When an Advice Columnist Starts Taking Revenge
She Gives Advice. Now She Wants Results.
Debbie Mullen spends her working life responding to other people’s problems. Women write to her about marriages that diminish them, husbands who control them and situations they have been encouraged to tolerate. From the reassuring distance of an advice column, she can suggest a way forward. Managing her own life proves less straightforward.
In Freida McFadden’s Dear Debbie, professional disappointment, domestic tension and concealed grievances begin pressing against the same carefully maintained surface. Debbie is observant, capable and increasingly unwilling to absorb another insult. The appeal of this standalone thriller lies in watching the gap between what she presents to others and what she considers an acceptable solution grow dangerously wide.
The Advice That Costs Debbie Her Job
Debbie loses her newspaper column after advising a woman to leave a financially abusive husband. The husband threatens legal action, and the publication protects itself by removing the person who offered the advice.
This is a particularly sharp beginning for an advice columnist’s revenge story. Debbie has performed the function her job supposedly exists to fulfil: recognising a problem and recommending a response. Her employer then treats the consequences of that response as a reason to abandon her.
The column’s authority proves conditional. It can offer reassurance while everyone remains comfortable, but advice becomes commercially inconvenient when somebody acts upon it and a powerful person objects. Debbie discovers that being permitted to speak is different from being supported when her words matter.
At home, her husband Cooper faces his own professional humiliation. His attempt to secure advancement at his accounting firm ends with him giving notice after his boss, Ken Bryant, refuses. An assertion of self-worth becomes an immediate threat to the household’s financial security.
Both spouses struggle to disclose what has happened. Their marriage becomes a place where bad news is edited before delivery. Each wants the other to see a version of events that feels less humiliating than the truth.
That dynamic gives the opening more substance than a simple accumulation of miserable experiences. Losing work creates practical difficulty, but hiding the loss changes the relationship through which that difficulty might have been managed. Debbie and Cooper begin responding to incomplete versions of each other’s circumstances.
Debbie also writes unpublished responses to her readers that abandon the restraint expected of an advice column. These drafts imagine violent solutions to domestic frustrations.
The distinction between published advice and private writing establishes an unsettling question. A furious draft can be a release valve, allowing someone to express thoughts they would never act upon. It can also become rehearsal. The reader has to determine which function Debbie’s writing serves as events outside the document grow harder to dismiss.
Small Humiliations Become Personal Projects
Debbie’s neighbourhood provides further opportunities to feel overlooked. A planned magazine feature on her garden goes to her neighbour Jo instead. Her book club offers social condescension rather than companionship.
She responds through covert retaliation. Jo’s roses suffer an engineered infestation. A book-club gathering becomes an episode of illness after Debbie supplies the food.
These episodes establish the novel’s dark comedy, but they also complicate its invitation to sympathise with her. Losing recognition for a garden is unpleasant. It does not belong in the same moral category as coercion or abuse. Debbie’s willingness to retaliate across that enormous difference exposes a weakness in her private system of justice.
Her decisions are governed by how an offence registers with her. There is no independent process for deciding whether a grievance deserves action or whether the response is proportionate. Once somebody enters the category of people who have wronged her, punishment becomes an available project.
The domestic setting makes that project deceptively ordinary. Gardening and preparing food usually signal patience, hospitality and care. Here, those familiar activities allow harmful intentions to travel beneath reassuring appearances.
That reversal creates a particular kind of suspense. The reader begins looking at competence itself differently. Being organised, practical and attentive remains useful, but those qualities offer no guarantee about the purpose they serve.
Debbie’s former boss also experiences a public reckoning when compromising footage appears on the newspaper’s website. Her technical abilities make the retaliation possible and challenge the assumption that her domestic identity defines the limits of her knowledge.
McFadden gives her a satisfying advantage over people who underestimate her. Yet enjoying that advantage requires the reader to remain alert to its application. A clever method does not automatically make the act defensible.
This is where the book’s humour becomes a test of allegiance. We may laugh because an unpleasant person loses control of the situation. That response can make the next escalation easier to accept before we have considered what has actually changed.
Her Daughters Bring Different Dangers Home
Debbie’s daughters, Lexi and Izzy, introduce problems that cannot be placed alongside garden rivalry without losing their seriousness.
Izzy’s exclusion from her football team leads Debbie to Coach Pike. His treatment of her daughter includes degrading comments about weight. Concerns about his behaviour towards the girls make his authority look increasingly unsafe.
Debbie eventually manipulates digital evidence linking him to a camera in the girls’ changing area. His arrest gives her intervention the outward appearance of an institutional finding.
The mechanism matters because the outcome is not simply the discovery of an untouched trail. Debbie helps construct what other people will regard as proof. The coach’s objectionable behaviour and the authenticity of the evidence against him are separate questions.
Her approach allows her to decide the conclusion first and arrange the investigation around it. That is a more disturbing power than merely noticing something the authorities have missed.
Lexi’s situation brings a direct sexual threat into the family. Her boyfriend Zane uses intimate photographs to pressure her into sex. His possession of something private becomes a means of trying to control what she does next.
Debbie intervenes, obtains evidence from his phone and sends material to the authorities and school. The threat against Lexi consequently becomes visible beyond the relationship in which Zane has tried to contain it.
Here, the novel supplies a stronger basis for understanding Debbie’s urgency. Lexi needs protection from an immediate coercive demand. The reader does not have to accept Debbie’s entire worldview to recognise that the situation requires action.
Her protective role also has limits worth examining. Taking over a daughter’s crisis may stop a threat while leaving the daughter with little knowledge of how the intervention occurred. Debbie’s family can benefit from her actions without being able to evaluate or consent to them.
There is a related concern with authority in The Teacher: the person who appears to control the situation may also control the story through which others understand it.
In Dear Debbie, protection and secrecy become increasingly difficult to separate.
Harley Offers an Apparently Clear Explanation
Alongside Debbie’s activities, Harley’s perspective appears to settle the question of Cooper’s unexplained behaviour.
Harley believes she is having an affair with Debbie’s husband. Her friendship with Debbie gives her access to the woman she imagines she will replace. She understands the marriage through the account supplied by her lover and treats Debbie as an obstacle to a future already taking shape.
Meanwhile, Cooper conceals calls and absences. His behaviour seems to fit the explanation Harley provides.
This arrangement gives the reader the impression of knowing more than Debbie. We appear to have access to both the anxious wife and the other woman. Instead of asking whether there is an affair, we begin anticipating the confrontation.
That sense of superiority is essential to the misdirection. Information arriving through different viewpoints feels independently corroborated, even when the crucial connection between those viewpoints has not actually been established.
Harley knows the man she meets. She also knows the name he has given her. Those are two pieces of information, and the novel encourages readers to treat them as inseparable.
Debbie’s visit to Harley’s home adds an apparently decisive clue: a man’s shirt carries a scent she recognises. Her reaction suggests that something personal has suddenly become clear.
The scene works because recognition seems more authoritative than suspicion. A familiar smell feels intimate and immediate. Yet the reader still does not know precisely whom Debbie has recognised.
Harley’s own certainty makes that omission easier to overlook. She has already supplied a story into which the shirt can fit. We complete the connection for ourselves.
The broader attraction of this plot is similar to the domestic uncertainty in The Housemaid Is Watching. Familiar surroundings do not prevent people from building incompatible accounts of the lives unfolding inside them.
The Past Gives Her Anger a Different Weight
The disclosure that Debbie was raped during her university years changes the context of her response to Lexi’s situation. Her attacker was known as Hutch, and the assault contributed to her departure from MIT.
This history explains why academic condescension carries more weight than the people delivering it understand. They see an unfinished education and draw conclusions about ability. The missing qualification conceals a life interrupted by violence.
Debbie’s technical competence becomes especially significant in that context. Leaving university did not erase her intelligence. Other people confuse the absence of a credential with the absence of the capacity that once brought her there.
The revelation also changes the meaning of her fierce determination to protect her daughters. A threat against Lexi connects the present to an experience Debbie has carried privately for years.
However, explanation should not become a blanket excuse. The assault does not make every later retaliation necessary, and it does not turn unrelated people into legitimate targets. A reading that treats trauma as automatic permission for violence would flatten the distinctions the story makes available.
The stronger interpretation is that Debbie has developed an intolerable relationship with helplessness. When she recognises another situation in which someone can exploit vulnerability, she tries to remove uncertainty by controlling the outcome herself.
Her return to the fraternity house associated with the assault brings that impulse into focus. She considers destroying the building, but encounters evidence that its present members take sexual safety seriously. She ultimately does not burn it down.
This is a meaningful interruption because the people currently occupying the place are not interchangeable with those associated with her earlier experience. The building carries continuity; its residents do not automatically carry identical guilt.
For once, new information can affect the response rather than merely help execute it. The possibility of restraint enters through a specific distinction between past responsibility and present circumstances.
That moment does not settle what Debbie will do elsewhere. It shows that she remains capable of changing a decision, which makes her subsequent choices more morally significant.
Cooper Begins Investigating His Own Marriage
Cooper’s worries become more concrete when he and the girls discover Debbie’s violent advice drafts and examine her movements through the family’s location-tracking app, Findly.
An address connects her to Ken Bryant’s house. Cooper investigates and finds his boss dead. When he checks his own gun storage, the weapon is missing.
From his position, the facts suggest a terrifying possibility: his wife may have killed his boss using his gun. Missing money at the firm adds another layer of danger.
Cooper is trying to solve a mystery in which his own recent behaviour supplies a plausible motive. His disagreement with Ken makes the death look especially threatening to him. He can imagine how the situation would appear to somebody examining it from outside.
The family’s technology changes function during this sequence. Location sharing usually promises reassurance: family members can see where one another are. Here, it becomes a record of movements whose meaning must be reconstructed.
A location cannot establish an intention. Nevertheless, it can lead Cooper to something physical that changes his understanding. The progression from a dot on a screen to a body in a house gives his fear an evidential basis.
His reaction also reveals how quickly a private relationship can become an investigative problem. He has to reconsider whether behaviour he accepted as familiar might have concealed decisions he never imagined.
The daughters’ involvement prevents this from being only a contest between spouses. Their mother’s possible disappearance from family life becomes an immediate emotional consequence. Cooper is frightened of what Debbie may have done, but also of what losing her would do to the children.
He continues searching. That choice carries him towards Harley’s address, where the apparently separate stories are about to meet.
The Dinner Changes the Identity of the Affair
Harley arranges a dinner intended to expose the affair. Debbie will be present when Harley’s married lover arrives, forcing the concealed relationship into the open.
The man who enters is Jesse, Cooper’s colleague.
He has been using Cooper’s name.
This is the central identity reversal. Harley’s account of an affair is real within her experience, but her identification of the man depends on a lie. Cooper’s suspicious behaviour belongs to a different secret.
The twist works by separating observation from interpretation. Harley has not imagined her relationship. She has misunderstood whom she is involved with. Readers who trusted her chapters as a direct window onto Cooper’s conduct discover that access to a person’s thoughts does not make that person’s knowledge complete.
Debbie already understands the substitution. The shirt’s scent connected Harley’s lover to Jesse, rather than confirming that Cooper had been there.
A further revelation explains why Jesse matters far beyond the impersonation: he is Hutch, Debbie’s university attacker. She recognised him when he entered her husband’s social and professional world and had been planning against him.
This changes the apparent starting point of the revenge story. Recent humiliations have not created every intention we have been watching. Some actions belong to a plan with an earlier origin.
It also corrects the impression that Debbie is moving through events as an uninformed spouse. The reader’s supposed advantage over her was partly manufactured by withholding the particular knowledge that governs her decisions.
That device is effective as a surprise, though it creates a legitimate question about narrative fairness. A viewpoint can conceal information so selectively that the eventual answer feels protected by the author rather than genuinely hidden in the situation.
The dinner nevertheless provides a clear, economical correction. One person’s real identity reorganises the marriage plot, the friendship and Debbie’s connection to the past at once.
What Happens at the End of Dear Debbie?
Debbie has used Jesse’s gun to kill Ken and has arranged evidence intended to implicate Jesse. At Harley’s apartment, Jesse is incapacitated, and Debbie shoots Harley. She intends to complete the scene by making Jesse’s death appear to be suicide.
Her plan is interrupted by Cooper calling for her outside. Debbie changes course and fires into the ceiling instead of killing Jesse.
Cooper’s arrival gives her a reason to leave the scene and return to the family beyond it. The emotional force comes from his continued attachment at the moment she is closest to completing her private reckoning.
Outside, the spouses disclose secrets they have withheld for years. Cooper reveals his alcohol dependency and attendance at Alcoholics Anonymous. His concealed calls involve his sponsor; his absences have been connected to meetings rather than Harley.
Debbie tells him about the rape.
The conversation gives both characters new knowledge, but it does not establish complete honesty. When Cooper asks whether she killed Ken with his gun, Debbie can deny that precise claim because the weapon belonged to Jesse. The literal answer protects the larger deception.
A year later, Cooper has his own accounting business, Debbie has achieved success with an app, and the couple attend counselling. Their household appears to have emerged into greater stability.
Jesse receives two life sentences for the murders attributed to him. A prison assault then brings another part of his past into the story: Misty, a woman he raped and killed. His punishment therefore intersects with crimes for which he had previously escaped accountability.
The final connection concerns Cindy, the gym employee who helped Debbie. Cindy was Ken’s financially abused wife and the reader whose letter prompted Debbie’s advice to leave. Ken’s death is consequently tied to that relationship as well as the events at Cooper’s firm.
The column, the workplace and the revenge plot belong to the same network of consequences. What appeared to be an isolated professional setback was already connected to the people Debbie intended to confront.
Why Harley’s Death Resists an Easy Victory
Harley’s murder is the strongest obstacle to reading the ending as uncomplicated justice.
She has knowingly pursued a man she believes married and has used friendship to gain access to his wife. Those actions make her manipulative. They do not make killing her proportionate.
Her death also exposes how far Debbie’s authority has expanded. Debbie decides which conduct is intolerable, chooses the penalty and arranges the surviving evidence. Harley has no opportunity to escape the role assigned to her.
The revelation that Cooper was not Harley’s lover makes this even more uncomfortable. Debbie is not reacting to the actual destruction of her marriage by this woman. Harley’s intended betrayal and usefulness within the plan become enough.
That distinction prevents the story from closing around a simple category of deserving victims. Jesse’s history supplies a powerful reason to want him stopped. It cannot transfer moral permission to every death required by Debbie’s preferred arrangement.
The prison revelation concerning Misty provides another form of retrospective reassurance. Jesse is guilty of terrible violence even though the murders for which he is sentenced were committed by Debbie.
But general guilt and responsibility for a particular act remain different. The ending rewards the satisfaction of seeing an offender punished while leaving the official account of events false.
This tension can be read as the novel’s most interesting provocation. The reader is invited to want an outcome that depends upon abandoning the standards used to determine responsibility.
It can also be read as a limitation. Giving the framed man an additional history of murder makes the conclusion easier to enjoy by reducing the emotional cost of his wrongful conviction for these specific killings.
Both readings arise from the same choice. The book preserves the contradiction, but heavily weights our feelings towards accepting it.
What the Ending Means for Debbie and Cooper
The marriage improves because genuine information finally passes between Debbie and Cooper. He can acknowledge a struggle he has hidden; she can disclose an experience he did not understand.
Those admissions should not be dismissed simply because other secrets remain. A relationship can become more open in one respect while continuing to rest upon deception elsewhere. The ending’s discomfort lies in that unevenness.
Cooper believes he is rebuilding trust with someone he now understands better. The reader knows that his improved understanding still excludes the murders and the construction of evidence.
His position is therefore more vulnerable than the outwardly happy aftermath suggests. He is consenting to a future based on a partial account of the past.
Debbie’s carefully truthful answer about the gun captures this arrangement. She does not need to deny every fact. She needs to answer a narrow question in a way that allows Cooper to accept a broader conclusion.
Her professional identity gives that moment an additional irony. An advice columnist makes complicated situations intelligible for others. Debbie ends the novel still determining how much understanding another person receives.
The couple’s counselling suggests a process of repair, but the reader cannot assume that attendance guarantees an honest foundation. The unresolved issue is whether Debbie will permit the kind of scrutiny she applies so confidently to everybody else.
Her successful app also returns her intelligence to public view. The woman dismissed as an unfulfilled suburban mother receives tangible recognition for abilities that were present throughout.
That achievement need not be rejected because of her crimes. It does, however, resist a comforting equation between success and rehabilitation. Material improvement tells us that her circumstances have changed; it cannot establish that her judgement has become trustworthy.
The title Dear Debbie finally sounds less reassuring than it did at the beginning. Addressing her means placing a problem in the hands of someone exceptionally capable of acting. The unresolved question is what authority she will claim once she has heard enough to decide.
Debbie ends with a family, a future and a version of events that allows both to continue. Her most consequential victory is the preservation of that version. The people closest to her gain relief without gaining the whole truth. Readers receive the missing information and must carry the discomfort on their behalf: the woman who can identify another person’s predicament so clearly remains unwilling to let others fully judge her own.
Sources
Freida McFadden: Dear Debbie — official identification, standalone status and publication details.
Verayea: Dear Debbie by Freida McFadden Book Review — characters, alternating viewpoints and the advice-column format.
Your Summary: Dear Debbie Summary Chapter by Chapter — sequence checks for the early retaliation and family storylines.
SoBrief: Dear Debbie — supplementary cross-checking of the digital manipulation and linked plot developments.
SpoilThePlot: Dear Debbie Spoilers, Summary and Ending Explained — corroboration of identities, Cindy’s involvement and the epilogue.
SuperSummary: Dear Debbie, Chapter 56–Epilogue — the fraternity visit, confrontation and marital disclosures.
Plot Twisted: Dear Debbie — Full Spoiler Review — independent comparison of the identity reversal and final outcomes.
