We tuned in to find out who died, but the moment in The White Lotus finale that truly killed was Laurie’s monologue on the complexity of female friendship. After a season of triangulating and passive aggression, the trio of ladies we loved to judge sat for their final supper, where two of them pretended the week had been a total dream. While Jaclyn, the smug actress nailed by Michelle Monaghan, compares the tense trip to floating on a cloud, Kate, Leslie Bibb’s Trump-voting Texan belle, contentedly muses that, after years of tending, her metaphorical “garden is in bloom.” But our ever-real and biting Laurie (my new favourite actress, Carrie Coon), a divorced lawyer for whom contentment is much more elusive, is having none of it.
“That’s funny, ’cause if I’m being honest, all week I’ve been so sad,” she says, her voice starting to waver. “I just feel like my expectations were too high, or…I just feel like as you get older, you have to justify your life, you know? And your choices…and when I’m with you guys, it’s just so transparent what my choices were, and my mistakes.”
I’d expected a stinging final indictment from Laurie, a character prone to truth-telling over rosé—calling out her friends for being fake bitches, specifically. Instead, she is brutally honest in a whole new way. She concedes that she has no belief system; that the markers society has sold her, from marriage and motherhood to career success, haven’t brought her any closer to enlightenment. Yet the epiphany she’s had in Thailand—a place so rooted in spirituality—is that it’s time, including the longevity of her friendship with Jaclyn and Kate, that gives her life meaning.
“We started this life together. I mean, we’re going through it apart, but we’re still together, and I look at you guys, and it feels meaningful. And I can’t explain it, but even when we’re just sitting around the pool talking about whatever inane shit, it still feels very f**king deep,” Laurie says, fully breaking down. After sincerely acknowledging Jaclyn’s “beautiful face” and Kate’s “beautiful life,” the things that arguably matter most to each of them, Laurie delivers the most gutting line of all: “I’m just happy to be at the table.”
My husband didn’t get it (I’m told many husbands didn’t), but I found myself tearing up. After the finale ended and into the morning after, my text chains lit up with friends from high school and college and our kids’ daycare wanting to dig into the intricacies of Laurie’s speech as the moment that landed—more than any Darth Vader–esque paternity reveal. One observed that not since America Ferrera’s Barbie monologue has an onscreen speech shook women thusly. I love how astute my friends are.
Laurie left us in shambles for reasons as complex as female friendship itself. We’re crying because she articulated feelings that women carry but don’t often examine. Among them: that, yes, your oldest friends can see right through you, occasionally reminding you of someone you no longer want to be. But I, too, know just how “fucking deep” it can be to sit with my oldest friends, speaking the same shared language and basking in the rare constant that they are. Last year, I had dinner with two college friends I hadn’t seen in forever and wondered at how they’d both stayed exactly the same and grown into the gracefully self-assured women they were always meant to be. Just bearing witness to them felt like a gift.
Of course, Jaclyn, Kate, and Laurie had their squabbles over the season, but one of the biggest finale twists was the way The White Lotus redeemed them. Series creator Mike White chastened me here: I’ve judged the trio all season for talking shit; for conversations as flimsy as their exquisite resort looks. But Laurie brought the group down to earth. Without saying so explicitly, she argued that female friendships can be ugly, and maybe they should be allowed to be, if love is at the heart of them. As one of my best friends texted last night, longtime female friendship transcends sticky stages or “petty fights”; it’s deeper and more abiding, even when, like most all relationships, it’s messy and imperfect.
When Laurie speaks her truth at dinner, The White Lotus also depicts another devastatingly familiar experience: that of a group of women sitting around a table projecting the sunniest, squeaky-cleanest versions of their lives. Their adoring and valiant husbands/partners who always manage to say and do the noble thing; their eerily precocious, brilliant and athletic children with eyes unsullied by YouTube! Even as grown women, even when you know better thanks to therapy, psychiatry, maturity, or some combination thereof, the Bragging Table can still be a powerful, influential force. The pull to participate—to sell yourself or, as Laurie puts it, “justify your life”—flares like an animal instinct. This is especially true when you feel as lost and left-out as Laurie did throughout the season.
It takes bravery to break from the group, but watching Laurie change the tone of the conversation and share something real is what moved me most about her monologue. At 43, this is true friendship to me now: the ability to be vulnerable with each other; to not have to posture or project perfection, but to be ourselves (even when we’re sad, vain, ridiculous, or politically misaligned, as thorny as the latter is for me) and simply “be happy to be at the table” together. The Bragging Table has long left me cold, but strangely enough, the three friends’ arc makes me see it with more empathy. Analysing real life at a slight distance, via these prestige-TV characters, I wonder about all the deeply human reasons—insecurity, pain?—that might compel female friends to peacock for one another. And I think, hopefully, about the ways friends can and do evolve all the time. At the friends’ final dinner, Laurie changes everything by going there. Jaclyn and Kate soften and shed tears, everyone trades “I love you’s,” and the fractured trio finally fits together on the couch, cackling with glee. My finale epiphany? We should all be Lauries.
This article was originally published on Vogue.com.
