Little Fires Everywhere - Hulu (2024)

FAQs

Why did Izzy burn down the house in Little Fires Everywhere? ›

In the book, the fire is set by Izzy, rather than her siblings. Same as in the show, Izzy is hurt by the knowledge that Mia and Pearl have been driven out of town by her family. She pours gasoline over Lexie's bed while her sister is at a friend's house, sets it on fire, and runs away.

In the finale, we learn that Elena and Bill Richardson's eldest children, Trip, Moody, and Lexie, are responsible for the fire—not Izzy, as in the book.

Izzy represents disruption and ostracism, and her relationship with her own mother is one of the relationships at the heart of the novel's theme of mothers and daughters.

“Ng has one-upped herself with her tremendous follow-up novel… a finely wrought meditation on the nature of motherhood, the dangers of privilege and a cautionary tale about how even the tiniest of secrets can rip families apart…

We eventually learn that Mia Warren's real name is Mia Wright. Mia changed her last name to Warren partly to disguise her identity, and partly to honor her late brother, Warren, who died in a car accident.

Elena had everything she thought she wanted. The perfect house, perfect husband, perfect home and suburb. Along comes Izzy and she throws a spanner in the works because she does not fit Elena's ideal life as she knows it. Even before she was born Izzy was a hard pregnancy.

Pearl is Mia's own biological daughter whom she was meant to relinquish to Pearl's father (who had inseminated her) and his fertility-challenged wife.

In the book, Mia is pointedly asexual. She's never seen an adult man naked. She's never, as Ng puts it, “felt that warmth, that electric tension.” Yet in the Hulu adaptation, Pearl tells Moody her mother has sex with “whomever she wants, whenever she wants.” Mia tells Pearl sex doesn't need to mean anything.

Perhaps because Elena is now the clear villain of this story, Little Fires Everywhere doesn't seem able to trust Witherspoon to convince viewers to appreciate or like Elena on her own strengths, even though watching Reese Witherspoon paste a sunny smile over a casually terrible statement is the deepest and purest ...

Unwilling to give up on her artistic dreams, she agrees to be Joe and Madeleine's surrogate for the cost of her tuition. Soon Mia's pregnant — after insemination via turkey baster!

Why did Mia and Pearl leave Shaker Heights? ›

Elena confronts Mia about finding Pearl's name at the abortion clinic, and asks Mia to move out. Pearl is reluctant to go, but when Mia reveals the truth about her family and Pearl's father, Pearl gains a deeper understanding for her mother, and agrees to leave Shaker Heights.

The younger Mia is played by a different actress, Tiffany Boone, yet she is pictured in the pregnancy photo. They even have a flashback with Boone playing Mia when Pearl is very little so it's clear that the younger Mia should have been in the photo.

In the book, Izzy, who becomes attached to Pearl (the daughter of Kerry Washington's Mia), watches as Pearl is betrayed by both Izzy's brothers, Moody and Trip, as well as Lexie. In retaliation, Izzy, lonely and depressed, sets her siblings' beds on fire.

Izzy grabs her things and runs away. Her brother Moody tries to stop her, but she leaves anyway. It's unclear where exactly she goes. In a brief fantasy sequence toward the end of the episode, she imagines hitchhiking, seeing Mia and Pearl drive by, then stopping to pick her up.

“If they stopped and slowed down and thought about it, they wouldn't do it.” Similar to the book, the ending is ambiguous: Mia finally tells Pearl about her past, and they go see Mia's estranged parents. Izzy takes off to chase down Mia.

Her siblings, Lexie, Trip, and Moody, are disgusted by their mom's ugly revelation. They realize they don't want to end up like her. They finish what Izzy started, setting each of their rooms on fire, but they make sure their mother gets out of the house safely.

In the book, it is Elena's daughter Izzy (Megan Stott) who commits the act of arson. However, in the show, Izzy intends to set the fires herself, but in the end the remaining Richardson children work together to set the house ablaze after she runs away from home.

In this Hulu series, based on the best-selling 2017 book of the same name by American writer and novelist Celeste Ng, fires are the metaphor for both family disaster and dangerous, unaddressed festering distrust between the races.

Therefore she steals Pearl's story of how she was denied to get access to a higher level math class due to being prematurely judged by the admissions teacher and not given a fair change to prove herself. Her boyfriend, who is also black, gets very angry about this.