Same As It Ever Was

51 pages • 1 hour read

Same As It Ever Was: A Novel

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-12

Part 1, Chapters 13-24

Part 2

Part 3

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Part 1, Chapters 1-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1: “Lost in the Supermarket”

Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary

Homemaker Julia goes a grocery store two towns away for crabmeat when her regular grocery store has none. She lives in a Chicago suburb with her husband of nearly 30 years, Mark, and her 17-year-old daughter, Alma. Her 24-year-old son, Ben, is at university. She plans to make crab cakes for Mark’s 60th birthday party that evening. At the grocery store, she runs into an old friend, Helen Russo, whom she hasn’t seen in 18 years. Helen tells Julia that her husband, Pete, died three years ago. Shaken by the encounter, Julia returns home to prepare for the party.

Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary

While preparing food for the party, Julia thinks about her life 20 years ago, when she first met Helen. Julia and Mark lived in a different Chicago suburb then. Ben was three years old, and Julia struggled with the challenges of being a stay-at-home mother with a small child. One day, she started to cry while driving Ben to his preschool. After seeing how upset she was, Ben didn’t want to leave her, so she decided they’d “play hooky” together.

Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary

In the shower before the party, Julia thinks about how, after what happened with Helen, they had to completely change their lives, including moving to the town they live in now. While she does her makeup in the bathroom, Ben arrives. He looks tired. He seems as if he has something he wants to tell her, but before he can, one of the guests calls upstairs asking for something.

During the party, Julia steps outside for a minute and runs into Mark’s best friend, Brady Grimes. Brady is wealthy. He’s drinking alone, and his wife, Francine, isn’t at the party. He despairs that he’ll soon turn 60, too.

After the party, Julia has Mark tie her wrists with scarves for some light bondage as a gift for his birthday. He’s surprised, because it’s out of the norm for them. After they have sex, Julia finds herself thinking about sex with Nathaniel.

Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary

Twenty years earlier, after deciding not to drop Ben off at preschool, Julia and Ben went to the botanical garden. Helen, a volunteer docent at the garden 20 years Julia’s senior, saw Julia crying there. Helen was kind to Ben and Julia. She suggested they all go get some ice cream. While eating ice cream, Julia was candid with Helen about her struggles. Helen suggested Julia might be depressed. Julia learned that Helen worked as a lawyer before retiring, while her husband stayed home and raised their five sons. Helen says Julia should call her sometime.

That night, Julia and Mark went out on a date. Julia found their dates tedious. After the date, he tried to be sexually intimate with her, but she rejected him. She thought about how they used to have sex all the time, but now she felt bored and lonely. She closed her eyes, and Mark said she had to relax her tongue and jaw if she was going to fall asleep. Annoyed, Julia went to sleep in Ben’s room.

Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary

In the present timeline, the week after Mark’s birthday party, Ben tells Mark and Julia that his girlfriend, Nora, who goes by the nickname Sunny, is pregnant with his child and they plan to get married. Julia is shocked and worried about Ben’s decision, but Mark is supportive.

Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary

In the past timeline, a week after meeting Helen at the botanical gardens, Julia goes to Helen’s house while Ben is at preschool. Julia meets Helen’s husband, Pete, who is taking shingles off the roof. Julia is impressed by the comfortable wealth apparent in Helen’s home and the signs of a happy family, like a framed picture of Helen and Pete kissing. After this initial visit, Julia becomes a regular guest at Helen’s home. Julia shares with Helen her reluctance about having another child and her dissatisfaction with her sex life.

Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary

In the present timeline, after Ben leaves, Julia sits down with Alma to talk about the big news. Alma says she thinks Ben will be a good father but that it’s silly for them to get married, and Julia expresses appreciation for this perspective. Later, Mark tells Julia that the news isn’t “the end of the world” (81) and that they’ll be around to help with the grandchild. He suggests they have Sunny over for brunch that weekend to get to know her better.

Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary

In the past timeline, one day when Julia goes to Helen’s house, Helen tells her that her youngest son, Nathaniel, has returned home and is living in the carriage house in the backyard. Nathaniel is 28 and has vague aspirations to be a writer.

In early December, Julia mentions to Helen that she would like to go back to work as a librarian. Helen gives Julia the contact information of a woman she knows who works in a library nearby. They talk further, and Julia reveals that her mother has met Ben only once, for about 10 minutes.

The next week, Julia meets Nathaniel when Helen has him help put a large plant in Julia’s car. She is immediately attracted to him.

Part 1, Chapter 9 Summary

In the present timeline, Julia and Alma don’t do a lot of activities together—which Julia feels bad about—but share a love for the teen drama Gold Beach. They watch it together, and Julia enjoys feeling close to her daughter in these moments. While watching two characters “hooking up” on the show, Julia asks Alma how things are going with Alma’s sort-of-girlfriend, Margo Singh. Alma says she and Margo have been arguing a lot. When Julia replies that some arguments are normal in a relationship, Alma retorts that Julia and Mark never fight. Julia worries that this suggests “darkness lurking beneath the surface” (97).

Part 1, Chapter 10 Summary

In the past timeline, in January, Helen and Pete leave for Florida for six weeks. Helen tells Julia to pick up an apricot galette (a kind of French tart) that she made for Ben’s birthday. Helen won’t be there, but a spare key is under the mat. At Helen’s, Julia runs into Nathaniel, and they eat some of the galette together. Then, Nathaniel kisses her. She feels thrilled.

Part 1, Chapter 11 Summary

In the present timeline, Sunny comes over for brunch with Ben. Mark is warm and greets Sunny with a hug, while Julia is more standoffish. When Sunny mentions the pregnancy, everyone freezes for a second. Julia burns the French toast. The conversation at brunch is stilted and awkward. Sunny says she doesn’t have close relationships with her family members because they’re “toxic […] narcissists.” After brunch, Sunny says they’re having trouble picking a date for the wedding that works for everyone, but she’s “type A,” unlike Julia, and will figure it out.

Part 1, Chapter 12 Summary

In the past timeline, on Ben’s fourth birthday, the family has a small birthday celebration. That evening, Ben falls asleep in his bed between Mark and Julia. Julia feels happy and content but slightly guilty about kissing Nathaniel the day before. A week later, she goes to see Nathaniel again. They listen to music and make out. The fifth time she returns to see him, he gives her oral sex. She becomes happier in her day-to-day life. A few weeks later, they have penetrative sex. Afterward, she feels “terribly, electrically alive” (127).

Part 1, Chapters 1-12 Analysis

Same as It Ever Was is written in third-person limited perspective from Julia’s point of view. While the plot is relatively straightforward and simple, the novel explores in detail Julia’s thoughts, emotional states, and sense of self throughout her life and in the context of various relationships. The text contains four timelines. In each part, a primary timeline covers present events, starting with Julia at age 54 running into Helen at the grocery store. Roughly every other chapter describes events that happened in a past timeline. In Part 1, this past timeline begins 20 years earlier, when Julia was driving her three-year-old son, Ben, to preschool. The alternating timeline allows for the gradual revelation about why Julia hasn’t seen Helen in 18 years: Julia had an affair with Helen’s son Nathaniel.

In keeping with the motif of music that threads throughout the text, the title of the book itself and of each part uses a lyric or title of a song that connects to the novel’s thematic content and/or tone. “Same as it ever was” is a lyric from the 1983 song “Once in a Lifetime” by Talking Heads (a band that Julia learns of in a flashback in Part 3). Part 1, “Lost in the Supermarket,” is the title of a 1979 song by The Clash. The reference to this song emphasizes that the supermarket is a highly symbolic setting in the novel. The song’s lyrics express alienation from mainstream consumer society and suburban life: “We had a hedge back home in the suburbs / Over which I could never see.” Similarly, at this point in the novel, Julia feels disconnected from the people around her in her ordinary suburban life: “Normally she is the queen of evasion, treats her trips to the grocery store like sniper missions, seeing how many faces she can avoid having to interact with” (5). This sense of disconnect heightens in the song and for Julia because the grocery store is so relentlessly normal and quotidian; as a place one goes to regularly, it reflects societal expectations to conform to certain norms of consumption and behavior, so it can intensify feelings of being (or longing to be) outside societal norms. The supermarket is also a place where, in the enactment of traditional American suburban gender roles, homemakers (usually women) get the food they prepare for their families as part of ensuring a happy family life. Julia herself enacts this highly stereotypical role in buying ingredients to cook a special meal for her husband’s 60th birthday party. Although she, reflecting the lyrics of “Lost in the Supermarket,” typically feels alienated from others in this space and in her suburban life in general, in this moment the grocery store is the site of her first social encounter with Helen in many years.

From the outside, Julia resembles any suburban mother buying ingredients for a special dinner. However, the third-person limited narration gives insight into her unique state of mind and emotional experiences. For instance, the novel describes the first moments of her encounter with Helen, after she simply says Helen’s name, in two lengthy paragraphs that reveal Julia’s internal life, including these thoughts:

She begins to consider how much she herself has changed since last they met, and the volume of those changes hits her forcefully and all at once; she is, upon reflection, more changed than not. She becomes nervily aware of her pulse pumping in her ears (5).

As this quote shows, events from Julia’s perspective happen on two levels: exterior events, or the things that actually occur in the outside world, and the interior ones, in which Julia’s memories and emotions move and interact with the exterior events.

The intense focus on Julia’s thoughts immediately recalls the work of Virginia Woolf whose writings, like Mrs. Dalloway, similarly use third-person limited narration to explore women’s experiences, specifically those of white bourgeois women like Julia. The novel highlights this association with Woolf when Julia describes Ben’s dreams:

Most of Ben’s dreams were like this, highly imagistic, nontraumatic, things simply happening, time going by.

“Our son, Virginia Woolf,” she’d joked to Mark not too long ago (22).

Much of Same as It Ever Was, except “nontraumatic,” adheres to Julia’s descriptions of Woolf’s work. This novel is likewise “highly imagistic,” portraying events “simply happening” and “time going by.” The novel’s languid, lengthy exploration of Julia’s inner life particularly introduces and develops the theme of Personal Identity and Motherhood by illustrating Julia’s internal struggle to retain her sense of self while also conforming to societal expectations of suburban motherhood.