This movie is good the way The Notebook is good: it’s not, but it’s great.Ĭut to some many years later. So she goes away to a mental institution for six months, which her eldest daughter Sidda understands to be her mom just ditching the family because no one will admit that mental illness is a thing. All the friends are alcoholics, but Vivi is the most alcoholic, and since this is, I guess, the ’60s (it’s the South, so everything looks kinda 1940s-ish but…it’s not then?), a doctor prescribes her pills to help her quit drinking, and the pills make her crazy and she’s a pretty bad mom, hovering somewhere between negligent and abusive. Vivi wants to be a “big city newspaper woman” and also marry the dad from Gossip Girl, who is one of her friends’ brothers, but he dies in the war so she marries some nice guy instead. Her mom (Cherry Jones) is kind of like the mom in Carrie with the religiosity bordering on mental illness. Anyway, they grow up a little bit, and the leader girl, vivacious Vivi, is now played by Ashley Judd, and her parents are always fighting. Just so everyone is clear here, these old Southern women: not racist. Also, they are not racist and are really nice to their Black nannies, which gets hammered home pretty quickly after they throw pie in the face of a boy who is racist. Based on some novels that were, I assume, a hit on the book club circuit, Divine Secrets goes like this: In the distant past, four best friends in Louisiana promise to be wild women who support each other forever.

Divine sisterhood of the ya ya book