Mistakes Were Made: Meryl Wilsner’s Spicy MILF Book Reviewed

Meryl Wilsner’s Mistakes Were Made is making waves in the Sapphic Book community. Hype has surrounded this novel since it was announced last year. Before Mistakes Were Made even had cover art or a blurb, people were feverishly shelving it as to-be-read on Goodreads. Lesbian and bisexual TikTokers were buzzing with excitement as they shared news of the romance. What, you ask, sets Mistakes Were Made apart from other love stories? Why is it turning so many young women feral? The premise.

College senior Cassie makes eyes at a hot older woman in a bar. Cassie buys her a drink. One thing leads to another. Pretty soon she’s having the best sex of her life in the back of Erin’s car. They part ways after the hook-up. And the next morning Cassie’s best friend Parker invites her to breakfast to act as a buffer with her mother. Waiting at the table is… you’ve guessed it! None other than Erin.

Cassie fucked her best friend’s mom. They play it cool and vow it can never happen again. But resisting temptation is easier said than done. Promises and taboos are broken, many times over. And Mistakes Were Made is all the more delicious for it.

The MILF Book is hotter than a solar flare. Wilsner has a genius for sex scenes (spoiler alert: there is strap on action!), and creates extraordinary chemistry between her characters. The pull between Cassie and Erin is palpable from the get go; strong enough that their disregard for consequences makes total sense.

From Mrs Robinson to Stacey’s Mom, people have been fantasizing about older women for decades. And the runaway success of the MILF Book is proof that lesbian and bisexual women are by no means immune to the craze.

That’s not to say the book is without flaws. Mistakes were indeed made. The pacing is choppy. The ending is impossibly neat and perfect. We see virtually nothing of Cassie and Erin’s lives, outside of the time they spend together, communicating, or thinking about each other – which makes the world feel narrow. Erin is a doctor; a job that is mentally and physically demanding, as well as time consuming. And yet – beyond sexting in the on-call room – the reader is shut off completely from her day-to-day reality at the hospital. Decisions like this undermine the books believability.

There’s also the issue of Acacia. Most early readers seem to love Cassie’s BFF since childhood. But Wilsner’s portrayal of this character didn’t sit right with me (a Black reader of f/f fiction). This is because Acacia is a textbook example of the Token Black Friend Trope.

Acacia exists to provide emotional support and guidance to her white best friends. She’s sassy, full of smart quips and comebacks. She has no character flaws and never displays any negative emotions – both of which are needed to make her fully human.

This last point is especially problematic because, throughout the book, Acacia is navigating a highly stressful situation. She’s playing mediator between her two closest friends, because one fucked the other’s mom. She’s absorbing the frustration and fears of two white girls for months on end, neither of whom ever seem to support Acacia through her own struggles in return. Yet there’s never so much as a glimmer of resentment about these two one-sided relationships.

In a way, an all-white cast of characters would have been easier to digest than tokenism. It’s not enough to include Black characters for the sake of making the author or their white protagonists look progressive. Black people deserve to have our full humanity reflected on the page; to be as complicated, contradictory, and chaotic as white heroines are allowed to be.

That being said, Mistakes Were Made is a good book. The casual language gives an immediacy to Cassie and Erin’s story that makes it highly compelling, and difficult to put down. Though the book is problematic in its approach to race, it shines when Erin pushes back against the social expectations attached to motherhood. The scenes where she tries to connect with Parker by teaching her daughter to choose authenticity and happiness are among the most poignant.

And Cassie. Scrappy, lovable Cassie. It’s impossible not to root for her. In spite of all the challenges life has thrown her way, Cassie builds an extraordinary life for herself. And her chapters represent the very best possibilities in romance, affirming that it’s possible to find love in the face of adversity, against all the odds.

Mistakes Were Made (AKA the MILF Book) is published by St. Martin’s Griffin. Available at all good bookstores from October 11th