The Most Fun We Ever Had (Reese's Book Club Pick): A Novel - Softcover

Lombardo, Claire

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0525564233 ISBN 13: 9780525564232

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK • “A gripping and poignant ode to a messy, loving family in all its glory.” —Madeline Miller, bestselling author of Circe

In this “rich, complex family saga” (USA Today) full of long-buried family secrets, Marilyn Connolly and David Sorenson fall in love in the 1970s, blithely ignorant of all that awaits them. By 2016, they have four radically different daughters, each in a state of unrest.
 
Wendy, widowed young, soothes herself with booze and younger men; Violet, a litigator turned stay-at-home-mom, battles anxiety and self-doubt; Liza, a neurotic and newly tenured professor, finds herself pregnant with a baby she's not sure she wants by a man she's not sure she loves; and Grace, the dawdling youngest daughter, begins living a lie that no one in her family even suspects.
 
With the unexpected arrival of young Jonah Bendt—a child placed for adoption by one of the daughters fifteen years before—the Sorensons will be forced to reckon with the rich and varied tapestry of their past. As they grapple with years marred by adolescent angst, infidelity, and resentment, they also find the transcendent moments of joy that make everything else worthwhile.

Don't miss Claire Lombardo's new book, Same As It Ever Was!

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

CLAIRE LOMBARDO earned her MFA in fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Prior to writing The Most Fun We Ever Had, she spent several years doing social work in Chicago. She was born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois.

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The Offspring
 
April 15, 2000
Sixteen years earlier
 
Other people overwhelmed her. Strange, perhaps, for a woman who’d added four beings to the universe of her own reluctant volition, but a fact nonetheless: Marilyn rued the inconvenient presence of bod­ies, bodies beyond her control, her understanding; bodies beyond her favor. She rued them now, from her shielded spot beneath the ginkgo tree, where she was hiding from her guests. She’d always had that knack for entertaining, but it drained her, fully, time and time again, decades of her father’s wealthy clients and her husband’s humorless colleagues; of her children’s temperamental friends; of her transitory neighbors and ever-shifting roster of customers. And yet, today: a hundred-odd near strangers in her backyard, humans in motion, staying in motion, formally clad; tipsy celebrants of the union of her eldest daughter, Wendy, people who were her responsibility for this evening, when she already had so much on her plate—not literally, for she’d neglected to take advantage of the farm-fresh menu spread over three extra-long card tables, but elementally—four girls for whose presences she was biologically and socially responsible, polka-dotting the lawn in their summer pastels. The fruits of her womb, implanted repeatedly by the sweetness of her husband, who was currently nowhere to be found. She’d fallen into motherhood without intent, producing a series of daughters with varying shades of hair and varying degrees of unease. She, Marilyn Sorenson, née Connolly—a resilient product of money and tragedy, from dubious socioemotional Irish-Catholic lineage but now, for all intents and purposes, as functional as they come: an admirably natural head of dirty-blond hair, marginally conversant in both literary criticism and the lives of her children, wearing a fitted forest green sheath that exposed the athletic curve of her calves and the freckled landscape of her shoulders. People kept referring to her with great drama as the mother of the bride, and she was trying to act the part, trying to pretend that she wasn’t focused almost exclusively on the well-being of her children, none of whom, that particular evening, seemed to be thriving.

Maybe normalcy skipped a generation, like baldness. Violet, her second-born, a striking brunette in silk chiffon, had uncharacteristi­cally reeked of booze since breakfast. Wendy was always cause for concern, despite seeming less beleaguered today, owing either to the fact that she’d just married a man who had bank accounts in the Cay­mans or to the fact that this man was, as she vocally professed, “the love of her life.” And Grace and Liza, nine years apart but both mal­adjusted, the former a shy, stunted soon-to‑be second-grader and the latter about to friendlessly finish her sophomore year of high school. How could you grow people inside your own body, sprout them from your own extant materials, and suddenly be unable to recognize them?

Normalcy: it bore a second look, sociologically speaking.

Gracie had found her beneath the ginkgo. Her youngest was almost seven, an insufferable age, aeons from leaving the household, still childish enough that she’d tried to slip into their bed in the mid­dle of the previous night, which wouldn’t have been that big of a deal had her parents been clothed at the time. Anxiety did something to Marilyn, always had, drew her magnetically to the animal comfort of her husband.

“Sweetheart, why don’t you go find—” She hesitated. The only other children at the wedding were toddlers and she didn’t specifi­cally want to encourage Grace’s already-burgeoning antisocial love of dogs by suggesting that she go play with Goethe, but she wanted a moment to herself, just a few seconds to breathe in the cooling air of early evening. “Go find Daddy, love.”

“I can’t find him,” Grace said, the hint of a baby voice blunting her vowels.

“Well, look harder.” She bent to kiss her daughter’s hair. “I need a minute, Goose.”

*

Grace moved off. She’d already checked on Wendy. Already swung on the porch swing with Liza until her sister had been distracted by a boy wearing sneakers with his wedding suit; already convinced Violet to share four sips of champagne from her fancy glass flute. She was out of people to check on.

It was strange to have to share her parents with others this week­end, to have her sisters back around the house on Fair Oaks. Her father sometimes called her the “only only-child in the world who has three sisters.” She resented, slightly, her sisters homing in on her territory. She soothed herself as she always did, with the company of Goethe, curling up with him beneath the purple flower bushes and running her hand through his bristly fur, the part of his butt that looked like it had been permed.

*

Liza felt a little bad, seeing her younger sister finding solace in the dog while she herself was finding solace inside a stranger’s mouth, but the groomsman emanated a smoky vapor of whiskey and arugula and he was doing something with his fingers to the inside of her thigh that made her turn her head away, deciding that Grace could fend for herself, that it wasn’t possible to learn that skill too early.

“Tell me about you,” the groomsman said, his knuckles grazing the lacy insignificance of the thong she’d worn in the hopes of exactly such an occasion.

“What do you want to know?” she asked. It came out sounding kind of hostile. She’d never quite mastered being flirtatious.

“There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?”

“It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.”

He smiled, confused, and she leaned forward boldly and kissed him.

*

Violet had never been quite so drunk, sitting slumped, alone, at one of the tables, from which she supposed she’d driven the other guests. The previous night came to her in fizzy episodic sunbursts: the bar that used to be a bowling alley; her blue-eyed companion with his double-jointed elbows, the athletic clasp of his thighs, the back of his mother’s station wagon; how she’d made sounds she did not recog­nize at first as coming from her own throat, porn star sounds, primal groans. How he came first—she’d later felt him dripping out of her, when they climbed back into the front seat—and then made her, with a deft attention to detail, come as well, for the first time in her life. And how she’d made him drop her a block away from her parents’ house lest Wendy be still awake.

She watched Wendy, wearing sweetheart-neck Gucci at her back­yard wedding to an old-money academic, being spun in circles by her new husband to “You Can’t Hurry Love.” Her sister had, for the first time, surpassed her, success-wise. She was blithe and beautiful and twirling in circles while Violet was drunk past the point of physical comfort, gnawing at a full loaf of catered focaccia, rubbing the oil on the underside of her skirt. But she felt herself smiling a little at Wendy, at oblivious Wendy getting grass stains on her satin train. Imagined going over to her sister and whispering in her ear, You’d die if you knew where I was last night.

*

Wendy watched as Miles, throwing an apologetic smile at her over his shoulder, was pulled away from her by his toddler cousin, their ringbearer, who had solicited his accompaniment to the cake...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0525564233
• ISBN 13: 9780525564232
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 641
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland