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This book sat on my to-read list for months. It was highly reviewed but every time I looked at it, with its bland cover and title and summary, I thought, "Do I want to spend 500 pages with some woman in the suburbs who doesn't know why she's sad?" I finally pulled the trigger and I'm so glad I did because this is such an emotionally rich novel. 2024 was a year of these surprisingly emotionally rich novels, and while it did not have quite the high concept of the other books I'd put in this bucket (PIGLET, THE HUSBANDS, THE WEDDING PEOPLE) it was the richest of them. The lack of a high concept, just being the story of a person, lets us dive so deeply into her. I was glad for all 500 pages.

On paper this sounds so boring. I particularly despise books that start with that character who has a perfect life. And Julia does. She has a wonderful husband, wonderful children, a job she enjoys, and a more than comfortable lifestyle. The problem is that Julia has never believed she is capable of giving or receiving love. She holds deep inside her a self-loathing she has never fully confronted, and she walks through this perfect life on tiptoe, constantly sure that she is doing it wrong and that it will all just go away. And maybe it should go away. Through this novel we learn just how deep all this goes, we see the childhood that created it, we see the incidents of extreme self-sabotage that almost destroyed it, and we see Julia constantly suspicious of the good things in her life even after she has worked so hard to get them.

Who cares if Julia's life on paper is boring? Most are. But when you care about a person (or a character) it becomes interesting, when a writer can present this person to you without the sheen she presents to the rest of the world, shows her to you with all the miserable thoughts she has about herself that she never shows to anyone, it is a deeply intimate and beautiful experience. I see reviews for this book that dislike it because they dislike Julia. And I get it. Julia is often unlikable, she makes many bad choices, she is riddled with self-doubt. She's also darkly funny and absolutely capable of the deep emotions she is sure she doesn't have. She is interesting because of how fully drawn she is.

Along with this close character analysis, we also get to see a very long portrait of a marriage. And we get a look at the long and difficult relationship with an emotionally unavailable parent. There's been a lot of generational trauma narratives lately, and I appreciated how Lombardo doesn't make this a Just Forgive Your Mom story, nothing is that simple. Things don't just work out. People don't just live happily ever after. And the trappings of your life are not who you are. I desperately wanted Julia to go to therapy, but I just enjoyed getting to understand her so well.