Same at it Always Was, by Claire Lombardo (2024)
Claire Lombardo’s 2024 family novel, Same As It Always Was, is an extraordinarily acute psychological exploration of the inner and relational life of a middle-class woman in the Chicago suburbs and the periods of her life from childhood to her 60s. The narration is episodic rather than sequential, moving back and forth among various segments of Julia Ames’ life, all of them illuminating each other. Not simply a narrative device, this oscillation reflects the reality that all of us live on a constantly shifting emotion-scape of memory, anticipation, regret and cherishing. Lombardo’s insight into her characters’ personalities is deep, expressed with a preternatural precision and deftness, and often with surprises and humor along the way.
The novel explores a range of Julia’s relationships – with an older mentor friend Helen, her conscientious son Ben and moody daughter Alma, her volatile mother Anita, and family friends Francine and Brady. As a personality, Julia is insecure, introverted and ungenerous, characteristics one comes to understand and sympathize with in view of her atrocious family background.
The novel’s central drama arises from Julia’s early adultery with Helen’s son Nathaniel, much younger than she, and the ramifications for her marriage with Mark. Readers of Surviving Infidelity will find Lombardo’s treatment of this insightful and cathartic.
Here are a few samples:
. . . if she [Julia] allowed herself to focus on the breadth of what she was doing, she’d be blinded by the sweeping magnitude of her betrayal, the sheer badness of her bad behavior; it was unconscionable to think that she was doing this to Mark, who was, objectively . . . the best man she’d ever been with. . . .
She kept two inarguable thoughts at the forefront of her psyche, scientific truths: first, that things had been creeping downhill for her for a couple of years, and so it wasn’t so terribly unexpected, her need for comfort, for friendship, and the fact that she’d sought it out elsewhere. But second, that she was a terrible person, that what she was doing was unequivocally wrong: that there was, despite the platitudes and nuance contained in Truth #1, no excuse for it whatsoever.
The sheer destructiveness of adultery is vivid: ". . . she had fucked up, shot everything to hell for the sake of a few instances of oblivious pleasure." Helen tells her that she seems "so intent on setting fire to it all."
Most adultery victims, a reasonable term for betrayed spouses, respond to discovery by needing and demanding to know a great deal about how the affair was conducted, but husband Mark takes a surprisingly opposite tack, deliberately not wanting to hear any details, as this series of quotes illustrates:
"I know, Julia." He looked back at her for just a dark, portentous second. "You know?" "You know—what?" she asked. "How?" "I surmise. I know enough. And I’ve decided I don’t want to know anything more."
Her breathing felt shallow, the air between them crackling and opaque. She’d braced herself for the fallout, for the painful disclosure of everything that had happened in the last few months, the last few years, all her uncertainties and darknesses and doubts and, most recently, her betrayal, which, funnily enough, had come to feel like the least serious thing overall, simply a stupid manifestation of less tangible things, everything that was wrong projected cartoonishly on a tiny screen. She’d been so ready for an explosion that the stillness scared her. "I only want to ask you one thing," he said. "Of course," she said. "Anything." "You don’t—" He drew in a small, sharp breath. "God, you don’t love this guy, do you?" She wanted to hug him; she knew he wouldn’t let her even if he weren’t driving. "Of course not. It wasn’t—anything, Mark."
But this seemed to make him even sadder. "What do you mean of course not?"
Watching a face like Mark’s darken was so much worse than watching a regular person get upset; the impulse, in her husband, was still unpracticed after so many years of living, and his hurt, his anger, his confusion all appeared with a childlike candor. . . .
"If it wasn’t—" he started to say. "Then what was the— Why? What was the point?" "I’m not sure," she said. "I’m not sure it was—about a point, exactly; it was more complicated than that. I’m—friends with his mom." . . .
"And it’s over? It’s— Your whole going off the grid like this, it’s—" "It’s over. Mark, I— You can’t know how sorry I am. And I know—there’s nothing I can say here that doesn’t sound like a cliché, but it truly didn’t mean anything, it was just a—" "I don’t want to know."
"But I—" She wanted to absolve herself, vocalize it and in doing so make it theirs. She wanted to stop being alone with it; she wanted it to become Mark’s too, something they discussed at length, however painfully, because once they did that they’d get further and further away from it, turn it into something anecdotal like they’d done with everything else from their pasts. Was that not the point of being married, having to carry less?
"You don’t get to unload this on me," he said. "It’s not fair, Julia, and it’s cruel, and you— God, you have to have some fucking accountability. You don’t deserve to feel vindicated, okay? Because I’m never going to stop being hurt by it."
It’s much more typical that the betrayer resists detailing the story, even after disclosure, and that the betrayed wants to know more and even asks the same questions over and over. Here, Julia’s wish to tell more is unusual, as is Mark’s resistance to hearing more, but this unusual reversal of instincts becomes quite credible in view of these particular personalities. Insightful as usual, Lombardo notes a possible underside of storytelling, how it can be a selfish imposition of an unwelcome burden on the betrayed spouse.
The lasting damage of adultery, even 25 years later, is achingly portrayed:
He’s not over it. . . . Despite everything that’s been said, everything they’ve agreed not to say; despite their affection for each other, the kindness they’ve shown each other, the salient fact of all the time that’s elapsed, the fact that so much of that time has gone by without either one of them giving it a second thought; despite the dinner parties and the weekends spent making each other laugh while they did tedious projects like cleaning the basement and the nights when they fell asleep together in unflattering pajamas in front of Frasier reruns, despite Alma. Despite all of it, her husband is not over what she did to him, and she can’t blame him for that, because he’s right, he’s always deserved credit; there is no amount of credit she can give him, really, that will match what he’s given her. How long, she wonders, have they been this fragile?
She’d once feared being close to him but now they don’t know how not to be together, even when they want to be apart; this is perhaps different, she sees now, than what she’s always mistaken for intimacy; they have spent so much time, now, in the impenetrable haze of intuition and misunderstanding and willful blindness that is a long marriage, that she can’t remember what it’s like to be anywhere else. . . .
Marriage in the aftermath of an affair: she hadn’t known it was possible to feel so shitty; she could never have predicted that she could physically hurt because she was so sad, or that her own sadness would be secondary to Mark’s. . . . she realized that there was such a thing as hurting someone beyond repair.
Julia and Mark’s marriage survives and even thrives in some ways. Yet all of us in betrayal trauma have learned that an important part of healing is the development of a shared narrative of our lives with our partners, however painful it may be to develop such a shared narrative. That common story is closed off for Mark and Julia, which leaves a lasting loneliness between them in what is otherwise a nourishing and joy-filled marriage.
I highly recommend this novel. Check out the positive review it received in the New York Times.
