Review by Jane Ward
Janelle Wolf’s birthday celebration is approaching, Charles Wolf’s business is going through a rebrand, and their daughter–Mira–is planning her wedding. On the surface, it appears the Wolf family leads a rather ordinary life. But award-winning author Mindy Friddle makes it clear from the start that life within the home of the Wolfs of Her Best Self is nothing close to mundane. Beneath the mannered surface lurks dysfunction and worse: lies, deceptions, and manipulations that threaten to bring down an entire dynasty.
The novel toggles between events of 2015 and thirty years earlier when matriarch Janelle drove off a bridge into a river during a terrible storm and suffered brain injuries that left her uncertain about what happened to her. All these years later, Janelle’s memory continues to fail her when she tries to conjure up that horrible night. When she meets Lana O’Shield, a spiritual counselor who promises to help unlock those memories, Janelle throws herself into the exercises assigned to her.
I have come away from all ten of my Wednesday outings feeling invigorated, remembering things. New things, I mean. About the accident. Lana says to write it all down, to stockpile my memories. To prepare….Lana said I am growing empowered, that I am flexing my independence, that I am giving myself permission to remember. (5)
Nothing about this family is what it seems. Charles Wolf has been siphoning money from his business, Rex Wolf Staffing Solutions, and working to keep his new business partner, Teddy Rex, from doing an audit. Mira may be marrying Nelson but she is obsessed with Teddy and he is with her, all while Teddy’s wife, Reagan, is managing the company rebrand. Janelle may have been fleeing from a gathering at the Rex’s home on the night of the storm, and not arriving as was reported and then repeated to her until it became what she believed. And Lana O’Shield, spiritual counselor, is actually a con artist with “a playbook…on how to hustle Charles Wolf.” (48)
A quick synopsis like this can’t capture the complexity of the novel, however. Yes, it is a zippy, thrilling read, and can be read as such. But Friddle has a deft touch as well, and has layered this well-paced plot and tight prose with thought provoking nuggets.
In the 1980s, Janelle was lauded in newspaper articles as a success “at being a wife, a mother, a community volunteer, and a career woman, all at once” (35), but she is one of many women who went from family home to marital home, from a father managing her life to a husband doing the same. Her father’s money was turned over to her husband so he might launch his business, rather than aid any projects she might have initiated. On the eve of her birthday party, Charles comes home to find her reading Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea in her bedroom. That 1966 novel sympathetically reimagines the life of Bertha Rochester, Jane Eyre’s “madwoman in the attic,” and the themes of men defining women as mentally unstable as a way to confine and control is central to Janelle’s story as well. While Bertha Rochester was held captive in an actual attic, Charles has kept his wife trapped in untrue memories, all to prevent his dark secrets from spilling out and sullying his reputation with the public and his family.
Little by little, though, these secrets are teased out, until finally fully revealed. The Wolf’s story is a modern Gothic tale, with all of Gothic’s best elements. An old home in secluded surroundings. Family secrets. The decline and fall of a once-important business and once self-important businessmen. A victimized woman, her villain, and his attempt to restrain her, and finally, the flawed antihero who saves her. Readers won’t necessarily admire outcast grifter, Lana O’Shield, but as she enacts her own self-serving plans, she allows Janelle’s truth to come out.
For years I had no memory of my accident, or even the days around it. A whole month of my life was lost to me, days and nights the doctors said I would never recall. But Lana says that is nonsense. My blackout is shrinking from days to hours, and now to minutes. (180)
How far will people go to preserve their images is the provocative question Mindy Friddle poses, and the story’s construct allows readers entry into the minds and machinations behind the veneers of gentility. By turns hilarious, heartbreaking, and chilling, Her Best Self is a real wild ride of a novel.
Her Best Self by Mindy Friddle
Regal House Publishing, May 2024
Paperback $20.95
ISBN 978-1-64603-463-5
Jane Alessandrini Ward is the author of In the Aftermath (She Writes Press, 2021), The Mosaic Artist (2011) and Hunger (Forge, 2001). She has been a contributing writer for an online regional and seasonal food magazine and a blogger and occasional host of cooking videos for an internet recipe resource. Jane lives in Massachusetts. To learn more, visit janeaward.com.