Loyal, crazy, guilty. Reviews of the book The True, Mad, Guilty Moriarty l The True, Mad, Guilty

Faithful, Mad, Guilty Liane Moriarty

(No ratings yet)

Title: Faithful, Mad, Guilty

About the book “Loyal, Mad, Guilty” by Liane Moriarty

Liane Moriarty is an amazing master of psychological drama. She, like a virtuoso musician, plays with various emotions and reveals the whole truth of life - touchingly, frankly and very subtly. Her book “The Faithful, the Mad, the Guilty” is a story about the vicissitudes of fate and a whole tape of events that line up into an amazing phenomenon called “life.” The writer not only opened the door to the reader into the life vicissitudes of each of the three families, but also showed how one single incident can radically change life.

As we begin to read the novel, we meet three married couples - Clementine and Steve, Erica and Oliver, Tiffany and Vid. Each of the main characters has their own life story, habits, oddities, way of life and priorities. In this story, there was a place for psychological trauma from childhood, everyday misunderstandings, and sexual problems - in a word, everything that fills our lives.

Liane Moriarty described the unusual relationship between married couples. On the one hand, Erica and Clementine are old friends, but this friendship is forced and tortured. Somewhere in the depths of their souls, hostility smoldered, and it collapsed in a big way on that fateful day when Tiffany and Weed invited everyone to their barbecue. What happened that day turned everything upside down - marriages are falling apart at the seams, evil intent is seen in any action, and everyone present is gripped by a feeling of guilt for many years...

The book “The Faithful, the Mad, the Guilty” is a colorful kaleidoscope of life. Representatives of various professions, a whole range of feelings and emotions, a real treasure trove of family and personal secrets, rooted in childhood, flash before the reader. Liane Moriarty paid special attention to describing the relationship between husbands and wives: the ability to cooperate and compromise, the degree of understanding of her loved one. Having finished reading the book, you feel that you yourself visited this barbecue and had a heart-to-heart talk with the characters, they are so lively, emotional and multifaceted personalities.

There is no action or intrigue in this novel, but this smooth narrative is a real explosion of emotions and a rethinking of values. The author paints pictures of life with small strokes so that the reader penetrates deeper into what is happening and sees all the details, feeling like an eyewitness to those events. The whole story is an excursion into the past of the main characters, which predetermined their future.

On our website about books, you can download the site for free without registration or read online the book “The Faithful, the Mad, the Guilty” by Liane Moriarty in epub, fb2, txt, rtf, pdf formats for iPad, iPhone, Android and Kindle. The book will give you a lot of pleasant moments and real pleasure from reading. You can buy the full version from our partner. Also, here you will find the latest news from the literary world, learn the biography of your favorite authors. For beginning writers, there is a separate section with useful tips and tricks, interesting articles, thanks to which you yourself can try your hand at literary crafts.

Download the book “Loyal, Mad, Guilty” for free by Liane Moriarty

Current page: 1 (book has a total of 29 pages) [available reading passage: 7 pages]

Liane Moriarty
Faithful, Mad, Guilty

Truly, madly, guilty

Copyright © Liane Moriarty, 2016

All rights reserved

© I. Ivanchenko, translation, 2017

© Edition in Russian, design. LLC "Publishing Group "Azbuka-Atticus"", 2017

Publishing House Inostranka ®

Dedicated to Jaycee

Music is the silence between notes.

Claude Debussy

Chapter 1

“This story begins with a barbecue,” Clementine said. The microphone amplified and softened her voice, giving it expressiveness, as happens with a portrait after Photoshop. – An ordinary barbecue for neighbors in an ordinary backyard.

Well, that backyard isn't that ordinary, Erica thought. She crossed her legs and snorted. No one would call Weed's backyard ordinary.

Erica sat in the middle of the last row of the meeting room, adjacent to a stylishly renovated library in a suburb forty-five minutes from the city, not half an hour as the taxi driver claimed - he should have known.

There were maybe twenty people sitting in the hall, although there were folding chairs for a couple dozen more. Most of the audience were older people with animated, interested faces. These were knowledgeable older citizens who had come to a community meeting on this rainy morning (when will it stop raining?) to learn something new and exciting. They wanted to tell their children and grandchildren that they saw the performance of an unusually interesting woman today.

Before the meeting, Erica read a description of Clementine's performance on the library website. It was a short and not very informative summary: “The famous cellist and mother from Sydney Clementine Hart will share her story “One Ordinary Day” with you.”

Is Clementine really a famous cellist? Hard to believe.

The $5 fee for the event included lectures by two guest speakers, delicious homemade morning tea, and a chance to win a raffle. The speaker after Clementine intended to talk about the controversial municipal plan to renovate the local swimming pool. Erica could hear the quiet clinking of cups and saucers somewhere nearby, being set out for morning tea. She held the tissue paper lottery ticket in her lap, fearing that she would not be able to immediately find it in her bag when the lottery started. Blue, number E 24. Doesn't look like he's going to win.

The lady sitting directly in front of Erica tilted her gray curly head with an interested look, as if she was ready in advance to agree with everything Clementine said. A tag was poking out from the collar of her blouse. Size twelve. Erica reached over and tucked the tag inside.

The lady turned her head.

“Shortcut,” Erica whispered.

The lady smiled, and Erica noticed how pink the back of her neck was turning. The younger man sitting next to him, who looked to be in his forties—possibly her son—had a barcode tattooed on the back of his tanned neck, as if he were a supermarket product. Was it supposed to be funny? Ironic? Symbolic? Eric was tempted to tell him that this was stupid.

“It was an ordinary Sunday,” Clementine began.

Why is she so insistent on the word “ordinary”? Probably Clementine wanted to seem closer to these ordinary people from ordinary distant suburbs. Erica imagined Clementine sitting at the small dining room table, or perhaps Sam's worn antique desk in her shabby chic home overlooking the water, composing a speech for the community, chewing on the end of her pen, throwing her lush dark hair over her shoulder and smugly stroking it with a sensual movement, as if she were Rapunzel. And he thinks to himself: ordinary.

Really, Clementine, how can we make ordinary people understand?

- It was the beginning of winter. Cold, gloomy day...

What the heck? Erica fidgeted in her chair. It was a beautiful day. “Amazing,” as Weed put it.

Or perhaps “magnificent.” Anyway, something like that.

“The frost just burned,” Clementine continued, shivering theatrically, which was unnecessary.

The room was so warm that the man a few rows ahead of Erica seemed to have dozed off. With his legs stretched out in front of him and his hands folded comfortably on his stomach, he threw his head back as if he were lying on an invisible pillow. Is he even alive?

The barbecue day may have been chilly, but it certainly wasn't gloomy. Erica understood how unreliable eyewitness opinions were. People believe that they are simply pressing the rewind button on a miniature tape recorder installed in their head, while in fact they are constructing their memories. They make up their own stories. So in Clementine's memory, the day of the barbecue remained cold and gloomy. But she is wrong. Erica remembers (remembers, not inventing) how on the day of the barbecue Vid leaned towards her car window and said:

– What an amazing day!

Or maybe he said "gorgeous."

It was a word with a positive meaning, she was sure.

If only Erica had said then: “Yes, Vid, it really is an amazing day” and stepped on the gas pedal again!

“I remember that I wrapped my little ones warmly,” Clementine said.

Sam probably dressed the girls, Erica thought.

Clementine cleared her throat and grabbed the edges of the lectern with both hands. The microphone was set too high for her, and it seemed that, trying to bring her lips closer to it, she was rising on her tiptoes. She stretched her neck, which made her face seem even thinner.

Erica thought about carefully walking along the wall and adjusting the microphone. It would take a minute. She imagined Clementine giving her a grateful smile. “Thank God you did it,” she will say later over coffee. “You just saved me.”

In fact, Clementine didn't want to see Erica there that day. The look of horror that flashed across Clementine’s face when she recently said that she wanted to listen to her performance did not escape her. However, Clementine quickly came to her senses: they say how nice it is, how good it is, and they can then drink coffee together.

“We received the invitation literally at the last minute,” Clementine continued. - At the barbecue. We didn't even really know the owners. They are... friends of our friends.

She lowered her eyes to the pulpit, as if she had lost the thread of the story. Earlier, Clementine had been holding a palm-sized stack of cards as she walked up to the podium. There was something heartbreaking about the cards, as if Clementine was remembering clues from her high school rhetoric class. She must have cut the cards with scissors. Not those grandmotherly scissors with mother-of-pearl handles. They disappeared.

It was strange to see Clementine on stage, so to speak, without a cello. She looks so casual in blue jeans and a cute colorful top. Uptown mom outfit. Clementine's legs were a little short for jeans, and flats without heels made them look even shorter. Well, it's just a fact. As she approached the pulpit, she looked almost ill-dressed—even if that word might seem unkind to Clementine. For performances on stage, she combed her hair up, put on high-heeled shoes and dressed all in black - long, wide skirts made of light fabrics, allowing her to squeeze the cello between her knees. When Clementine sat on the stage, with passion and tenderness, bowing her head to the instrument, as if hugging it, and one long strand of hair almost touching the strings, and her arm bent at an odd angle, she seemed so sensual to Erica, so exotic and incomprehensible. Every time she saw Clementine on stage, even after all these years, Erica felt a sense of loss, as if longing for something unattainable. She always assured herself that this feeling was more complex and remarkable than envy, since she was not interested in playing musical instruments. Or perhaps not. Maybe it was all a matter of envy.

Watching Clementine stumble through her meaningless speech in that cramped space overlooking a shopping mall and parking lot instead of playing in a hushed, high-vaulted concert hall, Erica felt the same shameful satisfaction that watching a movie star without makeup in a crappy store . "You're not that special after all."

“So there were six adults there that day.” “Clementine cleared her throat and rocked back and forth. – Six adults and three children.

And one lying dog, Erica thought. Woof woof woof.

– As I already said, we didn’t know the owners very well, but we had a great time.

You were the one having a great time, Erica thought. You.

She remembered how Clementine's clear, bell-like laughter would flare up and die in unison with Vid's muffled chuckles. I saw the faces of people with dark hollow eyes and the gleam of white teeth emerging from the dense shadows.

That evening, the street lights in that ridiculous backyard didn't come on for a long time.

“I remember at some point music started playing. – Clementine lowered her gaze to the music stand in front of her, then raised her eyes again, as if she saw something far on the horizon. She had a thoughtful look. She no longer looked like a suburban mom. – “The Awakening” by French composer Gabriel Fauré. “Of course, she pronounced the name in the correct French way.” - A wonderful piece of music. It sounds like such an exquisite sorrow.

She fell silent. Did she feel a stirring in the ranks, an embarrassment in the audience? For this audience, "exquisite grief" was an inappropriate expression, with great pretension to understanding art. “Clementine, my dear, we are too ordinary to understand your subtle references to French composers.” Anyway, "November Rain" by Hans & Roses was also played that night. Not that pretentious.

Wasn't the performance of "November Rain" somehow connected to Tiffany's confession? Or was it before? When exactly did Tiffany share her secret? Did this happen at that moment when everything suddenly spun faster at the party and it was like we were flying on a roller coaster?

“We drank alcohol,” said Clementine. “But no one got drunk.” Were a little tipsy.

She met Erica's gaze, as if all this time she knew where she was sitting, but avoided looking at her, and at some point she made up her mind. In response, Erica tried to smile, like a friend, Clementine's closest friend, the godmother of her children. But his face froze, as if Eric had been paralyzed.

“Anyway, the evening came, we were about to start dessert, and everyone was laughing. “Clementine looked from Erica’s face to someone in the front row, and Erica felt offended, as if she had been neglected. – I don’t remember what they laughed at.

Erica felt slightly dizzy, and the room suddenly seemed unbearably stuffy.

There was an irresistible desire to get out of here. Well, she thought. Eternal history. "Fight or flight." Excitement of her sympathetic nervous system. Violation of brain biochemistry. That's the problem. Everything is completely natural. Childhood trauma. She re-read all the literature on the issue. She knew exactly what was happening to her, but knowledge was of no use. The body, betraying her, acted in its own way. My heart was beating furiously. My hands were shaking. She smelled the smell of childhood - thick, real: moisture, mold and shame.

“Don’t resist panic,” the psychologist told her. - Accept it. Soar in it."

She had an exceptional psychologist, but, for God's sake, is it possible to soar when there is not enough space, space - above, below, when you cannot take a step without feeling the rotting loose filth under your feet?

She stood up, straightening her skirt, which was stuck to her legs. The guy with the barcode glanced at her over his shoulder. The sympathetic expression in his eyes slightly surprised her, just as the intelligent eyes of a monkey might have confused her.

“Sorry,” Erica whispered. - I need…

Pointing to her watch, she sideways pushed past him, trying not to touch the back of his head with her jacket.

When she reached the end of the room, Clementine said:

“I remember there was a moment when my friend shouted my name. Very loud. I will never forget this scream.

Without turning around and placing her palm on the door handle, Erica stopped. Clementine must have leaned toward the microphone because her voice suddenly filled the room.

“She screamed, “Clementine!”

Clementine was always great at imitating other people. Her ear for music accurately captured the intonations of human voices. Erica discerned genuine horror and piercing insistence in that one word: “Clementine!”

She knew she was the same friend who shouted Clementine's name at the party, but she didn't remember it. In place of this memory hung a white void. And if she cannot remember such a moment, then this indicates a problem, an anomaly, an inconsistency - a very significant and alarming inconsistency. The panic attack intensified and almost knocked her off her feet. She pressed the doorknob and staggered out into the relentless rain.

Chapter 2

- Were you at the meeting? – the taxi driver asked Erica on the way to the city.

He smiled fatherly at her in the rearview mirror, as if touched by the businesslike appearance of a modern woman, this formal suit.

“Yes,” Erica answered, violently shaking water from her umbrella onto the floor of the taxi. - Watch the road.

- Yes, ma'am! – The taxi driver playfully touched his forehead with two fingers.

“Rain,” Erica said embarrassedly and pointed to the raindrops frantically beating on the windshield. - The roads are slippery.

“I was just taking a gander to the airport,” said the driver.

He fell silent while he changed lanes into the next lane. He kept one meaty hand on the steering wheel and ran the other along the back of the seat, causing Erica to imagine a great white gander in the back seat.

“He thinks all this rain is caused by climate change.” I told him, man, climate change has nothing to do with it. It's La Niña! Do you know about La Niña? El Niño and La Niña? Natural phenomena! Been happening for thousands of years.

“That’s right,” Erica responded.

It's a shame Oliver isn't with her. He would take over the conversation. Why are taxi drivers so persistent in educating passengers?

- Yes. “La Niña,” the taxi driver repeated with an almost Mexican intonation. He clearly enjoyed saying “La Niña.” - So we broke the record, huh? The longest period of continuous rain in Sydney has been since 1932. Cheers cheers!

“Yes,” Erica confirmed. - Hooray.

It was 1931, she has a good memory for numbers, but there was no point in correcting him.

“Actually it was nineteen thirty-one,” she said.

I couldn’t help myself - that’s just my character. And she understood this.

“Yeah, exactly, one thousand nine hundred and thirty-one,” the taxi driver agreed. – Before that it was twenty-four days in one thousand eight hundred and ninety-three. Twenty-four rainy days in a row! Let's hope we don't break this record, right? Or do you think we’ll beat you?

- Let's hope not.

Erica ran her finger across her forehead. Sweat or raindrops?

Waiting outside for a taxi in the rain, she calmed down. My breathing returned to normal, but my stomach was still churning. She felt exhausted, as if she had run a marathon.

Taking out her phone, she texted Clementine.

Sorry, I had to run away, there was a problem at work, you performed amazingly, we'll talk later. Bye.

Then she changed “amazing” to “great.” Amazing - it's too much. Moreover, it is inaccurate. And pressed the “send” button.

It wasn't worth taking precious time out of your workday to listen to Clementine. She came only to support her friend and put her own thoughts in order about what happened. The memories of that day seemed to her like an old film from which someone had cut out certain frames. Not even entire frames, but fragments of them. Narrow temporary fragments. She just wanted to fill these gaps so that she wouldn’t have to admit to someone that she didn’t remember everything.

A memory flashed back to her own face in her bathroom mirror. Violently shaking hands as she tries to break that little yellow pill in half with her thumbnail. She guessed that the lapses in her memory were associated with the pill she took. But these pills were prescribed to her. She didn't take any ecstasy before the party.

She remembered feeling strangely apathetic before going to a neighbor's barbecue, but it had nothing to do with memory lapses. Drank too much? Yes. Drank too much. Erica, face the facts. You were under the weather. Got drunk. Erica couldn't believe that this word applied to her, but perhaps it did. For the first time in her life, she was definitely drunk. So, perhaps the memory lapses were due to blackouts due to alcohol. Just like Oliver's mom and dad. One day, in the presence of his parents, Oliver said: “They won’t remember whole decades of their lives,” and both laughed joyfully and raised their glasses, although Oliver didn’t even smile.

– May I ask what you do? – asked the taxi driver.

- I am an accountant.

- Is it true? – he responded with exaggerated interest. - What a coincidence, because I was just thinking...

Erica's phone rang and she jumped, as she always did when it rang. “Erica, it’s a phone,” Oliver kept repeating to her. “That’s what it was invented for.” It was her mother, with whom she least wanted to talk right now, who was calling, but the taxi driver was fidgeting in his seat, looking at her rather than at the road and licking his lips in anticipation of free advice. Taxi drivers know a little about everything. He would tell her about one amazing loophole that he heard about from his regular client. But Erica is not that kind of accountant. She wouldn't appreciate the word "loophole." Perhaps her mother is the lesser of two evils.

- Hi, Mom.

- Well, hello! I didn't expect you to answer!

“Sorry for answering,” Erica said.

She really felt awkward.

“There’s no need to apologize, I just need to switch gears.” You know, let's just listen and I'll pretend to send you a prepared voice message?

Erica looked out onto the rain-drenched street: a woman was struggling with an umbrella that was trying to turn inside out. Erica watched as the woman, suddenly losing patience and not slowing down, shoved her umbrella into the trash can with delightful indignation and continued walking through the rain. This is the case, Erica thought, inspired by this scene. Just throw it away. Throw the damn thing away.

– I was going to start like this: Erica, dear, I wanted to tell you... dear Erica, I know you can’t talk to me now because you’re at work, and how annoying it is that you’re stuck in the office on this beautiful day - in the wrong way that the weather is beautiful, in fact it is terrible, nightmare - but usually at this time of year we have amazing days, and often, waking up and seeing the blue sky in the window, I think: oh God, what a pity that poor, poor Erica is hanging out in her office on such a beautiful day! That's what I thought, but that's the price for career success! Now, if you were a park ranger or did some other kind of outdoor work... I didn't really want you to be a park ranger - it just came into my head, and I know why - because Sally's son I recently graduated from school and am planning to become a park ranger, and when she told me about this, I thought: what a wonderful job, what a smart idea - to be outdoors, instead of languishing in an office bay like you.

“I’m not languishing in the office compartment,” Erica sighed.

Her office overlooked the harbor, and her secretary bought fresh flowers every Monday. She loved her office. She loved her job.

- You know, it was Sally's idea. For my son to become a park ranger. Very clever. She's not conservative, Sally thinks outside the box.

- Sally? – Erica asked.

- Sally! My new hairdresser! – the mother said impatiently, as if she had known Sally for many years, and not a couple of months.

As if Sally would become her friend for life. Ha! Sally will go the same way as all the other wonderful strangers in her mother's life.

- So what else was in your message? – asked Erica.

“Let me remember... then I was going to say, as if by chance, as if I had just thought about it: “Oh, listen, dear, by the way!”

Erica laughed. Her mother always charmed her, even in bad times. Just when Erica thought she'd had enough and couldn't stand it any longer, her mother would charm her again, making her fall in love with herself.

The mother laughed too, but her laughter sounded nervous and shrill.

“I was going to say, 'Listen, honey, I was wondering if you and Oliver would like to come to my place for lunch on Sunday?'

“No,” Erica answered. - We do not want. “She began to breathe intermittently, as if through a straw. Lips trembled. - No thanks. We will come to you on the fifteenth, mom. And not at any other time. We have agreed.

“But, honey, I thought you would be so proud of me because...

- No. We'll meet you somewhere else. We can have lunch on Sunday at some nice restaurant. Or you can come to us. Oliver and I don't have anything planned. We can go anywhere together, but we won't go to your house. “After a pause, she repeated this phrase again, louder and clearer, as if speaking to a person who did not understand English well: “We are not going to your house.” - (Silence reigned.) - Until the fifteenth, - said Erica. - This is written in the diary. In both of our diaries. And don't forget that we have dinner planned with Clementine's parents on Thursday night! We will be looking forward to this too. Let's have some fun!

– I wanted to try a new recipe. I bought a book of gluten-free recipes - did I tell you?

Oh, that frivolous tone. A deliberate liveliness designed to get Erica to respond to the game they had played all these years, in which they both pretended to be an ordinary mother and daughter having an ordinary conversation. Meanwhile, the mother understood that Erica was no longer playing, and both agreed that the game was over. The mother cried, apologized and made promises that they both knew she would never keep. But now she pretended that she had never made promises.

- Mom, good God!

Feigned naivety. The childish voice that infuriates Erica.

“You promised at your grandmother’s grave that you wouldn’t buy recipe books anymore!” You're not cooking! You are not allergic to gluten!

– I didn’t make such a promise! – the mother said in a normal, non-childish voice, plucking up the audacity to respond indignantly to Erica’s indignation. – In fact, lately I have been suffering from terrible flatulence. I am gluten intolerant, thank you! Sorry for bothering you with my health problems.

Don't react. Don't give in to emotional provocations. It is in such cases that the mother spends thousands of dollars on treatment.

“Okay, mom, it was nice chatting,” Erica said quickly, like a telemarketing agent, without giving her mother a chance to answer, “but I’m at work, I have to go.” Let's talk later.

She quickly hung up and dropped the phone into her lap.

The taxi driver froze in his seat, pretending not to listen. Only his hands moved on the steering wheel. What kind of daughter is this who refuses to go visit her mother? What kind of daughter talks to her mother so indignantly about buying a new recipe book?

She blinked.

Her phone rang again, and she jumped so hard that it almost slipped off her lap. Probably my mother calling again to say something nasty.

But it wasn't the mother. It was Oliver.

“Hi,” Erica said, almost bursting into tears with relief at the sound of his voice. – I just had a fun conversation with my mother. She wants us to come to her place for lunch on Sunday.

“But we’re only supposed to be with her next month, right?”

- Yes. She's trying to push the boundaries.

- Are you okay?

- Yes. – Erica ran her fingertip under her eyes. - Everything is fine.

- Yes. Thank you.

“Just put her out of your head.” Listen, did you go to Clementine's performance at the library?

Erica leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes. Damn it! Well, of course. That's why he's calling. Clementine. Erica was going to talk to Clementine over coffee after her speech. Oliver wasn't too interested in why Erica would go to the show. He didn't understand her obsessive desire to fill in the gaps in her memory. He considered it inappropriate, almost stupid.

“Believe me, you remembered everything you set out to remember,” he said then. Having uttered the words “trust me,” he pursed his lips, his eyes looking stern. A fleeting reminder of the lingering pain he wouldn't admit existed. – Memory lapses occur in a heavy drinker.

This was not her case. However, Oliver saw this as a great opportunity to talk to Clementine, to finally push her against the wall.

Erica should have asked him to send a voicemail too.

- Yes, I went. But she left in the middle. I felt unwell.

“So you haven’t talked to Clementine?”

“Not today,” she said. - Don't worry. I'll find the right time. Anyway, that food court isn't the best place.

– Right now I’m just looking through my diary. It's been two months since the barbecue. I think she won't be offended by your question. Just call her. You don't have to meet.

- I know. I'm so embarrassed.

- Don't be embarrassed. This is all quite complicated. It's not your fault.

– First of all, it’s my fault that we went to the barbecue.

Oliver wouldn't absolve her of that guilt. He was meticulous down to the smallest detail. They always agreed on this - a passion for accuracy.

The taxi driver slammed on the brakes:

- Oh, you stupid driver! Damn gander!

To stay in place, Erica pressed her palm into the seat.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Oliver.

– It’s important for me.

The phone buzzed, warning of another call. It must be the mother. The fact that she called back a couple of minutes later means that she preferred tears to cursing. Crying takes longer.

“I don’t know, Erica, what you expect to hear from me about this,” Oliver said anxiously. He believed that the right answer was at the end of the book. That there is a secret set of relationship rules that she knows because she is a woman, but that she deliberately hides them. “Just... talk to Clementine, okay?”

“I’ll talk,” Erica promised. - See you tonight.

Switching the phone to silent mode, she put it in her bag. The driver turned on the radio. He must have given up the idea of ​​seeking her advice on accounting, deciding that he shouldn’t trust the professional advice of someone with such a personal life.

Erica thought of Clementine, who was probably finishing her little speech to the polite applause of her audience. There will be no shouts of “bravo,” no standing ovations, no bouquets behind the scenes.

Poor Clementine! It must have been humiliating for her.

Oliver is right: the decision to go to the barbecue didn't matter. Sunk costs. Erica leaned her head against the back of the seat, closed her eyes, and in her mind’s eye appeared a silver car approaching her in a whirlwind of autumn leaves...

At first glance, the book is a bit boring. I didn’t get to the point of dislocating my jaw due to yawning, but putting the book down, I calmly forgot about it. It was like this until the middle, until revelations and unexpected turns rained down like from a cornucopia. Each situation took a different turn again and again, and the attitude towards the characters changed after receiving new data, as often happens in life.

So, we meet three couples: Sam and Clementine, Erica and Oliver, Vid and Tiffany. There is also the difficult neighbor Harry, and the girl Dakota, and the parents of the heroes, and everyone keeps to themselves, like a trump card, some sad secret. I found Erica and Oliver the most sympathetic, perhaps simply because they were the best written, explaining the reasons for their difficulties in the present and how they cope with these difficulties. Sam and Clementine seemed childish to me, and Weed and Tiffany seemed too exotic.

Three couples with children meet at Vida and Tiffany's place in their luxurious, cozy home. Adults relax under the influence of alcohol and Vida's endless hospitality. Lulled by the warm atmosphere, they keep one eye on the children. And then SOMETHING happened.

The incident at the barbecue worked as a catalyst, ripping the covers off the heroes’ problems, exacerbating the accumulated discontent and claims against each other.

The ending is absolutely happy, but without far-fetched solutions, without miracles and pianos in the bushes. It all ended very vitally. I was especially moved by what Erica and Oliver decided to do. It's a pity for the concreted fountain. Tiffany's problem was resolved in a tricky way - either a coincidence or an independent choice. And with Sam and Clementine, I still didn’t understand what the problem was.

As a result, the simplest moral is on the surface: there should be no children or alcohol at any party. Barbecues/kebabs/outings into nature, where adults throw drinks and children have fun on their own, are unacceptable. But if you have a crack in a relationship that is not carefully noticed, then the catalyst may be not just a tragedy, but an ordinary unwashed cup or an unclosed tube of toothpaste.

Overall the book is not bad, especially the second half when I just couldn't put it down. But the liner is very drawn out. The issue of egg donation, morbid hoarding and creative crisis has been discussed five hundred times, and the characters’ characters are given superficially.

They say that Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon have already bought the film rights to this book. Casting has not yet been announced, but in the wake of Big Little Lies, I see Reese as Clementine, and Nicole could play either Tiffany or Erica.

There are writers who know how to create a work that completely involves you. One such writer is Liane Moriarty. Her books always contain a special psychologism, the presence of childhood traumas that people carry into adulthood. This is also present in the novel “The Faithful, the Mad, the Guilty.” It can be difficult to read at some points, but each page reveals something new that can clarify the situation. This is a book that constantly keeps you in suspense due to the fact that it does not answer the main question for a long time.

Three married couples gathered at a Sunday barbecue. Vid and Tiffany invited their neighbors to relax in their luxurious home, and they simply could not refuse. However, they would have stayed home that day if they had foreseen the events. Vacation has turned into something that each of them does not want to remember, experiencing negative emotions. They would do a lot to go back in time and change everything, but this cannot be done.

In the book, the writer talks about six people with completely different characters and beliefs. The friendship between two women is unlikely to be such in reality; rather, it is a habit. A man and woman who experienced a difficult childhood now want to do things differently. People who don't know how to appreciate what they have. People who have no inspiration. They have their own dreams, but their partner is not always ready to accept them. People who have a lot of not only family problems, domestic and sexual, but also internal conflicts and traumas. And the main feeling they experience is guilt. He has a special role here. And they don’t know what to do now, trying to forget what happened.

The work belongs to the genre of Contemporary Foreign Literature. It was published in 2016 by the ABC-Atticus publishing house. On our website you can download the book “The Faithful, the Mad, the Guilty” in fb2, rtf, epub, pdf, txt format or read online. The book's rating is 3.15 out of 5. Here, before reading, you can also turn to reviews from readers who are already familiar with the book and find out their opinion. In our partner's online store you can buy and read the book in paper form.

Truly, madly, guilty

Copyright © Liane Moriarty, 2016

All rights reserved

© I. Ivanchenko, translation, 2017

© Edition in Russian, design. LLC "Publishing Group "Azbuka-Atticus"", 2017

Publishing House Inostranka ®

Dedicated to Jaycee

Music is the silence between notes.

Claude Debussy

“This story begins with a barbecue,” Clementine said. The microphone amplified and softened her voice, giving it expressiveness, as happens with a portrait after Photoshop. – An ordinary barbecue for neighbors in an ordinary backyard.

Well, that backyard isn't that ordinary, Erica thought. She crossed her legs and snorted. No one would call Weed's backyard ordinary.

Erica sat in the middle of the last row of the meeting room, adjacent to a stylishly renovated library in a suburb forty-five minutes from the city, not half an hour as the taxi driver claimed - he should have known.

There were maybe twenty people sitting in the hall, although there were folding chairs for a couple dozen more. Most of the audience were older people with animated, interested faces. These were knowledgeable older citizens who had come to a community meeting on this rainy morning (when will it stop raining?) to learn something new and exciting. They wanted to tell their children and grandchildren that they saw the performance of an unusually interesting woman today.

Before the meeting, Erica read a description of Clementine's performance on the library website. It was a short and not very informative summary: “The famous cellist and mother from Sydney Clementine Hart will share her story “One Ordinary Day” with you.”

Is Clementine really a famous cellist? Hard to believe.

The $5 fee for the event included lectures by two guest speakers, delicious homemade morning tea, and a chance to win a raffle. The speaker after Clementine intended to talk about the controversial municipal plan to renovate the local swimming pool. Erica could hear the quiet clinking of cups and saucers somewhere nearby, being set out for morning tea. She held the tissue paper lottery ticket in her lap, fearing that she would not be able to immediately find it in her bag when the lottery started. Blue, number E 24. Doesn't look like he's going to win.

The lady sitting directly in front of Erica tilted her gray curly head with an interested look, as if she was ready in advance to agree with everything Clementine said. A tag was poking out from the collar of her blouse. Size twelve. Erica reached over and tucked the tag inside.

The lady turned her head.

“Shortcut,” Erica whispered.

The lady smiled, and Erica noticed how pink the back of her neck was turning. The younger man sitting next to him, who looked to be in his forties—possibly her son—had a barcode tattooed on the back of his tanned neck, as if he were a supermarket product. Was it supposed to be funny? Ironic? Symbolic? Eric was tempted to tell him that this was stupid.

“It was an ordinary Sunday,” Clementine began.

Why is she so insistent on the word “ordinary”? Probably Clementine wanted to seem closer to these ordinary people from ordinary distant suburbs. Erica imagined Clementine sitting at the small dining room table, or perhaps Sam's worn antique desk in her shabby chic home overlooking the water, composing a speech for the community, chewing on the end of her pen, throwing her lush dark hair over her shoulder and smugly stroking it with a sensual movement, as if she were Rapunzel. And he thinks to himself: ordinary.

Really, Clementine, how can we make ordinary people understand?

- It was the beginning of winter. Cold, gloomy day...

What the heck? Erica fidgeted in her chair. It was a beautiful day. “Amazing,” as Weed put it.

Or perhaps “magnificent.” Anyway, something like that.

“The frost just burned,” Clementine continued, shivering theatrically, which was unnecessary.

The room was so warm that the man a few rows ahead of Erica seemed to have dozed off. With his legs stretched out in front of him and his hands folded comfortably on his stomach, he threw his head back as if he were lying on an invisible pillow. Is he even alive?

The barbecue day may have been chilly, but it certainly wasn't gloomy. Erica understood how unreliable eyewitness opinions were. People believe that they are simply pressing the rewind button on a miniature tape recorder installed in their head, while in fact they are constructing their memories. They make up their own stories. So in Clementine's memory, the day of the barbecue remained cold and gloomy. But she is wrong. Erica remembers (remembers, not inventing) how on the day of the barbecue Vid leaned towards her car window and said:

– What an amazing day!

Or maybe he said "gorgeous."

It was a word with a positive meaning, she was sure.

If only Erica had said then: “Yes, Vid, it really is an amazing day” and stepped on the gas pedal again!

“I remember that I wrapped my little ones warmly,” Clementine said.

Sam probably dressed the girls, Erica thought.

Clementine cleared her throat and grabbed the edges of the lectern with both hands. The microphone was set too high for her, and it seemed that, trying to bring her lips closer to it, she was rising on her tiptoes. She stretched her neck, which made her face seem even thinner.

Erica thought about carefully walking along the wall and adjusting the microphone. It would take a minute. She imagined Clementine giving her a grateful smile. “Thank God you did it,” she will say later over coffee. “You just saved me.”

In fact, Clementine didn't want to see Erica there that day. The look of horror that flashed across Clementine’s face when she recently said that she wanted to listen to her performance did not escape her. However, Clementine quickly came to her senses: they say how nice it is, how good it is, and they can then drink coffee together.

“We received the invitation literally at the last minute,” Clementine continued. - At the barbecue. We didn't even really know the owners. They are... friends of our friends.

She lowered her eyes to the pulpit, as if she had lost the thread of the story. Earlier, Clementine had been holding a palm-sized stack of cards as she walked up to the podium. There was something heartbreaking about the cards, as if Clementine was remembering clues from her high school rhetoric class. She must have cut the cards with scissors. Not those grandmotherly scissors with mother-of-pearl handles. They disappeared.

It was strange to see Clementine on stage, so to speak, without a cello. She looks so casual in blue jeans and a cute colorful top. Uptown mom outfit. Clementine's legs were a little short for jeans, and flats without heels made them look even shorter. Well, it's just a fact. As she approached the pulpit, she looked almost ill-dressed—even if that word might seem unkind to Clementine. For performances on stage, she combed her hair up, put on high-heeled shoes and dressed all in black - long, wide skirts made of light fabrics, allowing her to squeeze the cello between her knees. When Clementine sat on the stage, with passion and tenderness, bowing her head to the instrument, as if hugging it, and one long strand of hair almost touching the strings, and her arm bent at an odd angle, she seemed so sensual to Erica, so exotic and incomprehensible. Every time she saw Clementine on stage, even after all these years, Erica felt a sense of loss, as if longing for something unattainable. She always assured herself that this feeling was more complex and remarkable than envy, since she was not interested in playing musical instruments. Or perhaps not. Maybe it was all a matter of envy.