Book Club Questions: Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty

Book Information

• What is the title of the book?

Nine Perfect Strangers

• Who is the author of the book?

Liane Moriarty

• When was the book published?

September 18, 2018

• What genre does the book belong to?

psychological fiction, thriller, and contemporary fiction

• Are there any notable awards or recognitions the book has received?

A New York Times Bestseller, Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Fiction (2018), Longlisted For The ABIA General Fiction Book Of The Year 2019, Longlisted For The Indie Book Award For Fiction 2019, and was adapted into a tv series on Hulu in 2021.

• Who are the main characters (for fiction) or key figures (for non-fiction)?

  1. Masha Dmitrichenko: The enigmatic and ambitious director of Tranquillum House.

  2. Frances Welty: A romance novelist dealing with career and personal setbacks.

  3. Napoleon, Heather, and Zoe Marconi: A family mourning the loss of their son/brother.

  4. Lars Lee: A divorce lawyer with commitment issues.

  5. Tony Hogburn: A former professional athlete struggling with his new identity.

  6. Ben and Jessica Chandler: A young couple dealing with marital problems.

  7. Carmel Schneider: A single mother dealing with self-esteem and weight issues.

Discussion Questions

1. In Nine Perfect Strangers, there’s a fair amount of commentary about women and their self loathing, especially directed toward their bodies: “Women and their bodies! The most abusive and toxic of relationships. Masha had seen women pinch at the flesh of their stomachs with such brutal self-loathing they left bruises. Meanwhile their husbands fondly patted their own much larger stomachs with rueful pride.” Do you think this is true? Why do you think men and women have such different relationships with their bodies?

The entire sentiment referred to in this question is on page 84, where Masha explains to the reader:

    "Masha had treated a hundred women like Frances. It was simply a matter of peeling back their layers to reveal the heartache beneath. They longed to be peeled, for someone to be interested enough to peel them. It wasn’t hard. They’d been hurt: by husbands and lovers, by children who no longer needed them, by disappointing careers, by life, by death.

    They nearly all loathed their bodies. Women and their bodies! The most abusive and toxic of relationships. Masha had seen women pinch at the flesh of their stomachs with such brutal self-loathing they left bruises. Meanwhile their husbands fondly patted their own much larger stomachs with rueful pride.

    These women came to Masha overfed and yet malnourished, addicted to various substances and chemicals, exhausted and stressed and experiencing migraines or muscular pain or digestive issues. They were easy to heal with rest and fresh air, nutritious food and attention. Their eyes brightened. They became expansive and exhilarated as their cheekbones re-emerged. They wouldn’t shut up. They left Masha with hugs and tears in their eyes and bright toot-toots of their car horns. They sent heartfelt cards, often with photos enclosed showing how their journeys had continued as they applied Masha’s lessons to their day-to-day lives.

    But then, two, three, four years later, a good proportion came back to Tranquillum House, looking as unhealthy as they’d been at their first visits — or even unhealthier. ‘I stopped my morning meditation,’ they would say, all wide-eyed and apologetic, but not that apologetic; they seemed to think their lapses were natural, cute, to be expected. ‘And next thing I was back drinking every day.’ ‘I lost my job.’ ‘I got divorced.’ ‘I had a car accident.’ Masha had only reset them temporarily! In times of crisis they returned to their default settings."

Men can just exist. Women have to perform.

I'm not going to go into a diatribe about the patriarchy or bring forth any hate. What I will bring focus to is this part of the quote above:

"They were easy to heal with rest and fresh air, nutritious food and attention. Their eyes brightened. They became expansive and exhilarated as their cheekbones re-emerged."

When women are separated from the society that wants them to hate themselves, they can heal.

But we live in a society where appearances matter—but the ideal look changes faster than women can keep up so they're in a vicious cycle of changing themselves, finding reasons to hate themselves, and trying to change again only to be disappointed again and again.

Poor Carmel, the mother of four daughters and recently divorced. See what she has to say with Masha on page 191-192:

    “You have already lost some weight, I see.” Masha opened Carmel’s file to begin her counseling session.

    ‘Have I?’ said Carmel. She felt like she’d won a prize. ‘How much?’

    Masha ignored the question. She ran her finger down a sheet of paper in the file.

    ‘I thought I might have lost some — but I wasn’t sure.” Carmel heard her unused voice tremble with pleasure. She hadn’t dared to hope. It seemed that Yao deliberately stood in such a way that she couldn’t see that dreaded number on the scales each day.

    She put a hand to her stomach. She had suspected it was getting flatter, her clothes looser! She’d been secretly touching her stomach, like when she was pregnant for the first time. This retreat was just like that euphoric time: the feeling that her body was changing in new and miraculous ways.

    ‘I guess I’ll probably lose even more when we start the fast tomorrow?’ Carmel wanted to demonstrate her enthusiasm and commitment to the retreat. She would do whatever it took.

    Masha said nothing. She closed Carmel’s file and balanced her chin on her folded hands.

    Carmel said, ‘I hope it’s not just fluid loss. They say that in the first few days of a diet you mostly just lose fluid.’

    Masha still said nothing.

    ‘I know the meals here are all calorie-controlled. I guess the challenge will be maintaining my weight loss when I go home. I’d be really grateful for any nutrition advice you can give me going forward. Maybe a recipe plan?’

    “You do not need a recipe plan,’ said Masha. ‘You are intelligent woman. You know what to do to lose weight, if that’s what you want. You are not especially fat. You are not especially thin. You want to be thinner. That is your choice. I find this not so interesting.’

    ‘Oh,’ said Carmel. ‘Sorry.’

    “Tell me something about yourself that is not related to your weight,’ said Masha.

    ‘Well, I have four daughters,’ said Carmel. She smiled at the thought of them. ‘They’re aged ten, eight, seven and five.’

    ‘I know this already. You are a mother,’ said Masha. “Tell me something else.’

    “My husband left me. He has a new girlfriend now. So that’s been —’

    Masha waved that away irritably, as if it were of no relevance. ‘Something else.’

    ‘There is nothing else right now,’ said Carmel. ‘There’s no time for anything else. I’m just a normal busy mum. An overweight, stressed-out, suburban mum.’ As she spoke she scanned Masha’s desk for family photos. She must not have children. If she did, she would know how motherhood swallowed you up whole. ‘I work part-time,’ she tried to explain. ‘I have an elderly mother who is not well. I am always tired. Always, always tired.’

    Masha sighed, as if Carmel were not behaving."

She is so so so much more than what her body looks like, but she' had been whittled down to what she has to offer others (like her ex husband), what she can bring to the world (her four daughters) and how she can look while doing it (in her words, overweight). And she apologizes over and over and over again like she's apologizing for being in anybody's line of sight. She can't be seen, not like this.

Like her only worth is how she can perform and appear to others instead of knowing that she has inherent worth just by having love, empathy, and compassion inside of her.

My heart breaks knowing so many women that have been whittled down the same way.

But men, they can get by with the bare minimum. They can lose or not lose weight. They can be motivated or not motivated. The the conversation between Masha and Tony on page 196 helps explain this idea:

    ‘So how do you hope to change your life?’

    ‘I just want to get healthier and fitter,’ said Tony. ‘Drop some weight.’

    Men often used that phrase: ‘drop some weight’. They said it without shame or emotion, as if the weight were an object they could easily put down when they chose. Women said they needed to ‘lose weight’, with their eyes down, as if the extra weight was part of them, a terrible sin they’d committed.

    ‘I used to be very fit. I should have done this sooner. I really regret. . .’ Tony stopped, cleared his throat, as if he’d said more than he wanted.

    “What do you regret?’ asked Masha.

    ‘It’s not anything I’ve done. It’s more everything I haven’ done. I’ve just kind of moped about for twenty years.’

    It took a fraction of a second to translate the English word ‘moped’ — a word she didn’t hear much.

    “Twenty years is a long time to mope,’ said Masha. Foolish man. She herself had never moped. Not once. Moping was for the weak.

    ‘I kind of got into the habit of it,’ said Tony. ‘Not sure how to stop.’

    She waited to hear what he would say next. Women liked to be asked questions about themselves but with men it was better to be patient, to be silent and see what eventuated."

Or think about what Frances had to say on page 99 about Lars.

    "The flustered lady was followed by an astonishingly handsome man with high cheekbones and flashing eyes, who paused at the front of the room, as if he were a movie star walking out onto the set of a chat show to rapturous applause. He was perfectly stubbled, perfectly proportioned and deeply, deservedly, in love with himself.

    Frances wanted to laugh out loud at the sight of him. He was too good looking even to be the tall, dark and handsome hero in one of her books. The only way it would work would be if she put him in a wheelchair. He’d look great in a wheelchair. Honestly, she could probably get away with removing both his legs and he could still play the lead."

Do you know what a wheelchair-bound actress with no legs gets? Unemployment. No matter how high her cheekbones are.

And "deeply, deservedly, in love with himself"? Men deserve to be in love with themselves but women have to fight for it? It isn't outright said right there but I'm reading between the lines and noticing the rhetoric Frances uses on others/men and the rhetoric she allows to use for herself. They are not the same.

And this dumb, self-sabotaging rhetoric starts so early! Zoe, a baby 21 year old compared to the older adults at the resort, sort of bonds with Frances by talking about her family's food intake on page 114:

    "We just wanted somewhere quiet, and a health resort seemed like a good idea because we’re all really unhealthy.’

    "Are you? You don’t look at all unhealthy to me."

    "Well, for a start, I have way too much sugar in my diet,’ said Zoe.

    "Sugar is the new villain,’ said Frances. ‘It used to be fat. Then it was carbs. It’s hard to keep up.’

     "No, but sugar is seriously bad," said Zoe. It wasn’t hard to keep up at all! Everyone knew sugar was terrible for you. “They’ve done all this research. I need to withdraw from my sugar addiction."

    "Mmm," said Frances.

    "I eat too much chocolate and I’m addicted to Diet Coke, that’s why my skin is so bad." Zoe put a fingertip to a blind pimple near her lip. She couldn’t stop touching it.

    “Your skin is gorgeous!" Frances gesticulated wildly, probably because she was trying not to look at Zoe’s pimple.

    Zoe sighed. People should be honest.

    "My parents are exercise fanatics, but my dad has a junk-food addiction and Mum basically has an eating disorder." She reflected. Her mother would not like any aspect of this conversation. "Please don’t tell her I said that. She doesn’t really have an eating disorder. She’s just kind of weird about food."

    Even before Zach died Zoe’s mother had been like that. She couldn’t bear to see lavish displays of food, which was a problem, seeing as she’d married a man with a big extended Italian family. Heather suffered from heartburn and stomach cramps and other ‘digestive issues’ she referred to only obliquely. She never saw food as just food. She always had some fierce emotional response to it. She was starving or bloated or craving something specific and unattainable."

It's kind of a shared misery sort of deal. They as women can commiserate with the "joy" of being a woman.

But this joy really just sparks vitriol in the end.

After getting very irritated about the "suffering" endured at the health resort, Heather had this to say on page 89 about the diet plans:

    "Weight was just not an issue for Heather! She weighed herself every morning at six on the dot and if she ever saw the needle move in the wrong direction she adjusted her diet. Her BMI was in the ‘underweight’ category, but only by a kilo. She’d always been lean. Zoe sometimes accused Heather of having an eating disorder, just because she was kind of picky about when and what she ate. She didn’t put just anything in her mouth — unlike Napoleon, who ate like a vacuum cleaner, hoovering up whatever was around him."

Throughout this novel, Liane Moriarty does sprinkle opinions of the opposite sex to make her case. Frances' thoughts on the subject are of men that aren't at the resort. Same for Carmel.

Heather's very direct, some may say snide comments about her husband on page 88 were set in the present moment and that was a little more powerful for me. Check it out:

    "[Heather] studied [Napoleon] as he sat in his too-short dressing-gown, his long hairy legs entwined. He had a feminine way of crossing his legs, like a supermodel being interviewed on a talk show. His two shorter, chunkier older brothers gave him hell about the girly way he sat, but he just grinned and gave them the finger."

I have many reasons to believe that Heather, had she heard from sisters that she sat in a manly way or anything not perfect feminine, that she would immediately change her posture and do her best to avoid sitting that way ever again. Even in the privacy of her own home.

Women have to check themselves so often that they've spilled over in their efforts and now begun having opinions about other women! Like this page 94 read Heather did on Frances:

    "[Frances] looked vaguely familiar to Heather — probably because Heather knew SO many women just like her: wealthy middle-aged women who hadn’t worked since before their children were born. There was nothing wrong with those women. Heather liked them. She just couldn’t be with them for too long without succumbing to rage. They were utterly unscathed by life. The only thing they had to worry about was their bodies, because all that lunching didn’t help their figures, so they needed to come to places like this to ‘recharge’ and to hear the experts tell them the amazing news that if you eat less and move more, you will weigh less and feel better."

As readers, we know that that's not at all true. But, as women, I think we are guilty of having unfounded, stereotypical opinions just like Heather's about other women.

This is a deep and complex conversation to have with any and all women of the world. That's the opposite of an easy task. But I think Liane Moriarty offers up an excellent starting point for the conversations to begin. I know after reading this, I've started to ask myself "What would Masha say about my body?"

She would say it's the least interesting thing about me and that my heart and my soul will be what saves me from myself.

Here are more spots of interest for this question:

pg 53

    Frances averted her eyes from the number. She had no idea of her weight and no interest in learning it. She knew she could be thinner, and of course when she was younger she was indeed much thinner, but she was generally happy with her body as long as it wasn’t giving her pain, and bored by all the different ways women droned on about the subject of weight, as if it were one of the great mysteries of life. The recent weight-losers, evangelical about whatever method had worked for them, the thin women who called themselves fat, the average women who called themselves obese, the ones desperate for her to join in their lavish self-loathing. ‘Oh, Frances, isn’t it just so depressing when you see young, thin girls like that!’ ‘Not especially,’ Frances would say, adding extra butter to her bread roll.

pg 54

    The man lagged behind to put on glasses so he could closely examine the wall on the landing. He was so tall the dressing-gown was more like a miniskirt, revealing knobbly knees and very white, very hairy legs. They were the sort of male legs that made you feel uncomfortable, as if you were looking at a private part of the body.

pg 82

    She turned sideways in her chair and lifted one leg, pressing her forehead to her shinbone. She occupied her body with the ease of a ten-year-old boy and she liked to say that she was only ten years old, because it was coming up to the tenth anniversary of the day it happened. Her cardiac arrest. The day she died and was born again.

pg 102

As Frances’s eyes ran over Masha’s exquisitely toned body and compared it to her own, she sank into herself. She was Jabba the Hutt, all pillowy bosom and hips and soft oozing flesh.

Stop it, she told herself. It wasn’t like her to indulge in self-loathing.

Yet it would be disingenuous to deny the aesthetic pleasure of Masha’s body. Frances had never bought into ‘everyone is beautiful’, a platitude only women had to be sold, as men could be beautiful or not without feeling as though they weren’t really men. This woman, like the handsome man, had a dramatic, almost shocking physical presence. Frances had to talk or write or flirt or joke or in some way act before she could make an impact on people around her, otherwise, as she knew from experience, she could stand at a counter in a shop and be ignored forever. No-one could ignore Masha. All she had to do for attention was exist.

pg 156

    The serial killer dropped his bath towel on a deckchair (you were meant to use the stripy blue-and-white towels from reception, but rules didn’t apply to him), walked straight to the edge of the pool and, without even bothering to put in his toe to check the temperature, dived straight in. Frances did a sedate breaststroke in the other direction.

    Now she was stuck in the pool because she didn’t want to get out in front of him. She would have thought she was too old to worry about her body being observed and judged in a swimsuit, but apparently this neurosis began at twelve years old and never ended.

    The problem was that she wanted to convey strength in all her future interactions with this man, and her soft white body, especially when compared to Masha’s Amazonian example, damn her, didn’t convey anything much except fifty-two years of good living and a weakness for Lindt chocolate balls. The serial killer would no doubt be the type to rank every woman based on his own personal ‘Would I fuck her?’ score.

    She remembered her first-ever boyfriend of over thirty years ago, who told her he preferred smaller breasts than hers while his hands were on her breasts, as if she’d find this interesting, as if women’s body parts were dishes on a menu and men were the goddamned diners.

    This is what she said to that first boyfriend: ‘Sorry.’

    This was her first boyfriend’s benevolent reply: ‘That’s okay.’

    She couldn’t blame her upbringing for her pathetic behaviour. When Frances was eight years old, a man patted her mother’s bottom as he walked past them on a suburban street. ‘Nice arse,’ he said in a friendly tone. Frances remembered thinking, Oh, that’s kind of him. And then she’d watched in shock as her five-foot-nothing mother chased the man to the comer and swung a heavy handbag full of hardback library books at the back of his head.

    Right. Enough was enough. She would get out of the pool, at her own pace. She would not rush to grab up her towel to throw over her body.

    Wait.

    She didn’t want to get out of the pool! She was here first. Why should she get out just because he was here? She would enjoy her swim and then she would get out.

pg 168-171

    Remembering this, she’d picked up speed, her arms and legs chopping through the water, harder and harder, faster and faster, but she couldn’t sustain it, she wasn’t fit enough, she was so unfit, and fat, and lazy, and disgusting. And she thought of her four girls on the other side of the world, in Paris, where Carmel had never been, having their hair done by Sonia, and probably sitting still for her, and suddenly she swallowed a giant mouthful of water.

    She hopped out of the pool, without making eye contact with the friendly blonde lady, as per the rules, fortunately, because she was crying like a fool, and she cried all the way to her room. There was no way the big man coming down the pathway to the pool hadn’t noticed.

    ‘Get a grip,’ she said now to her reflection in the mirror.

    She wrapped her arms around her body.

    She missed her children. It hit her like a sudden fever. She longed for the comfort of their four beautiful little-girl bodies and their heedless, proprietorial use of her body: the way they plonked themselves on her lap as if she were a chair, the way they burrowed their hot little heads into her stomach, her breasts. She was always yelping at someone, ‘Get off me!’ When she was with her children, she was needed — essential, in fact: everything relied on her. Someone was always saying, ‘Where’s Mummy?’ ‘I’m telling Mum what you just said.” ‘Mummmmmy!’

    Now she was untethered by obligations, as loose and free as a balloon.

    She undid the tie of her swimsuit and let it fall in a heap on the bathroom floor while she studied her naked body in the mirror.

    Carmel let her breasts drop and put a hand to the curve of her stomach. Average wasn’t good enough. Average was too big. Everyone knew that. There was an obesity crisis in this country! She didn’t want to fat-shame other people, but she certainly wanted to fat-shame herself because she deserved to be shamed. She used to be two sizes smaller and the reason she was now two sizes larger was not because of her four daughters; it was because she didn’t ‘take care of herself’. Women were meant to ‘take care of themselves’. That’s what men said on dating websites: I’d like a woman who takes care of herself. They meant: I want a thin woman.

    And it wasn’t like the information wasn’t available on how to take care of yourself! Everyone knew you simply cut out carbs and sugar and trans fats from your diet! Celebrities generously revealed their secrets. They snacked on a ‘handful of nuts’ or ‘two squares of dark antioxidant-rich chocolate’! They drank a lot of water, stayed out of the sun and took the stairs! It wasn’t rocket science! But did Carmel ever take the stairs? No, she didn’t.

    It was true that she often had the kids with her, and if they walked up too many stairs one of them was liable to run too far ahead while another one sat down and announced that her legs no longer worked, but still, there must have been times when Carmel could have built some ‘incidental exercise’ into her lifestyle. And yet she hadn’t. She neglected her body, she didn’t get her hair cut for months on end, her eyebrows were left unplucked, she forgot to shave her legs, and it was no surprise her husband left her, because, as she tried to teach her children, actions had consequences.

    She thought of the long, sculpted lines of Masha’s body.

    She imagined Masha living Carmel’s life, standing at the front door when Joel and Sonia dropped off the girls. Joel wouldn’t have left Masha in the first place, but say he did, then Masha’s heart wouldn’t hammer with pain and humiliation at the sight of her ex-husband and his new girlfriend. Masha wouldn’t curve her body around the door at a strange angle as if to hide it from Joel. Masha would stand tall and proud. She wouldn’t hunch her body to protect her raw, broken heart.

    Her sister said Joel’s so-called ‘lack of attraction’ was Joel’s problem, not hers. Her sister said Carmel should learn self-love and texted her links to articles about ‘intuitive eating’ and ‘healthy at any size’. Carmel knew these articles were written by fat people to make fat people feel better about their sad, fat lives.

    If she could transform her body, she could transform her life, and she could move on from her failed marriage. That wasn’t deluded. That was a fact.

    Her sister, who was both wealthy and generous — a most excellent combination — gave Carmel a card for her birthday that said: Carmel, I don’t think you need to lose weight. You’re beautiful and Joel is a shallow idiot and you should give ZERO FUCKS what he thinks. But if you’re determined to go on a health kick, I want you to do it in style and comfort. I’ve booked you into Tranquillum House for their ten-day cleanse while the kids are away. Enjoy! Ness xx PS And then come home and eat cheese. 

    Carmel hadn’t been that happy to receive a gift since she was a child.

    Now she thought of Masha’s words: ‘In ten days, you will not be the person you are now.’ The word ‘please’ filled her mind. Please, please, please, let that be true, please, please, please, let me become someone other than this. She looked at her stupid, dopey, pleading face in the mirror. Her skin was rough and red like an old washerwoman’s hands. There was a picket fence of tiny lines neatly indented across her top lip, which was so thin it disappeared when she smiled. The only part of her body that was thin was her top lip. Lips were meant to be plump rosebuds, not mean, thin, disappearing lines.

    Oh, Carmel, of course he stopped being attracted to you! What were you thinking? How could he possibly be attracted to someone who looks like you? She lifted her hand to slap her face once more.

4. “Carmel wasn’t wearing a body. It was so wonderful and relaxing not wearing a body. No thighs. No stomach. No bum. No biceps. No triceps. No cellulite. No crow’s feet. No frown marks. No caesarean scar. No sun damage. No fine lines. No seven signs of aging. No dry hair. No frizzy hair. No gray hair. Nothing to wax or color or condition. Nothing to lengthen or flatten, conceal or disguise.” What did you think of this scene when Carmel was body shopping? What point do you think the author was trying to make? Can you relate to this? Why, or why not?

I think this further explains my point that men can exist and women have to perform.

Do you think Lars or Tony or Napoleon would have shopped for a body? Do you think they would have any concern? Yes, according to Masha on page 85 Lars,

"saw attendance at health resorts as a part of his grooming regime, like a haircut or a manicure."

But I'd go so far as to say that Lars did these things "on top" like it was extra because he didn't really need to. You get where I'm going?

It's like women don't get to live in their bodies like men get to. They have to change everything about it. Instead of their body feeling like a cozy home they've lived in all their life, their body feels like a hotel room in a country they don't speak the language of. For example, Frances on page 52:

    "Frances looked back to her arm, and then quickly away again as she caught sight of a test tube filling with her blood. She hadn’t even registered the prick of the needle. She felt all at once as powerless as a child, and was reminded of the few times in her life she’d had to go into hospital for minor surgeries, and how much she disliked the lack of control over her body. Nurses and doctors had the right to prod at her as they pleased, with no love or desire or affection, just expertise. It always took a few days to fully reinhabit her body again."

I also think it was especially powerful to have Carmel body shopping with her daughters. The entire experience is on pages 252-254, though these particular two spots stood out to me:

    "Her daughter Lulu put down her book. She had peach smeared around her mouth. Carmel went to wipe it away but then she remembered she had no fingers. Fingers were useful.

    “That’s your body there, Mummy,’ said Lulu, and she pointed at Carmel’s body sagging on a door handle, without even a hanger.

    “That’s my old body, darling,’ said Carmel. ‘Mummy needs a new one.’

    ‘It’s yours.” Lulu was implacable as always."

Little Lulu is of an age where those problems haven't begun to matter to her. That body is her Mom's body and there's no changing it. Oh, to be carefree like a young girl.

Furthermore, when Carmel comes to terms with her body:

"Her daughters threw themselves at her. Carmel marveled at the blue veins in her hands as she cupped her daughters’ heads, the thump of her heart and the strength of her arms as she hefted a little girl on each hip."

Because the girls don't care about their mom's wrinkles or cellulite. They couldn't care less about Carmel's hair. Not the shape (or lack of shape) of any part of her body.

The girls cared about Carmel's capacity for love. That her heart beat with love for them. That her arms hugged the love into them. That Carmel was their mother.

That is what matters in the end. Life is long. Bodies change. Love endures.

6. At one point Jessica says, “The question is: Who gets to decide if I’m beautiful or not? Me? You? The internet?” And later, “Jessica thought those dreadful Kardashians were stunning. It was her prerogative to think so. Before the money Ben had drooled over images of luxury cars and Jessica had drooled over pictures of models and reality stars, that were maybe photoshopped, but she didn’t care. He got his car, she got her body. Why was her new body more superficial than his new car?” How much do you think our notions of beauty are shaped by social media? Does Jessica have a point about her body versus Ben’s car? Do you think women are made to feel superficial about what makes them feel good versus men?

I think social media has become a huge performative act. Appear wealthy. Appear thin. Appear well-liked. Appear anything good for your "image" or "brand."

Can't do that? Doesn't even matter! There are blurring filters. There are buildable façades. There are ways of faking it.

But does it matter? More specifically, does it matter to you and the people whose opinion you care about? Page 37 gives us Ben's take regarding Jessica:

    "One of their biggest fights recently had been about one of her Instagram posts. It was a photo of her in a bikini top, leaning over, pushing her arms together so her new boobs looked even bigger and pouting her puffy new lips at the camera. She’d asked what he thought of the photo, her face all hopeful, and because of her hopeful face he hadn’t said what he really thought — that it looked like she was advertising a cheap escort service. He’d just shrugged and said, ‘It’s okay.’

     Her hopeful face fell. You’d think he’d called her a name."

Jessica is the "influencer" character of the story and really struggling without being connected to her online world. On page 137, readers get inside her mind:

    "They hadn’t been having sex. Ben had been asleep and Jessica had been lying next to him in the darkness, unable to sleep, missing her phone so badly it felt like she’d had something amputated. When she couldn’t sleep at home she simply picked up her phone and scrolled through Instagram and Pinterest until she got tired.

    She looked at her scarlet toenails in the moonlight. If she had her phone with her right now she would have photographed her feet, together with Ben’s feet, and tagged it #starlightmeditation #healthretreat #learningaboutkoans #wejustsawafallingstar #whatisthesoundofonehandclapping.

    That last hashtag would have made her look quite intellectual and spiritual, she thought, which was good, because you had to be careful not to come across as superficial on your socials.

    She couldn’t shake the feeling that if she didn’t record this moment on her phone then it wasn’t really happening, it didn’t count, it wasn’t real life. She knew that was irrational but she couldn’t help it. She literally felt twitchy without her phone. Obviously she was addicted to it. Still, better than being addicted to heroin, though these days no-one was sure about Ben’s sister’s most recent drug of choice. She liked to ‘mix it up’."

Many characters have a bit of a struggle with being "off grid." Like Frances on page 58:

    "‘No problem.’ Frances retrieved her phone from her handbag, switched it off, and handed it to Yao. A not unpleasant feeling of subservience crept over her. It was like being on an airplane once the seatbelt sign was turned on and the flight attendants were now in charge of your entire existence."

Heather, on Page 92, kind of imposes the problem for Zoe:

    "Heather looked at the wall above their bed that separated their room from Zoe’s and wished she could see straight through it. What was she doing right now? She didn’t have her phone. Twenty-year-olds needed their phones by their sides at all times. Zoe found it stressful if her battery power dropped below eighty per cent."

Maybe Heather is enabling this idea of dependency. Maybe she's just an over-concerned mother who has already lost one child.

But it does bring focus on the need people have for their objects and how objects can sometimes give people "meaning," "worth," or "acceptance."

For example, Ben and his precious beautiful amazing important Lamborghini on Page 121:

    ‘Are there any more areas of concern before we resume the silence?’

    Ben raised his hand. Masha observed his wife flash him a look of horror and move slightly away.

    ‘Um, yeah, I have just one question. Are the cars parked undercover?’

    She looked at him for a moment, long enough to help him see the sadness of this deep attachment to his earthly possessions.

    He shifted uncomfortably.

    “They are parked undercover, Ben. Please don’t worry, they are perfectly safe.’

    ‘Okay, but, um, where are the cars? I’ve walked around the property and I just can’t see where...” As he spoke he removed his cap and briskly rubbed the top of his head.

    For the briefest of moments, Masha saw another boy wearing a baseball cap walking towards her, so strange and yet so familiar. She felt the love rise within her chest and she crossed her arms so she could secretly pinch the flesh on her arm, hard enough to hurt, until the vision vanished, and all that was left was here and now and the important tasks that lay ahead.

    ‘As I said, Ben, everyone’s cars are perfectly safe.’

    He opened his mouth to speak yet again and his wife hissed something inaudible through her teeth. He closed his mouth."

He's at a health resort and can't get away from the idea that his car is out of sight.

And on Page 271, Jessica has an admission:

"‘I feel like you love your car more than me,’ said Jessica. ‘I’m jealous of your car. I was the one who scratched it. That was me. Because I feel like your car is a slutty girl having an affair with my husband, and so I scratched her slutty face.’

    ‘Wow,’ said Ben. He put both hands to the top of his head. ‘Wow. That is . . . wow. I can’t believe you did that.’ He didn’t sound angry. Just amazed."

Having a lot of weight on material goods can take a toll. Jessica and Ben weren't always this way. They were married before winning millions in the lottery. And Jessica is able to admit on page 142 that,

    "[She] and Ben fought more about money now that they had an abundance of it. It was impossible to even imagine they’d once felt so upset about the arrival of unexpected bills.

    Becoming instantly wealthy was like starting a really stressful, glamorous job for which they had no qualifications or experience, but still, it was a pretty great job. It was hardly something to complain about. There was no need to ruin it, as Ben seemed intent on doing."

And more to the point on page 140:

    "But even on that first night, even while Ben and his brothers argued drunkenly over which luxury cars to buy, Jessica could sense Ben’s fear growing.

    ‘Make sure it doesn’t change us,’ he slurred, just before they fell asleep that night, and Jessica thought, What are you talking about? It’s already changed us!

    Then there was Jessica’s mother, who acted as if the win were a catastrophe.

    “You have to be so careful, Jessica,’ she said. “This kind of money can send people off the rails.

    It was true that there had been some unexpected difficulties with this new life. Some tricky situations they were still trying to unravel. Friendships they’d lost. One family estrangement. Two family estrangements. No. Three."

I think social media has exacerbated the "need" for women to look a certain standard. All we want to do is be accepted and it's harder and harder to do with all these micro trends. Do you have a fox face or a cat face? Are you clean girl or mob wife aesthetic? Are you going to get your hair colored old money bronde or cowboy copper? Are you a soft girl or are you in your villain era?

So we're forced to care about these things but then get slapped in the face with labels like "superficial" and "materialistic" when we carry them out. Like we're being punished for having to try and be those things instead of automatically being those things "without trying." We can't win!

Ben even gives us insight on pages 37-38:

"‘Look at me!’ she screamed. ‘You don’t even look at me anymore!’

    And it killed him to hear her say that, because it was true. He avoided looking at her. He was trying really hard to get over that. There were men who stayed married to women who were disfigured by accidents, burns or scars or whatever. It shouldn’t make a difference that Jessica was disfigured by her own hand. Not literally her own hand. Her own credit card. Willful disfigurement.   

    And then all her stupid friends encouraged her. ‘Oh my God, Jessica, you look incredible.’

    He wanted to yell at them, ‘Are you blind? She looks like a chipmunk!’

    The thought of separating from Jessica was like having his guts ripped out, but these days being married to Jessica was like having his guts ripped out. Whatever way you looked at it: guts ripped out."

This, again, is deep and complex conversation to have. But, again, also I think Liane Moriarty offers up an excellent starting point for the conversations to begin.

Spoiler alert, it didn't end well for Ben and Jessica, but I think they both found their own happinesses. Maybe not the ones they wanted for each other, but happinesses all the same. On page 438:

    "Ben thought first about ringing Jessica. They were on very good terms, although he still squirmed with embarrassment when he thought about the post she’d put on Instagram ‘announcing’ their split, as if they were a celebrity couple who owed it to their public to let them know the true story before the media began hounding them. She wrote: We’ll always be best friends but we’ve decided the time has come to lovingly separate.

    Right now, Jessica was in the middle of auditioning for the next season of The Bachelor. She said it wasn’t so much that she wanted to find love, and she doubted she would, but it would be great for her ‘profile’ and it would guarantee her so many thousand more Instagram followers. He couldn’t laugh too much because she was an ‘ambassador’ for multiple charities and her Instagram account was filled with photos of glamorous lunches and balls and breakfasts that she and a new group of society friends were so ‘honored’ to have organized.

    Ben was back working with Pete. The guys gave him a hard time in the beginning — ‘You short of a buck, mate?’ — but eventually they gave up and forgot he was rich. Ben still had the car, and a nice house, but he’d put a lot of his money into a foundation run by his mother to help support families of addicts."

So, please, go where the wind takes you and where you feel the most authentic. Social media is built to give you FOMO or issues with your self confidence. How else would they get people glued to the screens? Be rebellious and see what you want to be without any influence from the heavily filtered, heavily curated, "highlights" of others online.

Here are more spots of interest for this question:

pg 36-38

    Some celebrity couple had come to this place and saved their marriage. They had ‘achieved inner peace’ and got back in touch with their ‘true selves’. What a load of crap. They may as well have handed over their money to Nigerian email scammers. Ben had a horrible feeling the celebrity couple might have got together on The Bachelorette. Jessica loved celebrities. He used to think it was sweet, a dumb interest for a smart girl. But now she was making too many life decisions based on what celebrities did, or what it was reported they did; it was probably all crap anyway, they were probably getting paid to support products on their Instagram accounts. And there was Jessica, his poor innocent, hopeful Jessica, soaking it all up.

    Now it was like she thought she was one of those people. She was imagining herself at those trashy red-carpet events. Every time she got her photo taken these days she put her hand on her hip, like she was doing the actions for ‘I’m a Little Teapot’, then turned side on and thrust out her jaw with this maniacal smile. It was the weirdest thing. And the time she took setting up these photographs. The other day she had spent forty-two minutes (he’d timed it) taking a photo of her feet.

    One of their biggest fights recently had been about one of her Instagram posts. It was a photo of her in a bikini top, leaning over, pushing her arms together so her new boobs looked even bigger and pouting her puffy new lips at the camera. She’d asked what he thought of the photo, her face all hopeful, and because of her hopeful face he hadn’t said what he really thought — that it looked like she was advertising a cheap escort service. He’d just shrugged and said, ‘It’s okay.’

    Her hopeful face fell. You’d think he’d called her a name. Next thing he knew she was screaming at him (these days she could go from zero to a hundred in a second) and he felt sucker-punched, unable to understand what had just happened. So he’d walked away while she was in the middle of yelling and went upstairs to play the Xbox. He thought walking away was a good thing to do. A mature, manly thing to do. To disengage and give her time to calm down. He kept getting these things wrong. She ran up the stairs after him and grabbed the back of his t-shirt before he reached the top.

    ‘Look at me!’ she screamed. ‘You don’t even look at me anymore!’

    And it killed him to hear her say that, because it was true. He avoided looking at her. He was trying really hard to get over that. There were men who stayed married to women who were disfigured by accidents, burns or scars or whatever. It shouldn’t make a difference that Jessica was disfigured by her own hand. Not literally her own hand. Her own credit card. Willful disfigurement.   

    And then all her stupid friends encouraged her. ‘Oh my God, Jessica, you look incredible.’

    He wanted to yell at them, ‘Are you blind? She looks like a chipmunk!’

    The thought of separating from Jessica was like having his guts ripped out, but these days being married to Jessica was like having his guts ripped out. Whatever way you looked at it: guts ripped out.

    If this retreat worked, if they got back to the way they used to be, it was even worth the damage to the car. Obviously, it was worth it. Jessica was meant to be the mother of his children — his future children.

pg 58

    ‘No problem.’ Frances retrieved her phone from her handbag, switched it off, and handed it to Yao. A not unpleasant feeling of subservience crept over her. It was like being on an aeroplane once the seatbelt sign was turned on and the flight attendants were now in charge of your entire existence.

    ‘Great. Thanks. You’re officially “off the grid”!’ Yao held up her phone. ‘We'll keep it safe. Some guests say the digital detox is one of the most enjoyable elements of their time with us. When it’s time to leave, you’ll be saying, “Don’t give it back! I don’t want it back!”’ He held up his hands to indicate someone waving him away.

pg 64

    Ben took a giant bite of the apple. Jessica couldn’t do that anymore, not with her new capped teeth. The dentist wanted her to wear some sort of a mouthguard at night to keep her expensive crowns all safe. It was annoying that the better the stuff you got, the less relaxed you could be about it. It was like the new rug in their hallway. Neither of them could bear to walk on something so astoundingly expensive. They shuffled down the sides and winced when their guests marched straight down the middle in dirty sneakers.

pg 142 B

    He enjoyed the luxury holidays they took, but even the travel didn’t truly make him happy. Jessica remembered a night watching the sun set in Santorini. It was incredible, gorgeous, and she’d just bought a stunning bracelet for herself, and she’d looked across at Ben, who was deep in what seemed like profound thought, and she said, ‘What are you thinking about?’

    ‘Lucy,’ he answered. ‘I remember she used to talk about travelling to the Greek islands.’

    It made her want to scream and scream because they could afford to send Lucy to Santorini and put her up at a great hotel, but that wasn’t possible because Lucy preferred to stick needles in her arms. So fine, let her ruin her own life, but why did she have to ruin their lives as well?

pg 270-271

    ‘I miss your face,’ Ben said to Jessica. ‘Your beautiful face. I don’t recognise you. I don’t recognise us or anything about our lives. I miss our old flat. I miss my job. I miss the friends we lost because of this. But most of all I miss your face.’

    His words were crisp and clear. There was no slurring. No equivocation.

    ‘Good,’ said Masha. ‘Wonderful. Jessica, what do you want to say?’

    ‘I think that Ben is body-shaming,’ said Jessica. ‘I’m still me. I’m still Jessica. I’m still in here! So what if I look a bit different? This is the fashion. It’s just fashion. It’s not important!’

    ‘It’s important to me,’ said Ben. ‘It feels like you took something precious and fucked it up.’

    ‘But I feel beautiful,’ said Jessica. ‘I feel like I was ugly before and now I’m beautiful.’ She stretched her arms above her head like a ballerina. “The question is: who gets to decide if I’m beautiful or not? Me? You? The internet?’

    Right now, she did look beautiful.

    Ben considered for a moment.

    ‘It’s your face,’ he said. ‘So I guess you should decide.’

    ‘But wait! Beauty is ...’ Jessica pointed at her eye. She began to laugh. ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’

    She and Ben laughed and laughed. They clutched each other, repeating ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ over and over, and Masha smiled at them uncertainly. Why was that funny? Perhaps it was an inside joke. She began to feel impatient.

    At long last they stopped laughing and Jessica sat up and touched her lower lip. ‘Look. Fair call. I might have overdone it on the lips last time.’

    ‘I liked your lips before,’ said Ben. ‘I thought you had beautiful lips.’

    “Yeah, I get it, Ben,’ said Jessica.

    ‘I liked our life before,’ said Ben

    ‘It was a shitty little life,’ said Jessica. ‘An ordinary shitty little life.’

    ‘I don’t think it was shitty,’ said Ben.

    ‘I feel like you love your car more than me,’ said Jessica. ‘I’m jealous of your car. I was the one who scratched it. That was me. Because I feel like your car is a slutty girl having an affair with my husband, and so I scratched her slutty face.’

    ‘Wow,’ said Ben. He put both hands to the top of his head. ‘Wow. That is... wow. I can’t believe you did that.’ He didn’t sound angry. Just amazed.

9. Nine Perfect Strangers looks at the notion of transformation. “Oh, to be transformed, to be someone else, to be someone better.” Do you think these nine characters are really looking to be transformed? What does transformation mean to you? Do you think it’s really possible?

I mean...who wouldn't want to be transformed?

I've gone through a lot of transformations with different jobs, different relationships, and becoming a (generally) well adjusted adult through therapy. I joke that I've lived thirteen different lives.

But I also wouldn't mind some more transformations. I used to say (until my therapist told me it's not a great mindset to be in) that "I'm here...but I want to be there."

To quote John Mayer: "I am not done changing / Out on the run, changing / I may be old and I may be young / But I am not done changing."

I absolutely believe it's possible to transform yourself, but you have to put in a lot of work to do so.

And I think all of the characters wanted a transformation...in their own way.

Frances Welty was literally scammed by a guy pretending to have this life that he wanted her to be a part of. She fell in love with his son and, after a "car accident" they needed money. Frances sent it. And never heard from Paul again. She's a novelist and her career is dwindling so she must come to terms with that.

On page 17, she tells herself, "I'm only temporarily tragic."

And I think that rings true for Frances. I think, at Tranquillum House, she was looking for a way to rekindle her belief in herself. She craves the reassurance that she hasn’t lost her worth or relevance as a writer or a person. Her desire for transformation, to me, was more about healing from her recent wounds rather than a fundamental change in her identity.

Napoleon, Heather, and Zoe Marconi are mourning the loss of their son/brother after a suicide. They are all carrying this immense grief and transformation would mean finding a way to move forward.

On page 201, readers get insight from Napoleon's thought process:

    "Napoleon, once a believer in self-improvement, had felt an unusual sensation of bitter cynicism. He and his family had already been transformed in ways they could never have imagined. All they needed was peace and quiet, and certainly an improvement in their diets.

    While I admire and salute your passion, Masha, we do not seek or desire further transformation."

On the surface, the Marconi's (bless my poor brain for consistently reading the Macaroni Family) claim they’re seeking closure or a way to feel “normal” again.

However, their deeper struggle revolves around acceptance. They don't need to be changed any more. but they do need to accept that this terrible thing happened to their family. That's the only way to start healing.

Lars Lee is a divorce lawyer with commitment issues. That makes a lot of sense. What doesn't make a lot of sense is that he's got fears of being tied down (even though he's in a long term relationship??).

Lars, the health resort junkie, is content with his life. It's his boyfriend with the problem. As explained on page 134:

    "If Ray really wanted to be a father, should Lars let him go be one with someone else? But wasn’t that up to Ray? If Ray couldn’t live without children, then he was free to leave. They weren’t married. The house was in both their names, but they were both financially secure and sufficiently intelligent people to work all that out. Obviously Lars could handle a fair division of property.

    Was it the only way forward? Had their relationship reached an impossible impasse because, either way, one of them had to make an impossible sacrifice? Whose sacrifice was worse?

    But Ray had stopped asking! He’d accepted it. Lars felt that Ray wanted something else from him. What was it? Permission to leave? He didn’t want Ray to leave."

If he and Ray were to have a baby, that would be it. Permanent. No going back. That would mean lars makes himself open an vulnerable to loss and heartbreak.

But it also opens Lars up to a deeper love full of acceptance.

He gets there eventually, but the LSD definitely helped.

Tony "Smiley" Hogburn is a former American football tight end struggling with his identity after retiring. He's not very smily, despite what his nickname and bum tattoos say. He used to be revered for his athleticism but now has estranged family, grandkids he hardly knows, and grief for the loss of his beloved dog, Banjo. He's super cynical about the benefits of health resorts. He's stubborn to change, but he knows he needs to. Even if it took some LSD. On page 250, he comes to this realization:

    "Tony ran across an endless field of emerald green carrying an oddly shaped football that weighed as much as three bricks. His arms ached. Footballs weren’t normally that heavy.

    Banjo ran along beside him, he was a puppy again, bounding along with the same joyful abandon as a toddler, getting in between Tony’s legs, tail wagging.

    Tony understood that if he wanted to be happy again, he simply needed to kick this strange misshapen football through the goal. The football represented everything he hated about himself: all his mistakes, his regrets and his shame.

    ‘Sit!’ he said to Banjo.

    Banjo sat. His big brown eyes looked up at Tony trustingly.

    ‘Stay,’ he said.

    Banjo stayed. His tail whooshed back and forth across the grass.

    Tony saw the white goalposts rise like skyscrapers above him.

    He lifted his foot, made contact. The ball sailed in a perfect arc across a clear blue sky. He knew immediately it was good. That rollercoaster feeling in his stomach. There was nothing better. Better than sex. It had been so long."

I think his connections with the other guests of Tranquillum House were the catalyst of transformation. Nobody knew who he was and they still chatted with him. When they found out who he was, they treated him no different—except for Napoleon, who was a fanboy about it.

And any stubbornness was shattered when he thought he was going to die from the "fire" Masha set. On page 399:

    "He wasn’t ready to die. Fifty-six years wasn’t long enough. His life felt suddenly incredibly rich and abundant with possibility. He wanted to repaint the house, get another dog, a puppy; it wouldn’t be betraying Banjo to get a puppy. He always got another puppy in the end. He wanted to go to the beach, eat a big breakfast at the cafe down the road while he read the paper, listen to music — it was like he’d forgotten music existed! He wanted to travel to Holland and see his granddaughter perform in one of those stupid Irish dancing competitions."

Tony’s transformation is about redefining what it means to be strong. For most of his life, strength was physical, tied to his success as an athlete. But his time at Tranquillum House helps him see that real strength comes from emotional resilience, vulnerability, and the courage to start over.

By the end, Tony starts to embrace the possibility of a new life (with Frances!!!). He reconnects with his family and gets a new puppy too!

Ben and Jessica Chandler are a young couple whose marriage is on the rocks because of materialistic pursuits and lack of meaningful connection. Despite Ben's eyeroll explanation of why they went to Tranquillum House ("Some celebrity couple had come to this place and saved their marriage. They had ‘achieved inner peace’ and got back in touch with their ‘true selves’. What a load of crap") I think they were both there to rediscover their love and reprioritize what matters in their marriage.

Ben wants to fix the relationship just like Jessica does! on page 38:

"If this retreat worked, if they got back to the way they used to be, it was even worth the damage to the car. Obviously, it was worth it. Jessica was meant to be the mother of his children — his future children."

It's not for lack of effort. The problem is that they try to fix their deep rooted problems with surface fixes like physical appearance, possessions, or luxurious experiences. BUT the real transformation they need is internal: recognizing the emptiness of their superficial pursuits and learning to appreciate each other on a deeper level. Whether they’re truly ready to embrace that transformation is questionable.

Their ending was not at all surprising, I'll just say that. And not the ending in the Hulu tv series!

Carmel Schneider is a divorced mother of four and she sees herself as only that. She associates weight loss and external changes with regaining control and feeling desirable again. From page 171:

    "Now she thought of Masha’s words: ‘In ten days, you will not be the person you are now.’ The word ‘please’ filled her mind. Please, please, please, let that be true, please, please, please, let me become someone other than this. She looked at her stupid, dopey, pleading face in the mirror. Her skin was rough and red like an old washerwoman’s hands. There was a picket fence of tiny lines neatly indented across her top lip, which was so thin it disappeared when she smiled. The only part of her body that was thin was her top lip. Lips were meant to be plump rosebuds, not mean, thin, disappearing lines.

    Oh, Carmel, of course he stopped being attracted to you! What were you thinking? How could he possibly be attracted to someone who looks like you? She lifted her hand to slap her face once more."

What she truly needed was a transformation to see her own worth is beyond her appearance or her role as a mother. And she does that! She finds empowerment and even befriends the new girlfriend of her ex husband. That's camaraderie of her fellow woman!

Masha Dmitrichenko was going for the biggest transformation of all! She'd already survived a heart attack. She had changed her entire life around from the "filth" it was before. She likes transformation like Lars likes health resorts. She wanted to give transformations out like Oprah gives out cars!

You get an LSD-laced smoothie! You get an LSD-laced smoothie!

But when you focus on giving, you run the risk of emptying your own cup. She transformed a lot, but that transformations didn't get deep enough for her to process the loss of her child. I hope that for her. Her former husband still believes it's possible. On page 447, he says:

    "He wouldn’t give up. One day Masha would answer. One day she would weaken, or find the strength, and she would answer.

    He knew her better than anyone.

    One day she would."

So I think the most important transformation for Masha is still ahead of her.

Here are more spots of interest for this question:

pg 49

The studio did have a lovely, peaceful feel to it, and Frances thought she would enjoy being here, even though she wasn’t that keen on yoga or meditation. She had done a transcendental meditation course years ago, hoping for enlightenment, and every time, without fail, she’d nod off within two minutes of focusing on her breathing, waking up at the end to discover that everyone else had experienced flashes of light, memories of past lives and rapture or whatever, while she’d snoozed and drooled. Basically, she’d paid to have a forty-minute nap at the local high school once a week. No doubt she would be spending a lot of time napping down here, dreaming of wine.

pg 58

Frances tried to imagine herself in ten days and found it strangely difficult, as if it wasn’t ten days but ten years she was imagining. Would she really be transformed? Thinner, lighter, pain-free, able to leap from her bed at sunrise without caffeine?

pg 93

Heather: She’d spent days kicking herself. They didn’t need to be ‘transformed’. There was nothing wrong with their bodies. Everyone always said the three of them were exercise fanatics! This wasn’t the place for the Marconis; it was the place for people like that woman Napoleon had accosted on the stairs. What was her name? Frances. You could tell just by looking at her that she filled her life with lunches and facials and her husband’s work functions.

pg 103

    Masha repeated, "In ten days, you will not be the person you are now."

    No one moved.

    Frances felt hope rise in the room like a delicate mist. Oh, to be transformed, to be someone else, to be someone better.

    “You will leave Tranquillum House feeling happier, healthier, lighter, freer,’ said Masha.

    Each word felt like a benediction. Happier. Healthier. Lighter. Freer.

    "On the last day of your stay with us, you will come to me and you will say this: Masha, you were right! I am not the same person I was. I am healed. I am free of all the negative habits and chemicals and toxins and thoughts that were holding me back. My body and mind are clear. I am changed in ways I could never have imagined.’

    What a load of crap, thought Frances, while simultaneously thinking, Please let it be true.

    She imagined driving home in ten days: pain-free, energized, her head cold cured, her back as flexible as an elastic band, the hurt and humiliation of her romance scam long gone, washed clean! She would walk tall, stand tall. She would be ready for whatever happened with the new book. The review would have faded to nothing.

pg 169

Carmel: She’d told her sister that she was going to spend the time they were away eating paleo and doing cardio and weights and yoga. The plan was to transform her body.

pg 171

Carmel: She’d told her sister that she was going to spend the time they were away eating paleo and doing cardio and weights and yoga. The plan was to transform her body.

pg 178

The new Yao slept through the night and woke up in the morning refreshed. The new Yao no longer thought obsessively about his fiancée in bed with another man. The new Yao rarely thought of Bernadette at all, and eventually completely eradicated her from his thoughts. The new Yao lived in the moment and was passionate about ‘wellness’, inspired by Masha’s vision for Tranquillum House. Instead of just patching people up, like Yao had done as a paramedic, the plan was to transform people, in the same way that he himself had been transformed. It felt like religion, except everything they did was based on science and evidence-based research.

pg 183

Her demeanour would normally have made Frances bristle, and she wasn’t yet quite so Zen that she didn’t note the fact that she had the right to bristle. She was the paying guest turning up at the appointed time, thank you very much, not the hired help. But she didn’t sigh or clear her throat or wriggle because she was very nearly transformed, definitely thinner, and yesterday she did two push-ups in a row on her toes. She’d probably look very similar to Masha quite soon.

pg 201

    When Masha, an extraordinarily fit and healthy-looking woman, clearly passionate about what she did (his wife mistrusted passion and Zoe was still young enough to find it embarrassing, but Napoleon found it admirable), had spoken on the first day about how this experience would change them ‘in ways they could never have imagined’, Napoleon, once a believer in self-improvement, had felt an unusual sensation of bitter cynicism. He and his family had already been transformed in ways they could never have imagined. All they needed was peace and quiet, and certainly an improvement in their diets.

    While I admire and salute your passion, Masha, we do not seek or desire further transformation.

pg 305

She thought that Masha had badly overestimated her guests’ commitment to transformation. When people said they came to Tranquillum House to be ‘enlightened’, what they really meant was ‘skinnier’.

11. Lars thinks to himself in chapter 15: “He never ceased to be amazed by the obedience of people at these places. They allowed themselves to be dipped in mud, wrapped in plastic, starved and deprived, ricked and prodded, all in the name of ‘transformation.’” Do you agree? What’s the oddest thing you’ve ever had done to you for health/beauty reasons?

I think if you're desperate enough to change, you'll do anything.

I also think a lot of people want to skip the hard work and just be transformed already.

Thing is, the transformation comes from the hard work...or near-death experience, and I'm not promoting those. I've had the experience of grabbing onto the universe by the horns for my transformations. I've also had the experience of having the universe throw me over the fence with the aforementioned horns.

Bottom line: If you resist change, the universe will force you to evolve.

Just make sure that change is what you want.

As far as "odd" activities for health/beauty reasons, I have tried an ice bath—not great since I'm already an icicle at base level—and tried cupping therapy—and just ended up looking like I was attacked by an octopus. No shame in anybody trying anything to help them feel better. That's self care—no matter how odd it may be!

As far as the characters going to great lengths for transformation, Delilah, a 'wellness consultant' at Tranquillum House hit a nail somewhere on the head with page 305 saying,

    "When people said they came to Tranquillum House to be ‘enlightened’, what they really meant was ‘skinnier’."

That's probably the base hope for any sort of transition. Who doesn't feel better losing some weight?

But that's a surface thing. Being "dipped in mud, wrapped in plastic, starved and deprived, ricked and prodded" is only worth it if these methods lead you to the deeper transformation. Sitting in a meditation suite won't give you the answers, but meditating—meditating anywhere—will give your mind a break to allow answers to come to you. Being dipped in mud won't melt the fat off your body but it will remind you of the sensation of your body and the importance to reconnect with it.

Delilah continues her sentiments on page 308:

    "Obviously Delilah tried the psychedelic therapy too. Her experience had been awesome, but she wasn’t stupid enough to think any of those feelings or so-called ‘revelations’ were real. They were just drugs. She’d done magic mushrooms before. It was like mistaking lust for love, or thinking that the sentimental feelings you got when you heard a certain song were genuine. Get real. Those feelings were manufactured."

Even the drugs don't give you immediate "enlightenment." It's the journey with the (safely consumed) drugs that opens you up to better opportunities."

But to take drugs for transformation?? Frances explains on page 356:

    "Even the drugs hadn’t truly concerned her. The fact was that if Masha had asked, ‘Would you like to try this smoothie laced with LSD?’ Frances might have said, ‘Sure, why not?’ She would have been impressed by all the talk about ‘research’, comforted by Yao’s background as a paramedic and intrigued by the possibility of a transcendent experience, and she would have been especially susceptible if someone else had said yes first. (As a teenager, her mother had once said to her, ‘If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump too?’ Frances had answered, without guile, ‘Of course.’)"

I think if you're desperate enough to change, you'll do anything. That being said, the change comes from the hard work. Not snail mucus skincare, not sound healing with tuning forks, not colonics, salt therapy, coffee enemas, mud baths, dry brushing, or wrapping yourself in plastic.

Hard work.

Here are more spots of interest for this question:

pg 65

    ‘That smoothie was pretty good,’ said Ben, his mouth full of apple. ‘But I’m starved. I don’t know if my body can cope without pizza for ten days. I don’t see why we even have to do that part! What’s that got to do with marriage counseling?’

    ‘I told you,’ said Jessica. ‘It’s, like, a holistic approach. We have to work on everything: our minds, bodies and spirits.’

    ‘Sounds like a load of —’

pg 127

    [Frances] recalled what Ellen has said when she suggested this place. "Their approach is really quite unconventional.’ Ellen was her friend. She wouldn’t send her somewhere dangerous . . . would she? Just to lose three kilos? You’d want to lose a lot more than three kilos if they were doing something dangerous. What could it be? Walking across burning coals for enlightenment? Frances would absolutely not do that. She didn’t even like walking across hot sand at the beach.

pg 130-131

    Lars saw there was only one empty mat. He was the last guest to arrive. He wondered if he’d made the most fuss about being dragged from his bed. He never ceased to be amazed by the obedience of people at these places. They allowed themselves to be dipped in mud, wrapped in plastic, starved and deprived, pricked and prodded, all in the name of ‘transformation’.

    Of course, Lars did too, but he was prepared to draw the line when necessary. For example, he drew the line at enemas. Also, he did not want to ever, ever discuss his bowel movements.

pg 132

    ‘Namaste,’ said Masha. ‘Thank you for leaving your beds for tonight’s starlight meditation. I am grateful to you for your flexibility, for opening your hearts and minds to new experiences. I am proud of you.’

    She was proud of them. How condescending. She didn’t even know them! They were her clients. They were paying for this. And yet Lars felt a sense of satisfaction in the garden, as if everyone wanted Masha to be proud of them.

    “The retreat you are about to undertake combines ancient Eastern healing wisdom and herbal treatments with the latest cutting-edge advances in Western medicine. I want you to know that although I am not a practicing Buddhist, I have incorporated certain Buddhist philosophies into our practices here.’

   Yeah, yeah, East meets West, never heard that before, thought Lars.

    “This won’t take very long. I’m not going to say much. The stars will do the talking for me. Isn’t it funny how we forget to look up at the stars? We scurry about like ants in our day-to-day lives and look, just look, what’s up above our heads! All your life you look down. It’s time to look up, to see the stars!’

    Lars looked at the sky emblazoned with stars.

    The big guy on his left gave a chesty cough. So did the busty blonde on his right. Jesus. He should be wearing some sort of sanitation mask. If he came back from this thing with a cold, he wouldn’t be happy.

    Masha said, ‘Some of you may have heard of the word koan. A koan is a paradox or puzzle that Zen Buddhists use during meditation to help them on their quest towards enlightenment. The most famous one is this: What is the sound of one hand clapping ?’

    Oh Lord. The website had given the impression that this place leaned more towards luxury wellness. Lars had a daily yoga and meditation practice, but he preferred his health retreats to avoid too much embarrassing cultural appropriation.

pg 312

But they weren’t okay. Nothing she’d thought last night had been real. It was all just drugs. Drugs lied. Drugs fucked you up. She and Ben knew that better than anyone. Sometimes Ben’s mother sat and cried over the pictures of Lucy before she fell for the lies of drugs. Now that was a ‘transformation’.

Final Thoughts

I think reading this transformed me, too. And I didn't have to travel to Australia for it! I've since caught myself eating fast and slowed down the process by enjoying each bite. I tell myself to stop being a Carmel when looking at my body. I get down in the dumps about "glory days" like Tony and I know there are better days ahead. I haven't experienced loss like the Marconi's have, but their enduring hope of changes has nested within me.

Bravo to Liane Moriarty with this one. I might read it for a fourth time now...just because Masha is right, I may return to my daily life and, like page 84 says, might only experience a temporary change and return to my default settings.

Transformation is a consistent choice to yourself.

Unanswered Book Questions

I kept all of discussion questions in mind while reading the novel but the above questions in particular elicited the most out of me.

Check out the Nine Perfect Strangers Reading Group Guide from Flat Iron Books for more questions to the story. I'm curious about your answers to the discussion questions!

The lowest point of your life can lead to the highest (page 387),

Katherine Arkady