YMMV / Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

• Base-Breaking Character: Audiences cannot seem to agree on whether Vivi is a flawed but ultimately sympathetic Jerkass Woobie who struggles with mental illness from her traumatic childhood, or a vicious, sadistic, abusive mother who does not take responsibility for her own transgressions and is forgiven way too easily for what she did to her children.
• Jerkass Woobie: Buggy, definitely. Sidda and Vivi too, to a lesser extent.
• Tear Jerker: "You killed my son! You drink champagne to his death!"
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Sidda is meant to be seen as hard-hearted and cruel for not forgiving her mother...her physically abusive, mentally ill, violent, alcoholic, incestuous mother who shows very little remorse (if any) for what she's done to Sidda and her siblings.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: The plot is about Vivi's friends trying to get her daughter Sidda to forgive her by showing her how hard Vivi's life has been. But for some readers and viewers, Vivi's abuse of her children is so awful as to make her irredeemable, no matter how horrible her own life was. It does not help that Vivi's reaction to Sidda calling her abusive is to call Sidda a liar, disown her, and cut her out of her will.
• Values Dissonance: In the years since the book was written (1996), the long-term effects of child abuse have come to more light in the public eye, especially with the rise of online forums such as Reddit's r/justnofamily and r/raisedbynarcissists that allow people to share their own stories of terrible childhoods and get advice from others in the same predicaments. Nowadays, an increasingly common school of thought among people with abusive parents or other family members is that you are not obligated to forgive an abusive family member just because they're related to you, and that if they continue to abuse you and/or show no remorse for how they treated you previously, it may be best to minimize or cut contact with them for your own sake (especially if there is someone else involved who is also a target of that person's abuse or may become one, like your partner or your own children).