66 pages • 2 hours read
Liane MoriartyThe Husband's Secret
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Guilt and Grief
The experiences and concepts of guilt and grief arise repeatedly throughout the text. These are profoundly affecting emotions that fundamentally change the people who experience them. Much of the decision-making in the text is driven by guilt and grief: John-Paul’s lifetime of penance, Connor’s years of therapy and self-sabotage, Cecilia’s disassociation when she decides to keep John-Paul’s secret, and Rachel’s poor relationship with her son and ultimate decision to hit and kill Connor with her car. Tess, too, is driven by grief initially and later by the guilt of her sexual affair with Connor. Moriarty reveals the depth of grief and guilt and their power to overwhelm more positive emotions like happiness and love.
The Individual
The larger framing devices of the Berlin Wall and, early in the text, The Biggest Loser serve to reinforce the idea of the individual who is actively engaged in their own life at any given moment. Moriarty makes this clear in the first few chapters; she has each woman hear the same moment in the television program to make it clear to the reader that these moments of personal crisis are happening simultaneously. All three women struggle, initially, to see people as individuals rather than as parts of their own stories. Tess’s self-reflection throughout the book comes closest to getting outside of this view of the world. As she grows through the text, she sees the ways she prioritized her own experience at the expense of understanding the experiences of others in her life. This idea is emphasized in Janie Crowley’s brief chapters, as well, particularly in her disbelief that she’s able to wound John-Paul with the breakup.
Choice
Throughout the text, the main characters have important decisions to make: Tess chooses to leave her home, Cecilia chooses to keep John-Paul’s secret, Rachel chooses to kill Connor, and Will chooses to walk back his emotional affair with Felicity. All of these choices, even the seemingly least connected ones, have a significant impact on the community of characters. Tess’s choice to see Will, for example, meant that Connor was leaving and walking home at the precise moment that Rachel was driving down that street. The Epilogue makes the power of choice particularly clear: A series of small, but different, choices could have led to entirely different outcomes.
Each choice one makes leaves a handful of other choices that one could have made—other lives that could have been lived. This motif works to drive home both the importance of choice and, simultaneously, the relatively unremarkable nature of choice. Each person is making choices all the time. Even the ones that seem relatively small—not going to a doctor’s appointment, for example, or determining how to break up with a boyfriend—can have lasting and disproportionate effects on a person’s life. Each person’s life can have lasting effects on the lives of those around them.
Related Titles
By Liane Moriarty
