Mia helps Izzy embrace the parts of herself she’d been asked by her conservative mother to bury (in the book, that was anger, artistry, and tomboyish clothes). Izzy has never had a free-spirited female figure in her life like Mia, and once she does, she realizes it’s OK to be who she is. Izzy and Mia are one in the same: artistic, pugnacious, political, angry. A story about an angsty 14-year-old girl who loves art, combat boots, backwards baseball caps, and lionizing an older woman as if she’s a goddess among men? This is a story about coming out.

Elena rents the apartment she owns to Mia and her teenage daughter Pearl, and Izzy is at first intrigued by Mia, then obsessed with her. Izzy feels subjugated by her tyrannically straight-laced mother, who wants her to fall in line by dressing feminine and going by her given name, Isabelle. Elena’s youngest child Izzy is a key part of the poisonous rift that forms between the two mothers. The story centers on two moms with extraordinarily different backgrounds and levels of privilege: Elena Richardson (played by Witherspoon in the Hulu series), a Stepford-esque mother of four who’s both an impeccable housewife and a working journalist, and Mia Warren (Kerry Washington), a nomadic artist and single mother. But because I’m gay and therefore I watch or read everything through lesbian-colored glasses, I mowed through the pages of Little Fires wondering, when will it get gay?! The short answer is that the book only sort of does. The book tells poignant stories about motherhood and race in the 1990s. As a stan of Celeste Ng’s novel Little Fires Everywhere, I’d been anxious to watch the Reese Witherspoon-fronted Hulu series.

Little fires everywhere book