The Fleishman Is In Trouble Book Ending Reveals What Happened To Rachel

Three years after the publication of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s debut book, Fleishman Is in Trouble, the divorce drama has now been adapted into an FX/Hulu series, out Nov. 17. Claire Danes and Jesse Eisenberg star as Rachel and Toby Fleishman, a New York couple with two kids who are in the middle of separating when Rachel suddenly uproots herself from her life.

Already, the series has been praised for its performances and how closely it follows its source material, too, which invites the question: how does the Fleishman Is in Trouble book end? After the two-episode premiere, another six episodes will air on Thursdays through the end of the year. Of course, if you can’t wait that long, here’s what goes down in the novel. Spoilers ahead.

Libby (played by Lizzy Caplan in the series) is Toby’s friend who’s been narrating the journey of his marriage (and divorce) thus far. She runs into Rachel by the final third of the book, a section aptly titled, “Rachel Fleishman Is in Trouble.” She gets the entire story of Rachel’s absence straight from the source. Essentially, Rachel did go to the Kripalu yoga retreat, as she told Toby. She went with Sam Rothberg, the family friend with whom she’d had an affair, but that relationship ultimately fell apart after Rachel had an emotional epiphany (she’d “never been loved”) and realized Sam didn’t accept her any more than Toby did.

So, Rachel then spent the next three weeks by herself — and steadily slipped into a breakdown. She couldn’t find sleep and traveled the country looking for it: to her grandma’s house in Baltimore, to Los Angeles, and even to the park near her house just to rest. None of it worked until Libby found her near Toby’s place. Libby walks her home and looks after Rachel, who finally falls asleep and is later checked out by a doctor.

As for Toby and Rachel’s relationship? That’s a little less straightforward. Libby doesn’t tell Toby his wife is back in town, but the friends talk about conceptualizing the past summer as a book (meta!) and imagine an ending in which Rachel shows up at Toby’s door at the very end. And well, that’s exactly what happens with Fleishman Is in Trouble. Rachel returns, and the book is over.

Whether Toby and Rachel get back together, then, is totally up to your interpretation. Much discussion has been devoted to the topic — but Brodesser-Akner, a journalist, seems to be OK with the ambiguity. “Once I understood that people prefer the truth, even when it’s messy, and that people aren’t just looking for an easy story that makes sense, that’s when I felt like I was able to write my novel,” she told The New York Times in 2019.