Valley of the Moms: A Guest Post by Hannah Selinger

Gossip, drama and a dead body. This suburban town has it all. This sharp tale of wealth, community and secrets follows a small town that unravels after the mysterious death of a local mother. Read on for an exclusive essay from Hannah Selinger on writing Valley of the Moms. 

Stepford Wives meets Big Little Lies in this twisty thriller that uncovers the untruths, petty grievances, and local school politics underneath a seemingly quaint small town.

Truth is stranger than fiction, the adage goes, and it was, indeed truth, and not fiction, that inspired the idea behind my debut novel. Not long after I moved back to Massachusetts, after a 17-year absence, I found myself in a bit of a kerfuffle with the local Parent Teacher Organization. 

My husband and I were new to town, my oldest son a Kindergartener. We had come from the Hamptons where, surrounded by wealth and its various permutations, the idea of elsewhere had loosely translated to better and different. In Massachusetts, though, not too many miles from the small city in which I had grown up, wealth was categorically the same as it had been Out East, which is to say: evident in every interaction, right down to our public school system. 

When fighting it through traditional means began to feel futile, I sat down to write about it. Wealth, I thought, was already an exaggerated concept, but what if I were to stretch the idea further, past acceptability? And so, Valley of the Moms was born. 

I set out to explore not only the idea of the Parent Teacher Organization as provocateur, but also the idea of how wealth could shape a community and its moral code. What kinds of behaviors did wealthy communities find permissible? How far was too far? Was it really a stretch to conceive of a place where passions and persuasions and money created a petri dish of discontent so fertile that it bred murder? 

I didn’t think so. 

What began as an idea rooted in truth became a time and a place all its own. Anna and Denny, the main characters in Valley of the Moms, are not based on real people, though the setting–the North Shore of Massachusetts–plays a defining role in the architecture of its narrative. The book could take place anywhere, I guess; wealthy stories like this are not endemic to where I live. But this book, as I see it, as I know it, and as I wrote it, could only take place here, where the brooding New England sentiment plays its own character. 

To write a literary thriller about a place you love is not, I don’t think, about pessimism. In the end, what I hope readers take away from this work is that wealth comes at a cost, and that even our impulses to stabilize–to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe–arrives at great personal risk. Every choice, big and small, reverberates with consequence. 

My hope is that Anna and Denny’s story inspires readers to think more deeply about wealth and its corrosiveness; about marriages and the secrets that we keep; and about how where we live is a part of all of us.