SAME AS IT EVER WAS by Claire Lombardo 

Lombardo writes sweeping generational family sagas with telling bits of relationships in all their complicated spit and shine. Her first novel, The Most Fun We Ever Had, was equally as meandering through long marriages, spikey offspring, and tragedies and secrets that show up when you least expect it. I’ve visualized both of her novels as Netflix series—and I hope that happens. In Same As It Ever Was, our narrator, Julia, shifts between her years as a young mother while her husband, Mark, kind but clueless to his wife’s maternal ambivalence, builds a successful career. Julia turns to an older woman mentor who seems to embody everything Julia is not. Her son becomes Julia’s lover. The novel weaves the timelines from their early married years to their move to an affluent suburb where she and Mark raise their two children, always hoping her own mother will one day love her. It’s a story about the different ways we mother and who and what determines what that should look like.

Favorite line(s): Marriage was trying; marriage was burying the hatchet. But they had not buried any of their hatchets; instead she’d covered the hatchets with an assortment of decorative hand towels and they were both pretending that the hatchets didn’t exist. She felt Mark’s eyes on her sometimes and wondered what he was seeing, if everyone’s marriage ended up like theirs had, two people who’d once been mad for each other stranded on opposite sides of the kitchen, dimly aware of excess weight and emotional transgressions, Animaniacs—shaped pasta about to boil over on the stove, trying to remember how it had been before.

LIARS by Sarah Manguso

Wowser! Rage, rage against the domestic marriage machine. Much is made of the domestic inequalities of the marriage of Jane, a writer, and her husband, John, a filmmaker. Jane wants it all—the handsome husband, the creative life, and a child. Well, there’s no such thing as getting it all—and Jane, smart, clever, and now feeling stuck, must move across the country several times while John chases a career. Lonely and raging against the nightmare she’s got herself in, Jane’s biggest betrayal doesn’t come when her louche of a husband leaves her for another woman, but in how she talked herself into a life she knew betrayed herself.  

Favorite line(s): Why are you so angry? My husband frequently asked me why I was so much angrier than other women. It always made me smile. I was exactly as angry as every other woman I knew.It wasn’t that we’d been born angry; we’d become women and ended up angry. Anger is one of the last privileges of the truly helpless. Infants are angry. Have you ever sat all night holding a baby in the dark who’s screaming right into your face? It changes you, or so my husband used to say. He’d done that one night, sat and been screamed at. I was sitting right next to him, but he always told the story as if he’d been the only one there. All the other days and nights, it had just been me. But that one night had been the real game-changer, apparently. My mother told me I’d been such a happy child. You loved everything, she said. I became angry early, though. I was precocious. I pitied men for having to stay the same all their lives, for missing out on this consuming rage. 

FORGOTTEN ON SUNDAY by Valerie Perrin

In a village in France, Justine and her cousin Jules are sent to live with their grandparents after a car accident killed their parents. Justine works as a caregiver at an assisted living home and befriends Helene, a WWII survivor who recounts her love affair with Lucien while Justine writes her memories down in a notebook. A beach, a seagull, blindness, and betrayals are metaphorically woven throughout the novel, translated from French to English. While Justine confronts the secrets around the car accident, Helene relives her own demons. Told in alternating chapters, the women, one young, one old, and the stories they describe and uncover depict the regrets of undeclared love.  

Favorite line(s): The old folk run away, but they don’t know where to go. They’ve forgotten the path that leads back to before. Their “homes” have been put up for sale to pay the monthly fees for their stay at The Hydrangeas. Their window boxes are empty and their cats adopted. Their homes only exist inside their heads now, their personal “libraries.” Those libraries I love to spend hours in. What saddens me is when I see them piling up at reception from ten in the morning and staring at the two main entrance doors as they open and then close. They wait. (FORGOTTEN ON SUNDAY) When the weather’s fine, we take them out into the garden to enjoy the sunshine from the shade of the lindens. Being visited by the wind in the trees, the bees, the butterflies, and the birds makes up for all their waiting. We give them bread to throw to the sparrows and pigeons, which some love and some are wary of doing, while some just kick at the birds. And then arguments break out. And as long as they’re arguing, they’re not waiting anymore.