Petrusso is a history and screenwriting scholar and freelance writer and editor. In this essay, Petrusso examines Tartt's negative depiction of fathers in the novel.

In reviews of Donna Tartt's The Little Friend, several critics commented on the way families and parental figures are drawn in the novel. One reviewer, Andrew Pyper of the Globe & Mail, wrote:

Harriet's family is wholly free of men, as is the novel, with the exception of the white-trash, meth-head Ratliffs, who, aside from their hateful grandmother, Gum, live in a world without women. It's hard to know what Tartt intends by this segregation of genders, aside from the point that men on their own will eventually kill somebody and women on their own will make spiteful remarks to each other.

While Pyper makes an interesting observation, he oversimplifies Tartt's depiction of men, particularly the fathers, in The Little Friend. There are...