54 pages • 1 hour read
Ella BermanBefore We Were Innocent
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Complexities of Adolescent Female Friendships
Although Before We Were Innocent is a thriller that engages with high-profile themes related to violence, betrayal, true crime, and the toxicity of influencer culture, it remains at its heart a novel about the complexities of female friendships. Ella Berman is deeply interested in gender roles and the experiences of women in contemporary society. In interviews, she has noted that she wanted to write a book about “the dark side as well as the intense love” of teenage friendship (Tayce. “Ella Berman on How the Vilification of Women Inspired Before We Were Innocent.” United by Pop, 24 July 2023). Thus, it is clear that although Bess, Joni, and Evangeline are fiercely bonded and love one another dearly, each girl is capable of emotionally wounding the others. Through this depiction, Berman suggests that friendship in late adolescence is complex and that identity itself is a composite of many things. Each girl’s personality is made up of a mixture of positive and negative qualities. For example, although Evangeline initially seems docile and angelic, there is more to her than meets the eye, and Bess is also capable of angry, raw emotions; as she wryly says early in the narrative, “Show me an 18-year-old saint, and I’ll show you a liar” (97).
Bess is immediately drawn to Joni when the two first meet, and she soon comes to care just as deeply for Evangeline. The girls bond closely and quickly, and their friendship is representative of the ease with which young women often form relationships in late adolescence. In many scenes in the novel, the girls seem entirely comfortable in one another’s presence and spend quiet days sunbathing and enjoying each other’s company. Even Bess’s mother later admits that from the outside, the depth of the girls’ love for one another was obvious.
Despite the strength of these bonds, Berman is clear in her assertion that there are no true “sinners” and “saints” among girls of that age, for in late adolescence and early adulthood, young women are still growing into the adults they will become. Thus, while Bess might seem less manipulative than Joni and not as controlling as Evangeline, it is important to remember that she is the narrator of the story and is therefore inherently unreliable. Berman only provides Bess’s perspective on events, and because it soon becomes clear that Bess has deeply misjudged Joni, her characterizations of herself should also be approached with skepticism. Even in Bess’s depiction of events, her morally questionable actions are apparent, for she goes behind Evangeline’s back with Theo, and when she observes her friend falling from the cliff, she has a momentary hope that it is, in fact, Evangeline falling to her death. While Evangeline, too, harbors controlling traits that belie her initial characterization, Joni is the most overtly villainous, and her manipulations become clear even in the earlier timeline, well before the 2018 events draw full attention to her many flaws. Even so, the fact that she comes from a difficult, fractured home combines with the observation of Bess’s mother that Joni is insecure and unhappy, and these details imply that Joni’s manipulative nature is partially the result of childhood trauma.
It is precisely because of the imperfections evident in the girls’ personalities that they are able to love and wound one another with equal depth. Bess’s mother tells her daughter, “I know what those friendships can be like. The intensity is, it’s like nothing else” (341). Within this halting statement is the implicit idea that such friendships contain both positive and negative types of intensity, for adolescent girls can hurt one another with just as much passion as they can love one another. This dynamic is revealed in the earlier timeline when Bess begins a clandestine relationship with Evangeline’s brother Theo, for she unwittingly strikes at Evangeline’s deepest vulnerability. Being extremely close to her brother and seeing him as a lifeline in the face of her parents’ indifference, Evangeline feels threatened by Bess’s new closeness with Theo, and this drives the insecurity that leads to their disastrous falling-out on the cliffside path. Likewise, Berman reveals that Joni feels wounded by what she perceives to be the impending end of the trio’s friendship, and her various manipulations can be interpreted as misguided attempts to prevent occurrences (like newfound romance) that might jeopardize that bond.
The Inauthenticity of Influencer Culture
Berman’s depiction of influencer culture is markedly negative, and the author’s representation of Joni suggests that there is both toxicity and inauthenticity at the core of influencer platforms in contemporary society. Joni builds an entire media empire by capitalizing on the death of a dear friend, and ultimately, Bess comes to realize that Joni’s entire public persona is an elaborate misrepresentation of her true character. Throughout the novel, Joni is an inherently manipulative individual; in fact, her entire career is based on manipulation, because she manages to use her role in Evangeline’s death to garner a widespread audience and launch a lucrative self-help platform. Beset by negative press after her misadventure in Greece, she cleverly manipulates her status in the public eye. Challenging the common perception that she is a cold, calculating killer, she deliberately recasts herself a resilient survivor who is altruistic enough to show other women how to turn difficult circumstances into sources of inner strength. By employing glossy marketing terminology, Joni fashions herself as a “self-improvement” guru rather than a self-help author and sells the public a mixture of ideas for how to raise their “vibrations” and heal their “inner child.” Essentially, Joni is a glorified advice columnist, but in the new media landscape of “influencing,” she becomes a lifestyle icon.
Whenever she is in the public eye, she portrays herself as an open-minded, wellness-oriented, smoothie-drinking, succulent-planting media icon who has an ever-ready smile for her “Le Bon Babes,” but this cheery façade belies Joni’s true personality. The young Joni was a brash and sometimes violent girl, and these qualities still define the adult Joni; she has simply become more adept at hiding her flaws. Significantly, while watching Joni’s videos, Bess notices a moment of silence every time Joni is asked a question; she realizes that Joni needs a moment to don her public persona and think through how the public, plastic version of herself would answer the question. As Bess reflects, Joni is markedly inauthentic “for someone who has built a platform out of radical honesty” (126). There are also key moments in which Joni’s true personality shines through; for example, her private and public responses to Willa’s death lack affect and are characterized by coldness. Similarly, when confronted with the reality that Bess is still traumatized by Evangeline’s death, Joni responds with judgment rather than empathy. Her characterization therefore suggests that many real-life influencers are equally inauthentic in online spaces, and through this depiction, Berman endeavors to shed light on a piece of contemporary culture that warrants more analysis than it is usually given.
True Crime and Media Distortion
Both timelines of Before We Were Innocent examine the public’s fascination with true crime and indict the inherent distortions of sensationalist media representations, especially the skewed portrayals of the people involved in criminal cases. In the wake of Evangeline’s death, the media distort Bess, Joni, and Evangeline’s personalities and actively misrepresent facts, opinions, and timelines. The media storm presents Evangeline as a saint and vilifies Bess and Joni, and the time that the latter two spend in the public eye impacts the rest of their lives. In 2018, when Willa dies, the media revives its interest in Bess and Joni, and the two women are once again cast as cold, calculating villains. This depiction is meant to show the problematic role that the news media plays in perpetuating false narratives in real life, drawing particular attention to the various ways in which women are often mischaracterized.
Because the public is privy to brief glimpses of information rather than the full scope of the story, the girls are judged through a highly distorted lens, and this dynamic is also emphasized in both timelines, for the repercussions of Evangeline's death echo through the years. Each witness who is peripherally involved with the girls gives their own limited opinion on how the trio was behaving, and these fragmentary glimpses exacerbate the media’s broader misrepresentations. For example, people from the airport view Bess as bossy, and the man sitting behind them on the plane characterizes them as boy-crazy. People at the bar believe that they are out of control, and as Bess later observes, “Every single thing we’d ever done or said was now viewed through the prism of Evangeline’s death” (239). In reality, the girls’ raucous dancing at the bar represents one tiny moment in their lives, but after Evangeline dies, its importance is magnified and distorted; to the public, the evening becomes representative of who the girls are as a whole.
The 2018 timeline mirrors these issues in many ways, for Willa is a public figure, and when she goes missing, the press makes much of the fact that her girlfriend is Joni Bonnier, who became infamous after the misadventure in Greece 10 years ago. New media distortions run rampant as the press once again begins to follow Bess and Joni immediately after Willa’s death, presenting small, episodic snapshots of the two women to the world as if these images are representative of their lives and personalities. This pattern is designed to echo the days following Evangeline’s death, when Bess and Joni wander around Mykonos in a daze, aimlessly visiting shops and eating ice cream in an attempt to distract themselves from the tragedy that they have just endured. Restructured by the media’s biased perspective, such images are recast to present the girls as being criminally glib and carefree.
As similar misrepresentations pile up in the 2018 timeline, the author’s broader critique of the effects of media distortion becomes apparent. Berman has made it clear that this theme is inspired by real-life examples of women who, although innocent of any crime, were vilified in the media coverage surrounding the violent incidents in which they were involved. For example, Berman cites the case of Jennifer Levin (the 1980s-era victim of the so-called “Preppy Killer”) as an example of a woman who is treated cruelly by the media and blamed for her own victimization. Similarly, Amanda Knox’s wrongful conviction for the death of her roommate while studying abroad in Italy has come up in multiple reviews of Before We Were Innocent, and the contemporary media landscape abounds with true-crime content that sensationalizes murder, shames women, and alters public perception. Berman’s novel seeks to highlight the problematic aspects of this industry by implying that media representations flatten and distort women’s identities, distilling entire lives down to the events of a few episodic moments. Because Evangeline is less angelic than she is depicted in the media and Bess and Joni are arguably more sympathetic, it soon becomes clear that all of the girls are depicted inaccurately.
