"My lifeblood as a writer": An Interview with Claire Lombardo

Greg Zimmerman

June 19

Claire Lombardo hit the rare debut novel trifecta with 2019's The Most Fun We Ever Had: Readers loved it, critics praised it, and it sold hand over fist. That's quite an accomplishment for a previously unknown novelist debuting with a 500-page book. The novel's staying power and appeal were still evident: this past month Reese Witherspoon chose The Most Fun We Ever Had as her book club pick for April.

Now Lombardo is back with her second book, Same As It Ever Was, another long novel about a somewhat-functional family set in the Chicago suburbs. But Same As It Ever Was is certainly not, well, the same as it ever was. Whereas her debut had a polyphonic point of view, alternating between the voices and characters of four sisters, Same As It Ever Was is the third-person-limited story of Julia Ames, a middle-aged librarian and mother, navigating the slings and arrows of upper-class suburbia. It's a more contemplative novel, and also a terrific study in tension-building.

But Same As It Ever Was is still very much a Claire Lombardo novel. If you liked her debut, you'll very much like this one, too. On full display here are Lombardo's signature wit and humor mixed with a depth of feeling and profundity not often found in a 500-page novel. For instance, in one of my favorite passages, Lombardo describes an uber-suburban mom named Monica: "[Monica was a] pure Ativanned Stepford Brahmin, luxuriously sweatpanted and improbably gaunt, [with] a ponytail that looked like it would whisper about you when you left the room."

I recently had the privilege of speaking with Lombardo over Zoom about her new novel… and her beloved dog Renee, who joined us for part of the conversation.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Greg Zimmerman

So in Same As It Ever Was we have third-person limited narrator as opposed to the multiple points of view of your debut novel. Why did you choose this POV, was it more difficult to write so much in Julia's head, and how did you balance the introspection with moving the plot along?

Claire Lombardo

This novel started out as a multiple POV novel, I think just because I'm drawn to the freedom that that form allows, but Julia's voice was the one that started the novel for me and it ended up being the voice that interested me the most. So I ultimately decided to just stay in her head, which proved to be a lot harder than writing a multiple-POV novel.

Richard Russo told me this would be true. I asked him, having read a number of his novels that featured a more sweeping POV—e.g., Nobody's Fool, Empire Falls—whether writing in omniscience was difficult, but he actually said he found it more difficult to write a novel with a single narrator because omniscience allows you to take a break from your characters when you get tired of them. But with a close third-person narrator you're just—well, stuck with them.

Julia is a force, and she was—though I'm very fond of her—a hard character to be stuck with sometimes. One way that I got through feeling stuck with her was via dialogue. So this book, like The Most Fun We Ever Had, has a lot of dialogue. And we spend a lot of time watching Julia talking to other people, which hopefully throws her into relief to some degree.

We also spend a lot of time in her head, though, in her interiority. And the way that I tried to avoid becoming too slow or too contemplative is by having a narrative voice that is—I feel like "neurotic" has a negative or perhaps misogynistic connotation— but Julia has kind of a kinetic voice and she thinks colorfully. Julia's psyche is running a million miles per hour at all times.

Greg Zimmerman

Julia is such a fascinating character. And though (or maybe because) her worst fear is being boring, she is constantly judging other people as boring. But Julia is not a punk rocker, or a hipster artist, she's a librarian and mom. How do you think readers should reconcile Julia's perception of the world and other people with the perception of herself?

Claire Lombardo

A lot of this book is about perception—the way that we perceive others versus how they actually are, and also the way that we perceive ourselves. And Julia, for all her observational skills, and all of her self-criticism and self-doubt, has so much potential as a person. But she's kind of been beaten down by the world, which makes her reluctant to become a full participant in the human experience. And I don't think that's because she's not brave enough or because she's not dynamic enough. She's more content to be an observer than risk participating and being disappointed. Julia spends most of her thirties criticizing and "othering" the people around her to convince herself, "No, I haven't sold out and moved to the suburbs. I haven't betrayed my younger self by becoming a stay-at-home mom." And she's still second-guessing some of those things in her fifties. And so a lot of this novel is also about someone at an age where we don't normally think of someone trying to find herself.

Greg Zimmerman

One of the themes I loved in this book is the absurdity of or contradictions inherent within life in the suburbs. Why are the suburbs and its characters—specifically the Chicago suburbs—such fertile ground for fiction?

Claire Lombardo

They're little microcosms, right? They're these absurd tiny worlds. That's how I perceive all the suburbs of Chicago. And everyone in a Chicago suburb thinks that their Chicago suburb is very different from all of the other Chicago suburbs. But they aren't. And I feel confident saying that because I grew up in one of them (Oak Park). So yes, I think particularly when you get into these different little enclaves, there's plenty of room for people to create drama. So I just had a lot of fun exploring that. I'm not making fun of anyone either, for the record—because all of our lives are absurd. No one is more absurd than anyone else, or more boring. I mean, okay, some people are more boring than others, I guess, but no one is less worthy of attention than anyone else.

Greg Zimmerman

Julia and her daughter Alma's relationship is fraught, but seemingly for normal reasons (teenage angst, etc.), whereas Julia and her mother Anita's relationship is fraught for much different reasons. Can you talk about the significance of mother/daughter relationships in this novel?

Claire Lombardo

I think dynamics between women are inherently interesting, but mother-daughter relationships especially provide such a great deal of fictional fodder. So I liked contrasting the pretty average and pretty pedestrian—but nevertheless pretty explosive and fraught—dynamics between Julia and her daughter and Julia and her mother—the latter of which I think will be a less-recognizable mother-daughter dynamic to some readers. I had fun with that contrast. I also had fun exploring these three generations of women and how they've influenced each other, knowingly or unknowingly. I had a lot of fun writing a teenage girl too, in Julia's daughter Alma. She's very confident and she's very sure of herself in a way that Julia wasn't necessarily at that age, and Julia is both really proud of that and really afraid of it. I enjoyed playing around with those dynamics. And then it was so fulfilling to delve into Julia's past and see her relationship with her mother and how that shaped who she is, because that's another avenue in fiction that I'm fascinated by: the inheritance of things and how we get to be where we are.

Greg Zimmerman

This novel is a master class in building tension and drama, especially in the first 50 pages—you give us some pretty big hints that all is not well, but we don't know why, exactly, so we keep QUICKLY turning pages. Was this a conscious strategy because of the novel's length, or just an organic function of your writerly style (or both)?

Claire Lombardo

Yeah, it was not initially conscious; I'll just show my hand there. This novel did not start out in the form that you read it. As with my first novel, I spent years writing this book out of order, and it took me a very long time to figure out the structure of Same As It Ever Was and to figure out how, exactly, to tell Julia's story. I had to locate the heart of the story first. So I tried every which way of putting this novel together, and none of them were quite working. But I was always really drawn to what's now the first scene in the novel when, Julia runs into an elderly woman while shopping, and the reader doesn't know who she is or why this is such a fraught interaction between these two fairly composed women in a fancy grocery store. And once I decided to open the book there, it was a matter of tugging that line of tension to the right tautness.

A lot of the mechanical work of putting this novel together was figuring out where to leave breadcrumbs and where I was maybe hitting the reader over the head a little too hard. Because I hate that as a reader myself, when there's constantly something being alluded to in a novel, and it ends up being disappointing when you finally get to it—"you're like, oh, that's what you've been dangling in front of me through 200 pages? That's it?" So I really wanted to avoid that.

Ultimately, I see Same As It Ever Was as the life story of a person who finds it difficult to be a person. A fair share of the dramatic tension in this book comes from Julia misbehaving in both big and small ways, acting against her own best interests, but I was very interested in getting to the bottom of what made her tick and looking at her life from all possible angles. So that's the real drama and tension on these pages, I think—Julia just living, being a person to varying degrees of success—and that's really my lifeblood as a writer, getting to know my characters as well as I possibly can and then letting them run free.