One of Us Is Dead

The main characters cultivate their images with care. They spend hours at the salon, have cosmetic procedures, and are always ready with a “Buckhead smile.” They consciously perform certain roles and resist others.

Jenny’s clients obsess over their physical appearance, trying to project the eternal youth and normative beauty that their socialite status demands. She can charge high membership prices because the women can afford to “pour resources into fighting the greatest war of their lives: the one against the effects of time on the human body” (9). They embrace artifice and resist natural change, also patronizing Karen’s husband, Mark, a plastic surgeon. Though the fight against time is ultimately doomed, the novel suggests that the battle is a necessary part of their age and lifestyle. They fear being replaced by younger wives. When Karen observes Olivia’s vitriol toward Shannon, she notes that the women are close to the same age and Bryce “traded [Shannon] in for a newer model. [Olivia’s] hatred toward her was laced with insecurity and fear” (32). Crystal is “fresh-faced” and beautiful with a natural “glow” (27). She is initially uninterested in joining Jenny’s salon, free from the anxious need that drives women to Glow.

The characters put the same conscious effort into their manners and social performances. Early in the interview, Detective Sanford asks Jenny if she believes that the women only pretended to get along. She responds, “I think these women were pretending to be a lot of things” (60). All of the characters have moments of insincerity, but no one else takes artifice to the level that Olivia does. All her expressions are calculated. When speaking to Jenny about the break-in, her “face [turns] sympathetic. It was something [she] had practiced through watching reruns of Grey’s Anatomy, when the doctor had to tell some poor patient’s family their loved one didn’t make it” (228). She doesn’t experience empathy; she performs it. She even scripts the social performances of others, coaching other board members of Buckhead Women’s Committee. One of them doesn’t give the right line in support of Olivia’s motion to remove Shannon as chair, so Olivia delivers it, thinking, “That was what Sophie was supposed to say” (24).

Buckhead offers a limited number of roles and stories from which characters can choose. Newcomer Crystal knows that she has been “labeled a gold digger and a home-wrecker” (77). She doesn’t accept the evaluation, but she understands that there’s only one other “role” available to her: “I had to be the nice, beautiful girl from Texas that Bryce just couldn’t help falling in love with. I’d have to enchant them […] Sounds a bit ridiculous, but people love fairy tales, and whether I liked it or not, this was now my narrative” (77). Crystal doesn’t conflate image and identity. She keeps her humor and an actorly sense of distance from the role she plays. Nonetheless, she accepts the limited range of roles available to her and shapes her behavior accordingly.

Buckhead’s social world offers women a narrow range of possible identities. When these identities no longer fit, the women struggle to understand themselves.