Julia Ames is approaching 60 and planning a birthday party for her husband Mark. Her son, Ben, is 24; her daughter, Alma, is getting ready for college. But for all their apparent happiness, “They are a family whose clock is always slightly askew, affections misplaced and offences outsized.” A chance encounter with Helen Russo, a woman Julia has not seen for 20 years, is both a catalyst for present-day turmoil and a springboard for writer Claire Lombardo to launch into Julia’s tumultuous past.
For the triumphs of Julia’s life have been hard-won. Through alternate chapters moving back and forth in time, we learn that much of what has grown up around Julia has its roots in the time she spent with Helen, who she first met while adrift in postnatal despair, three-year-old Ben in tow.
Lombardo, whose first novel The Most Fun We Ever Had was a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick and New York Times bestseller, is wonderful on new motherhood; the all-consuming love, the ongoing terror, the ambivalence and shame. Coming into Julia’s life dispensing wisdom, expensive wine and Hermés scarves, Helen – the mother of five adult children – positioned herself somewhere between adoptive mum and best friend. Helen’s house, with its sense of many lives well-lived, and her drifter son, Nathaniel, both had their own allure.
Exactly why Julia is so at sea in motherhood is explained when we meet her own mother, Anita. Julia’s father abandoned them, and in the years that followed, alcoholic Anita had a rotating cast of boyfriends “who’d appear like library books, to be returned a few weeks later”.
Julia never saw herself as having children of her own; until she met Mark, she had neither known nor seen contentment. So when it is offered to her, she struggles hard to make it fit. Even in the present, her children almost fully grown, she finds, “a schism, for her, between what she wants to do as a mother and what she actually does; she has never quite trusted her instincts.”
All this comes to the fore as Ben, now a steady and sweet young man, announces that he is about to become a father, and that he is engaged to Sunny, a woman Julia and Mark have not yet met.
There is so much at play here, the past illuminating the present as we flit between the young Julia and the baby Ben, and present-day Julia regarding her adult soon-to-be-father son. The book is filled with quietly vertiginous moments: there’s a scene in which Julia stands between her daughter Alma and her mother, and it is only she who notices the familial resemblances, “Alma projected far into the future and Anita catapulted backwards; she supposes she herself is the logical midpoint.”
Lombardo is funny, too; the young and unhappy Julia describes a fellow mother as “pure Ativanned Stepford brahmin, luxuriously sweatpanted and improbably gaunt, a ponytail that looked like it would whisper about you when you left the room.” Her baby, resting “potato-like” in its stroller, is called Cure.
At almost 500 pages this novel is huge in its ambition, giving us almost the whole of a woman’s life. It is written with the understanding that the domestic sphere can be as tender and vital as the best romance, as compulsive as a thriller. Given its heft and scope, this would be a fantastic book to take on holiday; that said, the last 50 pages may well have you sobbing on your sun lounger.
But there’s no manipulation here, every tear has been earned, such is our investment, in Julia, in her family, in Helen, in what it takes to build and to bear a family. Lombardo understands that women’s lives are deserving of great literature. We are so lucky to have her.
Published by W&N, £20