Bayou Pages | “Same As It Ever Was” by Clair Lombardo

REVIEW BY MEREDITH MCKINNIE

Claire Lombardo’s second novel Same As It Ever Was is a compelling portrayal of middle age life in a typical upper-class family. Julia Ames is now approaching 60. Her husband Mark still lovingly adores and desires her, son Ben is finding his own way at 24, and teenage daughter Alma challenges her mother in frustrating, yet innocent, ways. Aside from a body she no longer recognizes and less demands on her time, Julia feels a semi-uselessness that she craved and now resents. When Julia runs into Helen in the grocery store, she is faced with a past she tried to forget and the friendship she still longs for. When Julia promised Mark that she would never see or speak to Helen again, she meant it, until she saw her.
When Julia and Helen met 20 years prior, Julia was in the depths of new motherhood, having given up a successful career to focus solely on raising son Ben. And Julia was drowning, overcome with the mundane nature of raising a small child, the tug-of-war of being constantly needed, yet feeling useless, always present and yet entirely invisible. She is the type who commits wholeheartedly and then resents the cage of her own making. Having had a complicated relationship with her own mother (one with physical and emotional distance), Julia is intent to give her son a different reality, smothering Ben to make up for her own mother’s withdrawal of love, affection, and care. Mark praises her attention to Ben, all the while noticing his wife slipping away piecemeal. Chiming in on how his unmothered wife chooses to mother their son is unthinkable.
We glimpse Julia in three critical stages of life, laced with paragraphs of inner dialogue. Lombardo gives us all the pieces to know a character intimately. And yet, Julia remains an enigma, unknowable to herself or to us. As Julia wrestles with this new stage of motherhood, one in which she has little control over her adult children’s choices, she has to face not only what she did, but how forgiveness can be unforgiving. This is essentially a family story – identifiable, layered, and alluring with a dose of scandal. I gave Lombardo’s first novel The Most Fun We Ever Had rave reviews years ago, and I would lend a similar recommendation to this one, though with some hesitation. Julia is not a likable character. You won’t root for her. But you will indulge her story because Lombardo makes it impossible to look away.
“There has always been a schism, for her, between what she wants to do as a mother and what she actually does; she has never quite trusted her instincts, never quite been able to venture into territory that feels too soft or too tender.”