Florence Grimes is a mess. Once part of a popular girl rock band, after a brief interlude with the manager who is really in love with another of the women in the group, she’s cast out and left with a baby to raise courtesy of the man who fired her. Sure, he pays for their son to go to a posh private school, and she adores her child, but her royalty checks are dwindling and let’s face it—she shouldn’t be spending what little money she has left on fancy nail art and other unnecessary items.
But then Flo isn’t someone who knows how to manage her life, She just doesn’t fit in with the other mothers, but then she doesn’t try that hard—her clothing and attitude impairing her ability to be accepted.
Finally, there’s hope. She gets a call about meeting an old colleague and she dreams of returning to the stage, but, as always with Flo, bad stuff happens and this time it’s really bad. Her son’s class bully mysteriously vanishes on a field trip, and Florence’s quirky, misunderstood 10-year-old son becomes a suspect.
“To save her son, Florence has to figure out what actually happened to the missing boy,” says Sarah Harman, author of All the Other Mother’s Hate Me (G. P. Putnam’ & Sons 2025). “But the more she uncovers, the more she realizes her son might not be as innocent as she’d like to believe,”
Books about missing children and women on the rocks aren’t typically funny but Harman, who describes the subject as a “fine line to walk” uses humor in recounting Flo and her attempts not only to resuscitate her career—and her life—but find out what really happened. And Flo, despite all her faults and mishaps, is someone to root for.
“Personally, as a parent, I have zero interest in fiction about bad things happening to children,” says Harman. “There’s enough of that in the real world; I do not want to consume that darkness in my limited free time. So, it was important to me to telegraph to the reader from the outset, that while this is a twisty mystery about a missing boy, this is not a book where children are going to suffer.”
Harman was never in a girl band (that’s what they called them back then) but she was inspired to write the novel by thinking back to the early aughts and the way that female celebrities were treated by the media and society in general. She references Britney Spears as one example.
“Or remember how the paparazzi took a horrible upskirt photo of Anne Hathaway and then Matt Lauer asked her on national television ‘what lesson she learned from the experience?’” she says. “That was in 2012. It really wasn’t very long ago. When I was writing Florence, I was thinking about how coming of age creatively in that sort of environment might shape a person’s worldview —and the rest of her life.”
The book, which came out in March of this year, is so compelling that even before publication, foreign rights to it were sold at auction in 14 markets and the TV rights bought by FX and The Bear creator Chris Storer, Not bad at all for any novel, but this is Harman’s first which makes it even more impressive.
Like Flo, Harman is an American living in the West End of London, and she notes that navigating the class system is much different than here. But there are some things that are common worldwide and one of them, she says, the redemptive power of female friendship.
“When we meet Florence, all the other mothers hate her—and for a good reason,” she says. “She’s kind of awful. Over the course of the novel, as Florence forges an unlikely alliance with another mom, Jenny, she discovers that she actually is capable of caring about something other than herself. It’s only by learning to be a friend that Florence is able to move on from her past and forgive herself for her failures. Ultimately, my hope is that this book makes readers feel it’s never too late for a comeback.”
This article originally appeared in the Northwest Indiana Times.
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