Same as It Ever Was

"Midlife reckoning featuring reflections on family relationships."

"Plenty of books have messy heroines – palatable, quirky ladies who (gasp) confess that motherhood is hard or that they sometimes hate their husbands. And then there is Julia, the protagonist of Same as It Ever Was. Julia is a frayed, spiky knot of insecurity and anxiety and loneliness and self-sabotage, a woman who finds herself falling apart as a stay-at-home mother to a 3-year-old in the 1980s. When she meets Helen, a sage older woman with an impossibly dreamy life, Julia feels she has found a life preserver. Their short, intense friendship has consequences that reverberate throughout Julia’s life. Calling this a drama about family doesn’t do Claire Lombardo’s novel justice – it’s an almost uncomfortably perceptive exploration of what it feels like to not feel at home in the world … which is to say, it’s deeply relatable."