Claire Lombardo's SAME AS IT EVER WAS

Name: Claire Lombardo's SAME AS IT EVER WAS
Start: 2024-08-22T19:00:00-05:00
Location: Content Bookstore

Schedule

Thu Aug 22 2024 at 07:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

Content Bookstore | Northfield, MN

Content welcomes Claire Lombardo for a reading around her new novel SAME AS IT EVER WAS. Join us on Thursday, August 22nd at 7 pm (after Back-to-Book Club Night with the friend of Content Jason Gobble), for a delightful conversation with Claire and KYMN's Paula Granquist.
“Witty and insightful...a powerful exploration of marriage, motherhood, and self.”–Bonnie Garmus, bestselling author of Lessons in Chemistry
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.
Claire Lombardo is the author of THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD. She lives in Iowa City, where she has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and works part-time as a bookseller at Prairie Lights Books.