One such book is The Divine Secrets Of The Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells. If you’re of a similar age to me, you might remember the stir it caused when it was released back in 1996. The book became an unexpected sensation: women around the world formed ‘Ya-Ya groups’ and, amongst the more literary-minded, there was horror that this piece of “genre fiction” had been nominated for the Orange Prize (now the Women’s Prize For Fiction).
I first read the book a few years later and it’s easy to see why it struck a chord with so many women, celebrating as it does the power of female friendship while also exploring the difficulties of mother-daughter relationships impacted by trauma.
In 2002, Callie Khouri adapted the book into a film with an all-star ensemble cast starring Sandra Bullock, Ellen Burstyn, Ashley Judd and Maggie Smith, amongst others.
I was curious to see whether the film could do justice to the emotional and psychological depth of the book, or whether something would be lost in translation.
The book
The Divine Secrets Of The Ya-Ya Sisterhood tells the story of mother and daughter Vivi Abbott Walker and her daughter Sidda, both born and raised in Louisiana. Sidda is a successful theatre director and when she describes Vivi as a “tap-dancing child abuser” in an interview with the New York Times, their relationship, always complicated, finally breaks down completely.
Vivi’s rage is volcanic, and she disowns Sidda, who postpones her wedding to her fiancé Connor and decides to retreat to a remote cabin for a while.
At the cabin, she receives a scrapbook titled “The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood”, sent by Vivi’s lifelong friends Caro, Necie, and Teensy, who want to help Sidda understand her mother’s painful, complex history.
As Sidda begins to piece together her mother’s story, she comes to empathise more with Vivi, and is able to place her unpredictable and sometimes violent behaviour during Sidda’s childhood into a broader context.
The scrapbook allows Wells to skip backwards in time and tell the story of Vivi and her friends, who formed a secret society as girls in the 1930s and christened themselves the Ya-Yas. Their friendship becomes a powerful emotional lifeline through decades of weddings, births, betrayals, breakdowns, and Southern social constraints. Despite their differences, the Ya-Yas maintain a deep loyalty to one another.
The book is primarily concerned with female relationships, whether between mothers and daughters or between friends. Both Sidda and Vivi have to come to terms with the past in order to find redemption and healing.
While Sidda and Vivi’s conflict is the emotional engine of the book, there’s plenty of joy to be found too, particularly between the Ya-Yas. The book also asks questions about memory and storytelling: the fragmented nature of the past is echoed in the structure of the book and, while memory is never presented as something perfect, it’s an essential way for the characters to understand the present.
There are definitely some elements of Southern Gothic at play, and in particular an examination of what it meant to grow into womanhood in the South during the 1930s-40s.
Despite their differences, the Ya-Yas maintain a deep loyalty to one another
It’s a book that has real depth and doesn’t over-simplify the issues it examines: Vivi behaves appallingly but her own trauma isn’t used as an excuse for her behaviour. Instead, we understand her better as a person, with all the shades of grey that implies.
There is an unflinching rawness to the emotional texture of the book, which feels honest: Wells isn’t afraid to examine maternal love that is not only not nurturing but actively damaging, and the interplay between women who are hurt and who, in turn, hurt others.
Even the friendship of the Ya-Yas isn’t presented as a perfect, saccharine counterpoint to the darker elements of the story – instead it’s also messy and imperfect, and sometimes unhealthily codependent, even as it provides a kind of sanctuary for them that falls outside the constraints of the time and place they live in.
We see throughout the book how complicated emotions can be – how love and hurt can tangle together, the ways in which kindness and cruelty can live side by side, the fact that forgiveness is difficult. Wells was exploring the idea of generational healing and cycle-breaking long before those terms found their way into common parlance.
One of the best things about the novel is how beautifully drawn the female characters are; the Ya-Yas are tremendously fun, eccentric and full of life. Vivi in particular is a brilliant creation – deeply flawed, beautiful, infuriating (and furious). Whenever I encounter a character like Vivi I’m amazed by the author’s skill: there’s a fine line between creating a difficult character and a plain unlikeable one, let alone one so memorable.
The setting of Louisiana is also a fundamental part of the book – lush, but with a hint of the eerie, full of religious guilt and family history. There’s beauty but also decay, and nothing is romanticised – it just feels alive and atmospheric. Wells manages to use the essential elements of the Southern Gothic tradition without reverting to cliché and includes enough specificity to make both characters and setting feel both real and sharp.
It’s a book with lots of emotion, but it doesn’t give us tidy answers. There’s a messiness to the story and the characters which is mirrored in the scrappy structure, a device that works well for readers who are comfortable with non-linear narratives.
If you love books with flawed, human characters and emotional honesty that explore serious themes with heart and humour, then this is a great read.
The film
The film was released to a mixed reception despite its all-star cast. It’s the kind of film that’s perfect for comfort-watching: cosy, almost, with some brilliant actors and gorgeous cinematography. The soundtrack is perfectly pitched and adds to the viewing experience and the acting is great, as you’d expect. Burstyn in particular brings fury, charm and a prideful vulnerability to the older Vivi, and manages to avoid over-acting despite playing a naturally melodramatic character. Bullock is brilliant as Sidda while Judd’s performance as the younger Vivi is the emotional centre of the film; her portrayal of Vivi’s breakdown is particularly affecting. Dame Maggie Smith, Shirley Knight, and Fionnula Flanagan as the older Ya-Yas add warmth, wry humour, and a welcome sense of levity to the film.
Each of the women has space to shine and they have great chemistry with each other which makes everything feel more believable.
The main issue with the film is that it flattens both the plot and the depth of the book for a more linear narrative. Sidda is the focus throughout, and the storyline of her childhood and Vivi’s past is told in flashbacks. The abuse that Vivi enacts is toned down considerably and the emotional intelligence of the book is simplified so that everything becomes much more Hollywood in tone, right down to the happy ending.
Vivi’s own trauma is used to excuse her behaviour, something which the book is careful not to do. Forgiveness in the film requires little more than an explanation and a shared joke, whereas in the book it’s presented as both difficult and a work in progress.
As a general rule the male characters feel less rounded than in the book (and even there it’s clear they’re not the focus) which means that the film misses out on giving those relationships, especially Vivi and Shep’s, enough weight to carry much emotion. It works in terms of keeping the film tightly focused on Sidda and Vivi but doesn’t do much to place them in a wider network of relationships. Sidda’s siblings are also notably absent from the film while in the book they have a more significant role.
The stories of the other Ya-Yas themselves are also missing from the film, which is a shame – although I can’t imagine how long it would have been if they’d tried to include the extra storylines from the book. The film pulls this off by zooming in on how they support Vivi and Sidda, but as a reader of the book I missed seeing their stories alongside hers; they essentially become relegated to a role as Vivi’s sidekicks rather than as women with their own lives and character arcs.
They are also the embodiment (along with Vivi) of Southern womanhood in the film, and the drawling, wise-cracking, and heavy drinking verges on cliché. It’s only the quality of the acting that prevents it from tipping over into silliness and I can’t help but wish that some of the complexities of the book had been incorporated here.
It inevitably glosses over some of the more jagged emotional edges which make reading the book such a rich experience
One thing I noticed was that the film seems to be trying to be several things at once – it’s part Southern Gothic and part family drama, with a big dash of quirky, feel-good friendship story thrown in for good measure. It doesn’t stop it from being enjoyable but it did make me wonder how different and interesting each of those three versions of the film could have been, had the producers decided to lean in wholeheartedly to one of those elements.
One element that feels particularly odd today – just two decades on – is how the Ya-Yas kidnap Sidda to take her away, rather than her choosing take some time alone. In the film, the Ya-Yas buy a rohypnol tablet from a drug dealer which they use to knock Sidda out, loading her onto a plane back to Louisiana with the assistance of her fiancé Connor. It’s very much played for laughs but I suspect a modern rewrite would handle it very differently.
Ultimately, The Divine Secrets Of The Ya-Ya Sisterhood is one of those stories that thrives in the tension between joy and pain, and in the push and pull of love. The film captures the all the sparkle of the book – the charm, the friendships, the warmth – and while it’s emotionally satisfying in a very Hollywood way, it inevitably glosses over some of the more jagged emotional edges which make reading the book such a rich experience.
That’s not to say that the film isn’t worth watching – far from it. It’s full of terrific acting and it’s visually beautiful, with a soundtrack that perfectly suits its tone.
But for me, this is a classic case of ‘read the book first’. Not because the book is always better, but because in this instance the book is more emotionally honest: sometimes unflinchingly raw, unafraid of the grey areas, and more ambitious.
Just like in real life, there are loose threads that don’t perfectly knit together, and for me that makes the book better, not worse, because it feel more true to life, which I think is what Wells was aiming for.
If you read the book first, you get the best of both worlds: a deeply engaging and moving novel which takes the reader seriously, and then the lighter, more polished film version, which is hugely enjoyable and stunning to look at, not to mention full of great performances to enjoy.