Dear Debbie

There is a particular kind of reading experience that Freida McFadden has made her signature, a book that you open at nine in the evening telling yourself you will read two chapters before bed, and then look up from at two in the morning having finished the whole thing. Dear Debbie is that kind of book. It is not her most complex novel. It is not her most psychologically subtle. But as an exercise in pure readability, in the kind of propulsive, darkly comic, revenge-fantasy momentum that makes you forget you have a body, it is very possibly her best.
Debbie herself is the key to everything. She is unlike most of McFadden's protagonists, who tend to be women in reactive positions, being gaslit, being threatened, discovering terrible truths about the men they married. Debbie is not reactive. She is a former MIT computer science prodigy who chose domestic life and now, thirty years later, is watching that choice disintegrate from the inside. She is brilliant and slightly unhinged and she has an extremely clear sense of who deserves what in the world around her. When she decides to stop dispensing advice and start dispensing consequences, the results are not the impulsive thrashing of a woman in crisis. They are the calculated, technically sophisticated, often hilarious operations of someone who has been paying attention for decades and has finally decided to use what she knows.
The dark comedy in Dear Debbie is sharper and more confident than in McFadden's previous work. The book knows it is funny. Debbie knows she is funny. There is a self-awareness running through her narration that keeps the reader's sympathy firmly in place even as the things she does escalate well beyond anything a reasonable person would endorse. McFadden manages a genuinely difficult trick here, making you cheer for someone who is technically doing terrible things, by making both the justice of her grievances and the satisfaction of her methods feel earned rather than gratuitous. You want her to get away with it. You want the book club women and the predatory educators and the husband with his secrets to get exactly what is coming to them. And the book, generously, delivers.
The pacing is McFadden at her most disciplined. The chapters are short and end at exactly the right moment to make you begin the next one. The reveals are timed well, spaced throughout the narrative rather than dumped at the end, which gives the book an ongoing sense of momentum rather than a single climactic jolt. The multiple points of view, including sections from Debbie's daughters and from other characters whose lives intersect with hers, add texture and the occasional interesting complication to what could have been a more one-dimensional story.
Where the book is less convincing is in its third act, which accumulates coincidences at a rate that eventually strains even the willing suspension of disbelief the book has carefully cultivated. The revelation that ties together Debbie's past trauma and her present situation requires several things to be simultaneously true that, taken individually, are each plausible, but stacked together begin to feel engineered rather than discovered. McFadden has always been a writer who prizes the plot mechanism over psychological realism in her endings, and readers who have followed her work will recognize this as a recurring pattern. It does not ruin the book. It does, however, interrupt the particular pleasure of the first two thirds.
There is also something genuinely interesting in the book's central premise that McFadden uses more than she fully explores. Debbie running an advice column and then deciding to stop advising and start acting is a rich irony that points toward questions about the gap between telling other people what to do and doing it yourself, about the wisdom we dispense freely to others that we cannot apply to our own lives, about what it costs a woman to play the reasonable, measured, helpful role for decades. The book touches on all of this without quite committing to it as its central concern. It is a thriller first and a meditation second, which is a perfectly legitimate choice, though the meditation is interesting enough that you occasionally wish the book had slowed down long enough to inhabit it more fully.
None of which changes the fact that Dear Debbie is enormously enjoyable, sharply written, and the kind of book that makes a Sunday afternoon disappear. As revenge thrillers go, it is very close to the top of its class.