PERFECTLY
IMPERFECT

MARY JANE HEALY

Played by ELIZABETH STANLEY

GOOD CATHOLIC GIRL, DEVOTED WIFE, HARVARD MOM, PTA PRESIDENT, SOULCYCLE STAR, TRADER JOE’S SHOPPER, CHRISTMAS LETTER WRITER, CONTROL FREAK, CAR ACCIDENT VICTIM, OPIOID ADDICT, RAPE SURVIVOR

Mary Jane Healy has the perfect life...from the outside. She has a husband who just made partner at his swanky Manhattan law firm, a big house in a Connecticut suburb, and she manages to make highly nutritional, paleo meals for her family and still squeeze in a hot yoga class every day. She has two beautiful children: Nick, her oldest, who just got into Harvard, and Frankie, her artistic, rebellious adopted daughter whom she loves dearly but feels might be slipping away. But she tells herself that’s always what happens with teenage girls and their moms—they drift apart, but eventually come back together.

Mary Jane knows a thing or two about fitting in. She’s been learning how to change herself to fit her environment since she was a young girl growing up in the Catholic Church. She tried so hard to be good. So why, when she got to college, was she held down and raped at a party? In the moment, she decided it was God’s will. And she learned how to bury the trauma, deep down inside herself, so that she could live the kind of life she desired. She fell in love with and married Steve. She never told him about her assault. She didn’t want to burden him—she wanted to fit in. Over time, she became the envy of her friends: the best at SoulCycle, the best at making class brownies, the best swim team mom. And then came the crash.

After getting into a bad car accident, Mary Jane doesn’t take the time she needs to slow down and nurse her injuries. Instead, she decides to be the best at healing. She gobbles down antioxidant foods, does sun salutations, and tries homeopathic remedies. But what she’s really doing is self-medicating (in secret) with the strong opiates her doctor prescribes. Soon, she is hooked on the pills. And worse, the car accident has triggered her college memories, and she stops feeling safe inside her own body. She doesn’t want to touch her husband, and she nitpicks at Frankie about her clothes. She turns to Nick, her golden child, to be her best friend and surrogate caretaker. Suddenly, nothing makes sense anymore.

It takes an overdose—a near-death experience that sends her first to the ICU and then to rehab—to get Mary Jane to realize that honesty is truly the best way to heal. She opens up about her past, both to her husband and her children, and realizes that the demons that hold us back are often the ones we keep in the dark. Mary Jane may no longer be flawless, but she’s finally free. As she writes in her final Christmas letter, she and her family are “perfectly imperfect people just like you. We don’t have any secrets anymore.”

“We get it, Mary Jane, you’re
winning at Candy Land.”