’d remembered her birthday! Well. Possibly he had. More likely, Ed had messaged him: Text your mum, mate. Her phone buzzed again with a picture of something fleshy and pale that for a terrifying second appeared pornographic (had he accidentally sexted his mother?) but which thankfully turned out to be a close-up of a piece of cooked chicken breast captioned: This cooked enough?

She expanded the picture with her fingertips for a closer look. It looked fine, but she texted back:

Give it a minute more.

She’d rather he ate overcooked chicken than got sick with salmonella on the other side of the world.

She kept the phone on her chest in anticipation of the next birthday text and tilted her head to see the morning sky outside the window. She was pleased to see it was blue and cloudless, like the sky of a childhood memory. It had been an unpleasantly sticky, sweaty summer. For weeks, she’d been waking up to oppressive gray skies and the sensation of being on the verge of some unspecified but catastrophic event. Was that just a permanent feeling she had to endure now? Because of technology? The twenty-four-hour news cycle? Perimenopause?

“You peri?” asked Samantha Fisher cheerily in the line for coffee at Blue Blues the other day, and for some reason Madeline heard Perry and her stomach lurched at the sound of his name.

She was embarrassed by that dramatic stomach lurch. Celeste’s husband had been dead for ten years and Madeline had no right to be traumatized by his memory.

Of course she was “peri.” Nearly every woman she knew was battling their hormones in some way, and menopause was openly discussed in the media these days, like, a lot, which was great but also kind of . . . invasive? She sometimes felt like saying, Shhh, that’s enough now, we don’t want the men to hear, it’s not . . . pretty.

Certainly everyone agreed it was just wonderful to simultaneously be dealing with hormonal changes, disdainful teenagers, and elderly parents. Why was being a woman so dreadful? Just because Eve gave Adam the apple? The man was probably hungry. The woman was always in charge of organizing the fucking snacks.

Her mother had told her that menopause was nothing to get worked up about and that when she herself was in her fifties, her periods just got lighter and lighter and then finally faded away altogether, like a delicate sunset. Madeline had been looking forward to her own sunset, but the opposite was happening. Her periods were now like natural disasters, so unacceptably heavy she could not leave the house on the second day. “Flooding,” said Dr. Cushman with a sympathetic wince. “If it keeps happening, we can look at medication. Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask, have you been to Croatia?” It had kept happening, but she hadn’t got around to booking a follow-up appointment with Dr. Cushman. It was just something else to do. Another thing to tick off on the endless life maintenance list: fix the frozen shoulder, smooth out the fine lines, get on top of the operatic periods, get your teeth cleaned. If only you could trade in your body like an old car that was costing more money in repairs than it was worth.

Well. She was not going to waste her fiftieth birthday thinking about Perry Freaking White or peri-freaking-menopause. Tonight was going to be wonderful. Wasn’t it? Did a secret part of her wish she was just staying home on the couch watching a movie? What the hell? No! She loved parties. She was a party girl!

She was not used to this second-guessing of herself. But lately she secretly felt like she was losing her nerve for  .  .  . what? For life? For everything: from tight parking spots to software updates. Supposedly you cared less about what people thought the older you got, but Madeline wondered if she’d had more confidence at forty. She still behaved as if she were famously feisty Madeline, but sometimes she woke in the night with a pounding heart, replaying everything she’d said that day and questioning her every decision.

“I just love your confidence, Madeline,” her “boss” often said. (Something condescending about her tone. As if she were complimenting an aunt’s pretty blouse at a family event.)

Madeline worked three days a week in the events department of the Pirriwee Pacific Hotel. She loved it! Well. She quite liked it. As the senior events manager, she managed corporate events like breakfast meetings and product launches, as well as the smaller weekday weddings. Those were mostly second weddings, which were much nicer and more relaxed than first weddings. The director of events, her Gen Z “boss” (a year younger than Abigail and therefore secretly referred to as “The Child”), handled the more glamorous affairs. Madeline didn’t mind “reporting” to someone so young. Not at all! It was fine! The Child was a sweet, intelligent young woman, but just occasionally Madeline experienced a warm flush of humiliation, when, for example, The Child double-checked Madeline’s work. She had to keep reminding herself that this was what she wanted: a part-time job that was stimulating but not all-consuming. She hadn’t worked in a normal nine-to-five fulltime job since before Abigail was born. She’d always hustled. She liked that word. It made her bitsy career feel like an edgy, cool choice. Her favorite job had been working at the local theater, but it had closed down, of course. Everything good closed down in the end.

She didn’t want or need The Child’s job. Sometimes she saw mothers on television dramas earnestly discussing how they needed “more” in their lives, and she’d think, Are you kidding? Less! I need less! Please give me less.

She carefully wriggled back up to a seated position and propped a pillow behind her against the headboard, ready for Ed and Chloe to present her breakfast. She smoothed her hair.

While she waited, she used two fingers to massage under her left armpit as per the recommendation of the physiotherapist, who said his mother diligently did these massages and kept her pain under control. Good for her!

Her phone buzzed with happy birthday messages and she turned it over on her lap so she could watch the names. She would read the messages later.

Nathan. Her nostrils did not flare at the sight of her ex-husband’s name. She was so mature now she was fifty.

Perfect Boyfriend. That’s how she had Abigail’s boyfriend saved in her phone. Her nostrils flared ever so slightly. Creepily texting his girlfriend’s mother a happy birthday message before his girlfriend had got around to it! She couldn’t admit her dislike to anyone because the man was universally adored. It would be akin to saying she didn’t like Blue Blues. (She loved Blue Blues and sometimes imagined herself lying in front of a bulldozer to save it.) (There were no plans for redevelopment. She just enjoyed visualizing potential conflict.)

Abigail and Perfect Boyfriend were both twenty-five, with double degrees, well-paid corporate jobs, financial plans, and the glorious selfassuredness of recent Oscar winners. They’d moved in together after just three months and there was nothing to worry about, nothing at all, it was true love. Madeline needed to stop watching true crime documentaries. Obviously, she would never stop watching them—she loved them so much—but they were skewing her view of the world. Every handsome, charming man was surely not destined to be a murderer.

More messages:

Darling Jane.

Darling Celeste.

Her gym. Her dermatologist. Abigail. Yes, about time, sweet daughter of mine. The Child. A request to rate and review her recent experience renewing her health insurance. Nothing from her mother yet, which was odd: twinge of worry. Madeline would find an excuse to call her if a message didn’t pop up soon. Bonnie. Renata. It’s not a bunion, Renata. Her message was accompanied by a strange, slightly mean GIF, which came across as aggressive, not funny. Poor Renata sometimes tried too hard when it came to their friendship, like she couldn’t believe she got to be Madeline’s friend. Exactly, Renata. Stay grateful. Melody. She paused and frowned: Who the hell is Melody? Oh, wait. That woman who joined Beach Boot Camp last week. New to the area, had a job teaching history at the high school. Chloe would probably take her class. She must have heard Madeline talk about her upcoming fiftieth, taken note of the date, and looked her up on the Boot Camp WhatsApp group. Thoughtful! She was trying to break in, letting Madeline know, I am up for friendship. Madeline would do exactly the same thing if she moved to a new area. She would consider Melody’s application favorably.

She could hear Ed and Chloe walking down the hallway. The clatter of cutlery on a plate. It smelled like pancakes and she was suddenly ravenous. She would eat them all. Spanx was invented for a reason. They were singing “Happy Birthday,” out of synch. Chloe laughed and said, “Start again.” She was in a good mood. Her younger daughter in a good mood could course-correct the worst day. Madeline grinned. She was about to adjust the strap of her nightgown when her fingertips froze.

What

The

Actual

Fuck

Is

That?