Sherry Price
Quick Facts
Sherry Price is Bel’s aunt, the wife of Jeff Price, and the mother of Carter Price. She lives next door to Annabel 'Bel' Price and Charlie Price, and becomes a near-daily presence in their lives—especially after Charlie’s arrest, when she and Jeff take Bel in. Her uneasy bond with Rachel Price anchors the family’s most volatile secrets. First seen preparing anxiously for the documentary filming, she projects poise and polish while guarding a fragile interior.
Who She Is
Sherry is a woman who has built her identity—and sense of worth—around motherhood and appearances. She curates every detail: the neat brown curls, the heavy bronzer, the precise instructions to her daughter about posture on camera. That surface polish masks deeper anxieties: a decade of infertility, a brittle pride in her “miracle baby,” and a willingness to cling to a manufactured family narrative even as it begins to crack. The more we see her, the more “supportive aunt” shades into “custodian of a carefully staged life.”
Her looks become emblematic of this tension: the “powdery orange” makeup clumping in her eye lines doesn’t beautify so much as reveal the effort of maintenance—of face, family, and story.
Personality & Traits
Sherry’s persona blends genuine devotion with control, gossip with need-to-know authority, and open emotion with sharp-edged defensiveness.
- Image-conscious and performative: On the first day of filming she blurts, “Does the camera really add ten pounds?” then choreographs Carter’s posture and angles. Her meticulous curls, thick mascara, and bronzer “creating” cheekbones show how hard she works to perfect both face and family.
- Intensely maternal—and controlling: After years of infertility, Sherry guards Carter’s life like a project. She chooses Carter’s outfits, speaks for her, and frames ballet as an “investment in her future,” revealing love that can smother as it protects.
- Gossip as power: In a breathy whisper, she tells Bel what she saw between Rachel and Mr. Tripp years earlier. Her excitement isn’t just nosiness; it’s leverage in a family where information equals control.
- Emotional volatility: She cries during home videos and at Rachel’s return, but emotion also weaponizes into passive aggression—her dinner jab, “Least he waited until after you were gone,” slices through the table’s tense truce.
Character Journey
At first, Sherry reads as the helpful, slightly overbearing aunt who stepped in when crisis hit. But as the documentary peels back the Price family’s myth, her support reveals a scaffold of control. The turning point is the revelation that Carter isn’t her biological daughter but Rachel’s—a truth that detonates Sherry’s carefully curated identity. The mother she’s performed, protected, and promoted collapses into a legal and emotional fiction. In the end, she’s forced into a devastating retreat, accepting Rachel’s ultimatum to leave Carter’s life. Her arc traces the painful cost of loving a story more than the truth, and it crystallizes the novel’s meditation on the mess and mercy of The Complexity of Family Bonds.
Key Relationships
- Carter Price: Carter is Sherry’s center of gravity; every choice is calibrated around her daughter’s success and safety. Because that bond is built on a lie, the reveal doesn’t just strain them—it voids the terms of their relationship, turning Sherry’s devotion into a kind of theft Carter cannot forgive.
- Jeff Price: Jeff is the steadier partner whose quiet knowledge often outpaces Sherry’s, leaving her both dependent on and resentful of him. Their marriage strains under her single-minded focus on Carter and the moral weight of the secret they share.
- Rachel Price: Sherry greets Rachel’s return with sobbing relief, but history—what Sherry saw, what Rachel knows—poisons the reunion. Their final confrontation flips the power dynamic: Rachel names the truth, and Sherry, who has long managed the family story, is expelled from it.
- Annabel “Bel” Price: Sherry shelters Bel after Charlie’s arrest, occupying the role of emergency mother. Yet even as she helps, she uses Bel as a confidante and conduit—sharing the Rachel–Mr. Tripp story and nudging the investigation forward in ways that serve her need for narrative control.
Defining Moments
Sherry’s key scenes reveal both the tenderness and the calculation behind her choices.
- The home video viewing: She discloses a decade of infertility and calls Carter their “miracle baby.” Why it matters: It earns sympathy while explaining her fierce protectiveness—and foreshadows how far she’ll go to keep the life she finally secured.
- The family dinner: Her pointed line to Rachel—“Least he waited until after you were gone”—slips the mask. Why it matters: The barb hints at secret knowledge and exposes how Sherry weaponizes propriety to wound and dominate the conversation.
- The final confrontation: Faced with Carter’s true parentage, Sherry spirals from denial to collapse, then agrees to disappear. Why it matters: It’s the tragic endpoint of a character who built identity on a lie; love without truth cannot hold.
Symbols & Themes
Sherry’s cosmetic perfection—neat curls, heavy bronzer, clumping foundation—mirrors the family’s varnished story. Her home, manners, and maternal script function like stagecraft, sustaining a spectacle that can’t survive bright lights. She becomes a case study in the costs of Truth, Lies, and Deception: when image outruns reality, the reckoning is intimate and irrevocable.
Essential Quotes
We’d been trying almost ten years, so we’d learned to keep things to ourselves, to not get too excited in those early stages. I was thirty-eight when we had Carter, our miracle baby.
This confession explains both Sherry’s gratitude and her anxiety. “Miracle baby” sanctifies her motherhood, but the secrecy and self-protection it required bleed into her later need to manage information, outcomes, and people.
Least he waited until after you were gone.
A seemingly offhand jab that does multiple jobs at once: punishing Rachel, signaling insider knowledge, and asserting social dominance at the dinner table. It shows Sherry’s talent for using etiquette as a blade when she feels her status threatened.
I don’t know what you’re talking about. Is this some kind of prank…for the documentary?
Sherry’s first instinct is to deny and reframe the crisis as performance—proof of how thoroughly she’s lived on camera, managing optics rather than admitting reality. The line exposes her dependence on a narrative she can script.
Don’t call me that! I’m your mom
Raw, unvarnished panic erupts when her claim to motherhood is challenged. The possessive “I’m your mom” is both declaration and plea, revealing a love so absolute it has eclipsed ethics—and a terror that love without legitimacy will not be enough.