An Evening with Claire Lombardo and Kate Baer: Same As It Ever Was

Name: An Evening with Claire Lombardo and Kate Baer: Same As It Ever Was
Start: 2025-05-14T19:00:00-04:00
Location: Midtown Scholar Bookstore

Schedule

Wed, 14 May, 2025 at 07:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

Midtown Scholar Bookstore | Harrisburg, PA

Secure your book + ticket here: https://tinyurl.com/32s2nbjm
The Midtown Scholar Bookstore is honored to welcome New York Times bestselling author Claire Lombardo to Harrisburg for a conversation and signing on the paperback release of her new novel, Same As It Ever Was. Lombardo will be in conversation with New York Times bestselling author Kate Baer.
This is a ticketed event. Every ticket includes a signed paperback copy of the book and up to two general admission seats. Doors will open at 6:00pm, and the event will begin at 7:00pm. Seating is general admission; first come, first served. Book signing to follow discussion.
About the Book:
Same As It Ever Was showcases the consummate style, signature wit, and profound emotional intelligence that made The Most Fun We Ever Had one of the most beloved novels of the past decade.
Featuring a memorably messy family and the multifaceted marriage at its heart, Lombardo’s debut was dubbed “the literary love child of Jonathan Franzen and Anne Tyler” (The Guardian) and hailed as “ambitious and brilliantly written” (Washington Post). In this remarkable follow-up—another elegant and tumultuous story in the tradition of Elizabeth Strout, Ann Patchett, and Celeste Ng—Lombardo introduces us to an unforgettable cast of characters, this time by way of her singularly complicated protagonist.
Julia Ames, after a youth marked by upheaval and emotional turbulence, has found herself on the placid plateau of mid-life. But Julia has never navigated the world with the equanimity of her current privileged class. Having nearly derailed herself several times, making desperate bids for the kind of connection that always felt inaccessible to her, she finally feels, at age fifty seven, that she has a firm handle on things.
She’s unprepared, though, for what comes next: a surprise announcement from her straight-arrow son, an impending separation from her spikey teenaged daughter, and a seductive resurgence of the past, all of which threaten to draw her back into the patterns that had previously kept her on a razor’s edge.
Same As It Ever Was traverses the rocky terrain of real life, —exploring new avenues of maternal ambivalence, intergenerational friendship, and the happenstantial cause-and-effect that governs us all. Delving even deeper into the nature of relationships—how they grow, change, and sometimes end—Lombardo proves herself a true and definitive cartographer of the human heart and asserts herself among the finest novelists of her generation.
About the Speakers:
Claire Lombardo is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Most Fun We Ever Had, which was a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick and has been optioned for television by Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern. She has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Grinnell College and lives in Minneapolis, MN.
Kate Baer is the 3x New York Times bestselling author of What Kind Of Woman, I Hope This Finds You Well, & And Yet. Her work has also been published in The New Yorker, Literary Hub, Huffington Post and The New York Times.
Prices include applicable PA sales tax and Harrisburg City amusement tax.