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At fifty-seven, Julia Ames has found herself with an improbably lovely life. Despite her inclination towards self-sabotage, she has a husband she loves, two happy children and a quiet, contented existence in the suburbs. But, out of the blue, things begin to change.
Her always well-behaved son, Ben, is acting strangely, and will soon make a shocking announcement.
Her beloved but belligerent teenage daughter is about to depart for college, leaving Julia unexpectedly terrified of an empty nest.
And, in the local grocery store, Julia encounters a woman she hasn’t seen for 20 years – a woman whose friendship was once both her lifeline and, very nearly, her downfall.
Consumed with her checkered past and the chaos of her present, Julia starts to spin out of control, at risk of destroying all she most loves. Following Julia over the course of a few tumultuous months, bookended by a birthday party and a wedding, and examining the fifty-plus years before, Same as It Ever Was examines the complete and complicated trajectory of one woman’s life and asks what it takes to make – and to not break – a family.
Her always well-behaved son, Ben, is acting strangely, and will soon make a shocking announcement.
Her beloved but belligerent teenage daughter is about to depart for college, leaving Julia unexpectedly terrified of an empty nest.
And, in the local grocery store, Julia encounters a woman she hasn’t seen for 20 years – a woman whose friendship was once both her lifeline and, very nearly, her downfall.
Consumed with her checkered past and the chaos of her present, Julia starts to spin out of control, at risk of destroying all she most loves. Following Julia over the course of a few tumultuous months, bookended by a birthday party and a wedding, and examining the fifty-plus years before, Same as It Ever Was examines the complete and complicated trajectory of one woman’s life and asks what it takes to make – and to not break – a family.
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Reviews
Witty and insightful. A powerful exploration of marriage, motherhood, and self
A big American novel to get totally lost in. Rich and compelling and funny and true
This is such a wonderful book: unsentimental yet full of feeling, with such sharply-written, loving and generous characterisation. It has everything I adore in a novel. I finished it in floods of tears, and had to sit for a minute or two to pull myself together. It absolutely floored me. What a joy to let a writer of such talent suffuse us with a life's worth of humour and pain, affection and mess!
It was such a pleasure to bury myself in this book, a literary novel of family life which moved and surprised me. Claire Lombardo creates such interesting characters and predicaments and manipulates the revelations and emotional bombshells so expertly that you read on ravenously
Lombardo loves her characters, taking time to peel back each of their layers through the time-lapse structure of the novel and her rich descriptions. . . A sure bet for fans of Richard Russo and Jane Smiley
A family saga to save as a treat and devour when you should be doing something else, in which events past and present upset a long marriage
Pitch-perfect. . . Lombardo is compulsively readable and consistently funny, and it's impossible to look away as Julia continues to self-sabotage. This domestic drama hits all the right notes