Big Little Lies (HBO, 9 p.m.), a glossy, new 7-part series about rival moms in ritzy Monterey, California, would be notable if it only had Reese Witherspoon as its star and executive producer, but it also has Nicole Kidman, who co-exec produces, Shailene Woodley, Laura Dern, Zoe Kravitz, Alexander Skarsgard, and Adam Scott rounding out the cast.
Told through the eyes of three mothers – Madeline (Witherspoon), Celeste (Kidman) and Jane (Woodley) – Big Little Lies paints a picture of a town fueled by rumors and divided into the haves and have-nots, exposing the conflicts, secrets and betrayals that compromise relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children, and friends and neighbors.
Reese Witherspoon explained what drew her to the project in the first place: “With this piece I feel like it was such a unique opportunity to have women of every age, of every color, talking about motherhood … that’s the common denominator. 
Motherhood is the great equalizer. Parenthood is a good equalizer, socioeconomically, and everything brings these five different women together in a way that they clash but they also understand and discover each other.”
The pilot (which aired last Saturday the 19th) adapted from Liane Moriarty’s novel, has high-class bickering and behind doors marital tensions, but also at the center of it is a murder that is alluded to but not fleshed out for several episodes. Not only do we not know the culprit (it could be anybody of course); we don’t even know the victim. Woodley’s character is ostensibly at the center, since she’s a young, single mom and a newcomer to town, who is trying to fit in and get along with the privileged mommy group.
Nicole Kidman was struck by the strength and quantity of female roles in the series: “This piece for me was the story of women that I know, and it was a way which we could go to other women with five great roles that were complicated and deserve to be told. It’s very rare to find five roles in one piece that we’d all jump at a chance to play.”
Co-Exec Producer David E. Kelley (The Practice) adapted the Moriarty best-seller on which the limited series is based, with the setting changed to Monterey from Australia, with Moriarty’s blessing. Big Little Lies is really into the marriage of apparent opposites: congenial and contemptuous, beautiful and ugly, loving and abusive, big and little. Everything with these characters is simmering resentment, very low-key microaggressions, and secrets—there aren’t the big epic takedowns and glasses of water in the face one might be conditioned to expect from a story about rich housewives one-upping each other. It’s all very subtle, and for every dig, there’s a thousand self-deprecating remarks, concessions, and compliments.
From the book:
Sometimes it’s the little lies that turn out to be the most lethal…
A murder…a tragic accident…or just parents behaving badly?
What’s indisputable is that someone is dead. But who did what?
Big Little Lies follows three women, each at a crossroads:
- Madeline is a force to be reckoned with. She’s funny and biting, passionate, she remembers everything and forgives no one. Her ex-husband and his yogi new wife have moved into her beloved beachside community, and their daughter is in the same kindergarten class as Madeline’s youngest (how is this possible?). And to top it all off, Madeline’s teenage daughter seems to be choosing Madeline’s ex-husband over her. (How. Is. This. Possible?).
- Celeste is the kind of beautiful woman who makes the world stop and stare. While she may seem a bit flustered at times, who wouldn’t be, with those rambunctious twin boys? Now that the boys are starting school, Celeste and her husband look set to become the king and queen of the school parent body. But royalty often comes at a price, and Celeste is grappling with how much more she is willing to pay.
- New to town, single mom Jane is so young that another mother mistakes her for the nanny. Jane is sad beyond her years and harbors secret doubts about her son. But why? While Madeline and Celeste soon take Jane under their wing, none of them realizes how the arrival of Jane and her inscrutable little boy will affect them all.
Big Little Lies is a brilliant take on ex-husbands and second wives, mothers and daughters, schoolyard scandal, and the dangerous little lies we tell ourselves just to survive.
“It’s so refreshing to spend time with all of these women,” Witherspoon added, giving a nod to her cast for the “collective performance,” going as far to say, “I really feel more strongly than anything I’ve ever done, and this is the greatest ensemble experience I’ve ever had.”
Gorgeously shot, neatly directed and beautifully acted from start to finish, Big Little Lies is an achievement in almost every way. It should get lots of Emmys, unless its superstar leads cancel one another out.
Religious pilgrimage is as common in modern India as it was in Medieval Europe, when it inspired Geoffrey Chaucer’s classic The Canterbury Tales. But you don’t have to go back in time or to exotic lands for a pilgrimage experience. If you think of a “pilgrimage” as a journey of personal or spiritual significance, you can become a pilgrim right now in America.
For example, the popular Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed describes a kind of pilgrimage. In the wake of her mother’s death and a failed marriage, a damaged young woman decides to hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, alone and without training, and ultimately heals herself.
In the Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction book The Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, author Annie Dillard describes a metaphysical journey through a dramatic year in Virginia’s Roanoke Valley, exploring nature and its seasons near her home while recording both her scientific observations and her thoughts on solitude, nature and religious faith.
The international award-winning novelist Paulo Coelho has written lyrically about pilgrimage, too. He is best known for The Alchemist–about an Andalusian shepherd boy whose dream of treasure sends him on a quest to the Egyptian desert–but before he wrote that fictional tale, Coelho penned The Pilgrimage about his own spiritual quest along the famed pilgrimage route of the Camino de Santiago, still the most popular long-distance trail in Europe.
Katherine Sharma’s family roots are in Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas. But after her early childhood in Texas, she has moved around the country and lived in seven other states, from Virginia to Hawaii. She currently resides in California with her husband and three children. She has also traveled extensively in Europe, Africa and Asia, and makes regular visits to family in India. After receiving her bachelor’s degree. in economics and her master’s degree in journalism from the University of Michigan, Katherine worked as a newspaper and magazine writer and editor for more than 15 years. She then shifted into management and marketing roles for firms in industries ranging from outdoor recreation to insurance to direct marketing. Although Katherine still works as a marketing consultant, she is now focused on creative writing.
It seems appropriate to celebrate the romantic holiday with some romantic-mystery/mystery-romance genre mating. Maybe start by revisiting the popular “gothics” of my teen reading years: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, Nine Coaches Waiting by Mary Stewart, Dragonwyck by Anya Seton and Wings of the Falcon by Barbara Michaels.
For more modern fare, try You Belong to Me by Karen Rose, in which a sexy widower cop and a troubled medical examiner find love while investigating a serial killer, or Heartbreaker by Julia Garwood as against-the-odds romance blossoms amid another serial murder case.
Or, embrace Stephanie Plum, the protagonist of Janet Evanovich’s popular series, for her debut with One for the Money, in which Stephanie takes a job hunting bail jumpers for a quick buck and is soon on the trail of a hot ex-beau with a price on his head while getting training from the studly “Ranger.”
All of these are sturdy romantic mystery entries, but, if you’re looking for more literary prose, read the Booker Prize-winning best-seller Possession by A.S. Byatt. Described as a “novel of wit and romance, an intellectual mystery, and a triumphant love story,” the tale is built around a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets through their letters, journals, and poems, and tracking the dead poets’ movements from London to Yorkshire, with seances and fairy lore along the way.
By Kirk Curnutt
We probably have Ernest Hemingway to thank for turning this idea into conventional wisdom. In the posthumously published A Moveable Feast, Hemingway took great pleasure in rubbing his rival’s nose in his reputation as a Post contributor, insisting Fitzgerald had confessed to dumbing down his work to appease its 2.7 million readers: “He had told me … he wrote what he thought were good stories, and which really were good stories for the Post, and then changed them for submission, knowing exactly how he must make the twists that made them into salable magazine stories.… He said it was whoring but that he had to do it as he made his money from the magazines to have money ahead to write decent books.”
In “The Offshore Pirate,” a man presumed to be a bore reinvents himself as a pirate and hatches a cheeky kidnapping ruse to prove he’s no dullard. In “The Camel’s Back,” another man slips into a costume-shop camel suit to dupe his gal into marriage. And in the much-maligned “The Popular Girl,” a dashing beau plays dumb, allowing himself to be long-armed and toyed with so the deb of his dreams gains a measure of independence and resolve before he rescues her from financial ruin.
For all the vivacity and exuberance that marks these stories, they’re also streaked with trademark Fitzgerald melancholy. There’s something charmingly poignant about Sally Carrol Happer in “The Ice Palace” longing for a kiss that will make “all her smiles and tears … vanish in an ecstasy of eternal seconds.” Or of Yanci Bowman in “The Popular Girl” imagining the exciting life she would lead if only she lived in New York: “She adored New York with a great impersonal affection—adored it as only a Middle Western or Southern girl can. In its gaudy bazaars she felt her soul transported with turbulent delight, for to her eyes it held nothing ugly, nothing sordid, nothing plain.” Fitzgerald knew how to render his characters’ naiveté in a way that makes their dreams at once achingly palpable and unrealizable.
She was beautiful, impulsive, carefree, and determined to make a name for herself. Zelda Fitzgerald, the subject of a new Amazon series, was the iconic woman of the 1920s Jazz Age and the inspiration for many of writer F. Scott Fitzgerald’s female characters. Her reputation as a party girl undermined her talent and her intelligence, and her complicated, self-destructive relationship with her husband was the love story of the era.
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