Same As It Ever Was: A Novel

Same as It Ever Was is a domestic fiction novel told in third-person limited perspective entirely from the point of view of the protagonist, Julia Ames. Domestic fiction is a genre that focuses on a family unit and their experiences. Often, contemporary domestic fiction is told from the point of view of a female protagonist and her experience creating an ideal home life. As writer Deborah Levy puts it, “We [women] had a go at cancelling our own desires and found we had a talent for it. And we put a lot of our life’s energy into creating a home for our children and our men” (Levy, Deborah. Things I Don’t Want to Know. Bloomsbury, 2018, p. 16). The struggle of women, particularly mothers, to conform to or reject societal expectations in the home is a classic literary trope and the core conflict at the heart of Same as It Ever Was. Julia Ames consistently chastises herself for not being good enough at creating a utopian homelife for her family, in part because of her own troubled childhood.

The novel focuses in particular on life in the suburbs, a familiar setting familiar in American domestic novels. The conformity and high expectations in wealthy American suburbs like those of Chicago provoke alienation, which is another classic literary trope. Exemplifying this trope in American literature is the suburban domestic drama Revolutionary Road (1961) by Richard Yates. While this classic novel offers a far more scathing critique than Claire Lombardo’s more nuanced portrayal of suburban life in Same as It Ever Was, both novels closely focus on a troubled marriage in the wake of an affair, the desire for the “American Dream,” and the struggles of motherhood.

In addition, Lombardo explicitly references the works of Virginia Woolf, most notably Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Like Mrs. Dalloway, Same as It Ever Was is a phenomenological exploration of a woman’s life experiences told in third-person limited perspective. Phenomenology concerns the development of human consciousness and self-awareness and thus reflects subjective, lived sensations. Rather than objectively describing events, it focuses on feelings and impressions of those events. Woolf’s novel is considered a feminist masterpiece because it draws attention to and thereby valorizes the emotional life of a woman in the domestic sphere (as opposed to the period’s overwhelming focus on men’s lives in “objective” history). Similarly, Lombardo details Julia’s thoughts, perspective, and emotions. However, instead of following her interior life for a single day, as in Mrs. Dalloway, Same as It Ever Was follows Julia’s reflections on her entire life, from childhood through midlife, similar to another phenomenological exploration of the female perspective, albeit nonfictional: Simone de Beauvoir’s series of memoirs from Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958) to Old Age (1972).

As in Mrs. Dalloway, Same as It Ever Was filters events through Julia’s subjective perspective and impressions. These impressions provide a skewed version of reality that may not be entirely accurate, which gradually becomes apparent through other characters’ dialogue and actions. For instance, Julia perceives her mother as a cold, selfish person with an alcohol addiction. While this may be partially true or was true at a time, when they reunite, Julia learns that Anita has close relationships with her stepdaughters, works as an aid to the deaf, and is sober. Julia eventually admits the unreliability of her perceptions in the final chapter: “She will remember it just as it happened, or maybe not exactly, who’s to say” (491). The unreliability of her third-person narration underscores her humanity and creates tension within the novel’s plot.