Her Best Self (Regal House 2024) by Mindy Friddle is a fascinating look inside a dysfunctional family in a well-crafted, evocative story with a psychological thriller quality to it. Throughout the novel, pervasive cunningness by several characters heightens tensions and casts a riveting net sure to pull readers deeper into the tale. A darkly comedic quality further enhances the fast pacing, the threatening foreshadowing, and the sheer cleverness of the whole package. In short, Her Best Self is a marvel. Set in South Carolina and authored by a South Carolina native, the book casually captures the noisiness of small Southern towns and the class distinctions often cruelly drawn in society. Yet, it is the diverse characters, all impeccably drawn by the author and often a mystery even to themselves, who drive the story.
The wife, Janelle Wolf, suffered a brain injury in a puzzling accident many years before when she drove her car off a bridge into a river and barely survived. In the aftermath, Janelle is haunted by the person she was before the accident, even naming her “Janelle Before.” This “Janelle Before” was a powerhouse as a wife, mother, and attractive socialite who actively involved herself in her husband George’s then successful Rex-Wolf Staffing business. She seeks to find way back to “her best self,” that is, “Janelle Before.”
Early in the novel Janelle asks two key questions which shape the novel: Why did she drive off that bridge? And why did she scream hysterically at at her husband Charles when he arrived at the scene? She does not know.
Janelle struggles not only with a loss of self-confidence but with memory issues—did she ever love Charles before she drove off the bridge? “Everyone says so,” she replies when asked if she and Charles were happy together before the accident. Despite her prior high social standing, she is shunned by many in her former social circles after the accident as they somehow blame her.
Charles projects a lovingly protective persona with regards to his wife, but he might or might not really be that loving and supportive of Janelle. After all, he hires a private eye to either spy on her or protect her, and even he vacillates as to which motive is dominant. Whether he is trying to help her recover her memory or doing his damnedest to make sure she never does is a question that weaves through the story with increasing intensity. After the death of his business partner, Charles is also facing the fact their Rex-Wolf Staffing enterprise is falling apart.
Charles and Janelle’s two grown children, Mira and Burry, add further intrigue and a grand dose of charm to the story. Mira is a free-spirited daughter who is a well-educated poet and former college instructor. She now works as a bar manager, and is planning her wedding to a tightwad, stuffy man. No one seems to think this marriage is a good idea except possibly Mira and her prospective groom. Her brother Burry has a tense relationship with their dad after abandoning a job in his dad’s firm. Like Mira, he is devoted to his mom. Tenderhearted and kind, Burry is doing his best to help lovingly raise his partner’s neurodivergent son.
This son—known as Spec— steals every scene he’s in and becomes more important as the story evolves. A shy youth with a rare gift for computers and variously diagnosed, though probably on the autism scale, Spec struggles to make sense of the adults around him. The developing close relationship between him and Janelle (he calls her “Grandmother” though there is no blood relationship) is especially sweet. Readers should keep a careful eye on Spec!
And then there’s Teddy, the son of Charles’s late business partner, and Teddy’s take-charge, aggressive wife Reagan. These two have a whole new plan for George’s failing company. Reagan wants to “rebrand” and “recast the narrative” of Rex-Wolf Staffing and install Teddy as the new CEO. Eventually, Reagan hopes to push Teddy into politics. Teddy tends to go along with whatever Reagan wants as that is the best way to get along with her. But despite his marriage, he is preoccupied with his long- infatuation with Mira and his many attempts to win her as a lover.
Kicking much of the action into play, Lana, the outsider and so-called psychic healer, intrudes into the family with a certain gifted aggression and wily deceit. She encourages Janelle to write copious notes designed—so Lana says anyway—to help Janelle remember what happened the night she drove off the bridge. While Janelle views Lana as her “spiritual midwife” and good friend, Charles thinks Lana is a “gypsy grifter.” Lana dresses in an eccentric style meant to project herself as a spiritualist. She is the catalyst that will break all the various secrets out in the open, but more than that, she is a fascinating character study of the ultimate survivor. That she has beguiled Janelle becomes clear early on, but her ultimate purpose is only slowly revealed.
Whether readers deem this a complex mystery in the guise of a domestic tale, or a domestic story with a thriller gloss, the story is enthralling. Mindy Friddle is a skilled author who creates this utterly captivating tale with a cast of wonderfully complex characters who seem snared by their own secrets. Told with a rotation of points of view, every major character has a chance to be center stage and nearly all have aspects of the unreliable narrator. Janelle, who suffers from the after-effects of her brain injury, is the most unreliable of all. Yet her husband Charles is so locked into his own slanted version of reality, he too has moments of sheer unreliability. The combination of character, plot, unreliable narrators, mystery, pacing, and the crisp writing makes this a stellar novel.
There is so much gas-lighting going on it’s hard to explain in a review, and that there are secrets—many and all potentially explosive—is a given. Lana, whether grifter or spiritual counselor, spears Janelle and George and soon opens a Pandora’s box. Ultimately the who-is-gaslighting-whom will be revealed. But what a merry, fast paced, and fascinating ride readers will have until they reach the climax and the big reveal.
Mindy Friddle
Mindy Friddle is a native of South Carolina, and the author of two other novels, The Garden Angel, selected for Barnes and Noble’s Discover Great New Writers; and Secret Keepers, awarded the Willie Morris Prize for Southern Fiction. She is the recipient of The South Carolina Arts Commission Fellowship in Prose and has twice won the state’s Fiction Prize. Named a Fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Friddle’s short stories have appeared in storySouth, LitMag, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Southern Humanities Review, and many others. She lives on Edisto Island, SC.
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