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The Safety of Secrets

Delauné Michel
Avon: An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers (2008)
ISBN 9780060817367
Reviewed by Lisa Heidle for RebeccasReads (7/08)

In “The Safety of Secrets” by Delauné Michel, we meet Fiona, a working actor in Hollywood, who is married and expecting her first child. Although this should be an exciting time, her closest friendship is unraveling and her marriage is strained. She has spent much of her life holding a life-altering incident from her childhood so close that nothing can penetrate, showing the malignant effects of secrets and how they contaminate all that we love and desire most. 

She and Patricia, her childhood friend, were drawn together out of a shared understanding of what it’s like to be unseen, not considered. Both become actors in order to gain the acceptance they never had as children, a natural progression for two unwanted women who learned to play roles and wear masks at a young age. The experience they shared and chose to lock away has bound them together, more out of necessity than devotion. Due to their troubled early lives, neither Fiona nor Patricia learned how to separate from one another and create boundaries as they moved into adulthood; the interactions between them and others are juvenile at best. When Fiona shares the news with her husband that they are going to have a baby, he asks that she postpone sharing the news until the pregnancy progresses. Having already told Patricia, Fiona has “…a sudden impulse to cross my fingers behind my back.” She justifies the telling to herself by saying, “And she’s my best friend, for Christ’s sake. Telling her is like telling myself.”

Michel uses Fiona’s progressing pregnancy in parallel to the disintegrating relationship between the two women. As the burden of concealment builds in them both, communication turns into competition and devotion turns into animosity until the pain and resentment is palpable. They skirt around the secret they share, unwilling to delve into the pain from the past. The author also refers to acting approaches to mirror Fiona’s interpersonal relationships, reinforcing the belief that all is not what it seems with the struggling character. After a difficult encounter with Patricia, Fiona muses, “I want to slap her. And rewind this to the beginning when she walked in to see if we could do a better take, like happy best friends. Like that acting technique of working from the outside in: do the physical and the emotions will follow. Not that I ever believed in that technique, but maybe it could work this time.”

When Patricia divulges their shared history on national television, Fiona is forced to question what occurred so many years before and to explore the difference between secrets and privacy. Delauné Michel’s “The Safety of Secrets” shows that safety is only an opaque illusion if it does not reside within the truth.

  

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