“My mom says your husband is in a better place now,” the ten-year-old announced to our grieving friend, her voice flat. “Is it because your house is so messy?”
Her mother called it “radical honesty.” A gift.
A gift that had already declared a friend’s prized painting a “big blue booger” and another’s famous pie as tasting like “feet.”
But watching the color drain from our friend’s face, I knew this wasn’t honesty. It was emotional vandalism, and the polite facade our book club had maintained for months was about to be obliterated.
Karen loved nothing more than intellectual women and brutal honesty, so I arranged for her to be publicly vivisected by both, using her own daughter as the scalpel and a celebrated author as the surgeon.
The First Crack in the Foundation: A New Face and an Uninvited Guest
The Tuesday Night Book Club was a sanctuary. For twenty years, the same six women—me, Sarah, Eleanor, Maria, Judy, and Beth—had gathered in a rotation of living rooms. We’d dissected novels over cheap wine and expensive cheese, navigating the fictional lives of characters as we navigated our own very real divorces, empty nests, and aging parents. It was sacred ground, paved with dog-eared paperbacks and shared history.
Then Karen joined.
Beth had met her at a yoga retreat and, in a fit of sun-salutation-induced goodwill, invited her. Karen was forty-two, a decade and a half our junior, with the kind of aggressive wellness that made me feel tired just looking at her. She spoke in a vocabulary of “holding space” and “vibrating on a higher frequency.” We were polite. We were welcoming. We could adjust.
The first crack appeared on her third meeting, held at my house. An hour in, the doorbell rang. It was Karen, looking flustered, with a small, blonde girl attached to her hand. “So sorry!” she announced to the room. “Sitter canceled last minute. This is Dakota. You all don’t mind, do you?”
We were a room full of mothers and grandmothers. Of course, we didn’t mind. We made a space for the ten-year-old on the floor with a bowl of pretzels and my iPad. The girl, Dakota, had pale, watchful eyes that seemed to take in everything. We were discussing a dense historical fiction novel set in Tudor England. Maria was making a point about Anne Boleyn’s ambition when a small, clear voice cut through the room. “This sounds really boring.”
A stunned silence fell. We all looked at the little girl, then at Karen, expecting a gentle reprimand. Instead, Karen beamed, a brilliant, proud smile. “Dakota, honey, thank you for sharing your truth. I just love that she’s not afraid to be authentic.” She turned to us, her expression beatific. “We have a policy in our house: radical honesty. No topic is off-limits, no opinion is suppressed.”
The Unfiltered Critic
The next month, at Sarah’s house, “radical honesty” got a full-throated audition. Sarah, a retired interior designer, had a home that looked like a magazine spread. It was impeccable, her pride and joy. We were all arranged on her cream-colored sofas, admiring a new abstract painting she’d hung over the fireplace. Dakota, who Karen had brought along again without apology, squinted at it.
“That painting looks like a big blue booger,” she declared.
Sarah’s smile froze on her face. A nervous titter went around the room. Karen just laughed, a sound like wind chimes in a hurricane. “See? She just says what everyone’s thinking! It’s so refreshing, isn’t it?”
No one was thinking that. We were thinking it was a bold, beautiful piece of art that probably cost more than our cars. But no one said a word. We were women of a certain generation, conditioned to smooth over rough edges, to keep the social machinery humming. Confrontation was a tool of last resort.
Later, as Sarah served her famous lemon meringue pie, Dakota took one bite and pushed the plate away. “The yellow part tastes like feet and the white part is too smooshy.”
This time, the silence was heavier. Sarah, who had spent the entire afternoon baking, just stared down at her own slice, her fork hovering. I watched the slight tremor in her hand. This wasn’t refreshing. It was cruel. And Karen, her mother, just sat there, glowing with a vicarious pride, as if her daughter had just recited a Shakespearean sonnet instead of insulting our hostess. “I’m so glad she has a discerning palate,” Karen murmured, loud enough for us all to hear.
A Conversation with My Conscience (and My Husband)
That night, I couldn’t shake the image of Sarah’s face. I found my husband, Mark, in the garage, tinkering with his old Triumph motorcycle. The smell of oil and metal was a comforting antidote to the cloying scent of Karen’s patchouli perfume.
“It’s getting out of hand,” I said, leaning against his workbench. I explained the “booger” painting and the “feet” pie.
Mark wiped his hands on a rag, his brow furrowed. “The kid’s ten. Kids say stupid things. Where’s her mother in all this?”
About the Author
