Want to Know a Secret?

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual content, harassment, illness, emotional abuse, graphic violence, and death.

Throughout the novel, McFadden explores the duality of identity as they struggle to reconcile the person that they are in private versus the person that they project to everyone else. While the tendency to behave differently around others exists within everyone, April’s character takes it to the extreme. Using April’s character, McFadden highlights how people conceal their darkest secrets behind carefully curated public personas—even to deadly lengths.

McFadden uses a shifting first-person perspective to explore the false identity that April projects to the people in her community. April is an unreliable narrator in the text, as much of her narrative is false. She leads the reader to believe several things about her life that are not true: she had an affair with Mark, rather than just kissing him as she claims; her mother does not have dementia, but rather April put her in a nursing home to stop her from telling the truth; she knows what happened to her neighbor, Doris; and more. April’s biggest secret is the fact that she is a murderer, having killed both Courtney after she had an affair with her husband and Doris to stop her from telling Elliot about her affair with Mark.