Debbie Mullen spends her column telling other women what to do about husbands who lie, belittle, and worse, and the joke of Dear Debbie is that she's terrible at taking her own advice. McFadden opens on a woman absorbing one indignity after another: a job gone, a marriage curdling into surveillance, two teenage daughters who've started keeping secrets of their own. The early chapters move at a deliberate simmer, stacking small humiliations until Debbie's patience runs out in a way that feels less like a twist than an inevitability.
Once she stops being reasonable, the book turns gleefully mean. McFadden has always known how to make a reader complicit, and here she weaponizes the advice-column structure itself: every problem Debbie used to solve for strangers becomes a problem she starts solving for herself, by whatever means the situation demands. The plotting rewards suspicion. Husbands, neighbors, colleagues, even the daughters, all get a turn under Debbie's newly unsentimental eye, and McFadden keeps sliding the ground so a reader's confidence about who's dangerous and who's just unpleasant never sits still for long.
The payoff is where the book proves itself as a thriller and not just a fantasy of comeuppance. McFadden lays enough groundwork that the late revelations reframe earlier scenes rather than contradicting them, which is the difference between a twist that lands and one that just startles. A subplot dealing with assault and its long aftermath carries more weight than the book's darkly comic register might suggest, treated as a wound rather than a plot device, and it grounds Debbie's rage in something more specific than generic marital grievance. Some of the late turns resolve faster than the slow-burn opening promises, the last act moving at a clip that trades a little complexity for momentum.
Why you should read
- Readers who want a revenge plot with real dark comedy
- Fans of domestic thrillers about marriages built on secrets
- Anyone who likes an unreliable, unsentimental female narrator
- Readers who enjoy twists that recontextualize earlier scenes
What to expect
- A slow-burn opening that accelerates hard at the midpoint
- Dark comic tone alongside genuinely serious subject matter
- Multiple suspects and shifting reasons to distrust them
- A satisfying, if occasionally rushed, final-act payoff
Debbie herself is the reason the meanness works. She's petty in recognizable ways, generous in others, and funny about her own worst impulses even as she indulges them, which keeps the revenge plot from curdling into something merely grim. McFadden writes New England suburbia as a place where everyone is surveilling everyone, phone trackers and knowing neighbors turning ordinary domestic life into its own low-grade thriller before Debbie ever does anything drastic. By the time the accounts get settled, the book has made its case that being the bigger person for years is its own kind of slow damage, and watching someone stop absorbing it is most of the fun.
