Sisterhood During Crises
Although the title hints at a story about carefree fun during a vacation get-together, the narrative turns out to be one filled with personal melodramas. Each of the friends who are invited to enjoy the weekend bring troubling issues with their own lives. Through the power of sisterhood which spans a gamut of ages and backgrounds, they all require the affection and care of the others to arrive at a moment of awareness or reach a turning point. The story is quite specific to the ideal of feminine strengths in confronting their issues rather than avoiding them and by focusing on change rather than getting lost in the illusory drama of competitive sports such as an equitable group of men might do.
The Power of Film
The woman inviting the others to the five-star weekend asks her college-age daughter to document the highlights on film. Although Hollis is intending for her daughter Caroline to essentially create a video scrapbook of the good times, Caroline pursues the opportunity with a more serious goal. She hopes to create a genuine documentary-style film that treats the lens as an objective observer. Instead, the result is that the daughter is afforded a literally close-up view of her mother which results in her seeing her subjectively in a way she never has. The novel implicitly suggests that society learns much about feelings of empathy and understanding from the fictions they see portrayed on the screen which can then be applied to real life. By transforming the weekend into a cinematic representation of reality, Caroline comes to a better understanding of the underlying causes at work in creating conflict between mother and daughter.
Cancel Culture
One of the friends invited to the weekend is a woman named Dru-Ann who has enjoyed a successful career representing female athletes. She arrives for the weekend gripped in anxiety over the possibility of being canceled as the result of a video which appears to show her making critical comments about the state of one of her client’s mental health. The thematic treatment of cancel culture is a net thrown wide enough to examine it from the perspective of social media, mob psychology, and how the attacks impact the interpersonal relationships of those facing cancellation.
