Tom Lake

“All three girls are in their twenties now, and for all their evolution and ostensible liberation, they have no interest in a story that is not about a handsome, famous man. Still, I am their mother, and they understand that they will have to endure me in order to get to him. I take back my place on the sofa and begin again, knowing full well that the parts they’re waiting to hear are the parts I’m never going to tell them.”

Lara begins her story convinced that her daughters are only interested in Peter Duke. However, as the story continues, they become intrigued with this new perspective on their mother, and are able to fill the gaps in a story that they’ve never gotten the whole of. Here, Laura asserts her control of the story, connecting to the theme of Who Owns Personal History.

“Emily Webb asked questions, told the truth, and knew her mind, while these Emilys bunched up their prairie skirts in their hands and mewled like kittens. Didn’t any of them remember what it was like to be the smart girl? No high school girls had come to try out for the part, […] No one had come to speak for our kind.”

As Lara is watching women audition for the part of Emily, her anger at the way the character is being misrepresented leads her to try out herself. Lara connects with Emily’s intelligence and her youth, seeing the character as a reflection of herself. To Lara, Emily comes to symbolize her lost innocence—when she realizes that she will never play Emily again, she understands that she has grown up.

“‘But all three of us can’t have it wrong,’ Emily says, as if their math outweighs my life. ‘You remember it that way because it makes a better story if Duke was George and I was Emily. That doesn’t mean it’s true.’”

Despite Lara’s first-hand knowledge, her daughters refuse to believe that Duke never played George, and remain convinced that they are right. Throughout Lara’s story about Duke and Tom Lake, her daughters disagree with her on several points, despite the fact that they weren’t there. Through their assertions, the girls claim ownership of Lara’s story—something they must wrest away from her until she cedes some of her control over this personal history.

“‘You can’t pretend this isn’t happening,’ Maisie said. I couldn’t, and I don’t. Nor do I pretend that all of us being together doesn’t fill me with joy. I understand that joy is inappropriate these days and still, we feel what we feel.”

Lara is torn between the joy she feels at having her entire family home again, something that she thought would never happen, and the reason for their gathering: the global COVID pandemic that began in 2020. Tom Lake is one of many novels published in the wake of the pandemic that explore its unexpected consequences. As Patchett highlights here, within the scope of larger tragedy, joyous moments occurred, such as the reuniting of families, and Lara refuses to feel guilty for her gratitude for this gift.

“When I go down the hall and find Maisie and Nell asleep in their twin beds, I see them both as they are and as they were: grown women and little girls.”

Tom Lake operates in two time frames: the present, in which Lara and her family harvest the cherry orchard, and Lara’s past with Peter Duke. However, the present also features a ghost of an earlier time: memories of the family when the girls were younger. Throughout the novel, Lara experiences moments where the present is overlaid with the past, complicating the notions of story and memory that Patchett explores.

“It is sentimental and useless to tell someone you would gladly give them your past because the past is nontransferable, and anyway, I would have wanted to give her only the good days. When seen through Nell’s eyes it’s hard not to think those good days were wasted on me, and that she would have done a better job of it.”

Lara’s story describes a time in her life when an acting career literally fell into her lap. Her youngest daughter, Nell, admits to jealousy that her mother experienced this luck and walked away from it, while Nell is struggling to build her own acting career. However, Lara’s mention that she “wanted to give her only the good days” hints that even her good fortune had its ups and downs, a truth that is supported by the story she reveals as the novel continues.

“This is a story about Peter Duke who went on to be a famous actor. This is a story about falling in love with Peter Duke who wasn’t famous at all.”

In her daughters’ minds, Duke, the movie star, and Duke, the boy Lara fell in love with, are one and the same. They see her story as a tantalizing brush with stardom, while Lara sees it from a different perspective—the Duke she fell in love with was just a boy. As she tells the story, she strives to communicate this truth to her daughters, using the power of storytelling to make her point.

“It hadn’t occurred to me until we started reading the funeral scene that I was now the age of Emily in the third act, and that no matter how young I looked, I would age out of the part in time because time was unavoidable. I thought of all those women dressed as girls who’d showed up to audition at my high school. No one gets to go on playing Emily forever. That’s what I was thinking at the table read, how I would lose her.”

At her first table read for Our Town, Lara experiences a sense of nostalgia for the character of Emily, already aware of eventually growing too old to play her. She sees the women who auditioned for Emily in a new light, as trying to hold on to a time that has passed. For Lara, the character of Emily symbolizes her youth and innocence—at Tom Lake, she is still able to play Emily, but by the end of the summer she will already outgrow the role. She realizes for the first time that adulthood means leaving some things behind.

“Emily! I want to say. This sorrow at the thought of exclusion you wish to protect your dear father from, that’s what I’ve been feeling all morning. But I have been here long enough to understand the difference between daughters and mothers and daughters and fathers.”

Lara and Emily’s relationship has a tumultuous history, in which Lara has been hurt repeatedly by Emily’s dismissal of her feelings—which is how Lara has interpreted Emily’s attempts to individuate and gain autonomy. When Emily neglects to tell Lara about her engagement, Lara is hurt, and then hurt further by the cautious way that Emily protects Joe from the same injury. Lara’s recognition that mothers are treated differently is bolstered by her years of experience with Emily, and connects to the theme of How Daughters Reflect and Refract Mothers.

“There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well, until one morning you’re picking cherries with your three grown daughters and your husband goes by on the Gator and you are positive that this is all you’ve ever wanted in the world.”

As Lara tells her story, she sees her own history in a new way, remembering that she hadn’t always wanted what she now has. Simultaneously, however, she finds this difficult to believe, and probes the way that memory can trick people, shaping one’s past to fit our present. Partly, she admits, this is because the accumulation of memory over the years means that history is lost, something she wants to communicate to her daughters, but knows that they cannot yet understand.

“None of us knew we were at the beginning of anything but this was where the four of us started.”

As Sebastian arrives at Tom Lake for the first time, Patchett explores the idea that one only knows what the important moments of one’s life are after they happen and enough time has elapsed for one to make sense of causality. Events sometimes only take on significance after the fact, and their relative importance is to some degree the result of memory.

“‘Every generation believes the world is going to end.’ She raises her head. ‘Is that true? Did you and Dad think it was all going up in a fiery ball?’ She is so close to me. I can see the faintest remnants of long-ago freckles on her forehead. ‘No. I said it to make you feel better.’ Joe and I thought about the plays we wanted to get tickets for, the price of rent, whether or not we should go out to dinner, how soon we could afford to have a baby. We didn’t think anything would end, any of it, ever.”

Lara and Emily are discussing her announcement that she is not going to have children. When Lara glibly repeats the common adage that “[e]very generation believes the world is going to end,” Emily questions the truth of her statement. Lara is forced to admit that her generation hadn’t really believed it, which contrasts sharply with her daughters’ generation, who are living through a pandemic and climate change. This exchange also highlights an important component of Lara’s personality—she is honest with her daughters, even when it might reflect poorly on her.

“Parts of this story they already know, and this is one of them. The stories that are familiar will always be our favorites.”

As Lara describes going to the cherry farm for the first time, her daughters are excited because this is the point when her story converges with their own personal history. Over the years, they’ve heard parts of the story, and this is one that they’re familiar with. When they begin to chime in and take ownership of the narrative, Patchett further develops the theme of Who Owns Personal History.

“It wasn’t as if I’d grown up in Los Angeles. I’d seen plenty of farms in my day, but never had I seen a place that made the tightness in my chest relax. The order in the rows of trees and the dark green of the lush grass beneath them soothed me like a hand brushing across my forehead.”

When Lara visits the cherry orchard for the first time, she feels a visceral sense of connection. She is not the only one—Duke brings it up at lunch, and Pallace agrees. Duke even goes so far as to try to buy the orchard, before finally settling for a cemetery plot. The novel positions the orchard as a magical place that seems to exist outside the normal world.

“‘When I was growing up I used to lie in bed at night imagining what other people’s families must be like,’ Duke said once the pie was served, cherry pie, which he told her was his favorite. ‘I would picture their houses, their furniture, what they ate and how they spoke to one another, and what I always pictured was this.’ He turned to Joe. ‘Turns out I spend my entire childhood picturing your family.’”

On Lara’s first visit to the farm, she brings Duke, Sebastian, and Pallace along, not realizing that Joe had intended it as a date. All four of the visitors are struck by the place, and here Duke identifies what is so affecting about the farm—it is the manifestation of the perfect, idealized home that he imagined as a child. This sense will drive Duke to try to buy the farm more than once, and eventually, arrange to be buried on it.

“‘I had two lives,’ Joe says, unwrapping his lunch. ‘Maybe more than two. I got to do everything I wanted. Who can say that?’”

Although Joe was also present at Tom Lake that summer, he is a side character in Lara’s story, and the fact that he is a famous director doesn’t get much attention. However, Nell, with her acting aspirations, asks him to explain why he left that career behind to return to the farm. With his answer, Joe highlights a point that Lara, who also left theater behind, often makes: that as one follows the path of one’s life, direction changes, but after the fact, those changes seem preordained.

“Funny how we never know. Uncle Wallace didn’t go onstage thinking it would be his last night. When my last night came I didn’t know it either, my last time to play Emily, my last swim in the lake.”

Lara has just told the story of Uncle Wallace’s last night as the Stage Manager. Characteristically, after she finishes, she reflects on the event, placing it in the larger context of human experience. This observation connects to the theme of How Storytelling Shapes Understanding, with her recognition that the story can only be fully understood, and shaped, after the fact.

“I don’t for a minute think she is crying because of her sisters, though surely part of her is crying for herself. She has lost these months to the pandemic, being stuck on the farm with no idea how much longer she’ll have to stay. She is losing this time when she is beautiful and young in a profession that cares for nothing but beauty and youth. But really, she is crying for me. While her sisters stand and stare in utter bafflement, Nell the Mentalist has snapped all the piece together. She knows I am finished.”

When Lara describes tearing her Achilles tendon, Nell’s experience as an actor and reader allows her to predict what will happen next in Lara’s well-structured and crafted narrative. When Nell bursts into tears, her sisters think she is crying for herself, but Lara sees the truth: Nell has seen how the story will turn out, and is mourning Lara’s lost career.

“I learned so many things that summer at Tom Lake and most of those lessons I would have gladly done without. The hardest one had nothing to do with Duke, or plans or love. It was realizing that I wasn’t Emily anymore.”

When Pallace steps into the role of Emily, she makes it so powerfully her own that Lara is left feeling that she can never act again. This realization is also a recognition that the blend of youth and innocence that had made Lara such a successful Emily is gone. To Lara, who insists she cannot act, losing her own innocence also means losing the role of Emily.

“The past need not be so all-encompassing that it renders us incapable of making egg salad. The past, were I to type it up, would look like a disaster, but regardless of how it ended we all had many good days. In that sense the past is much like the present because the present—this unparalleled disaster—is the happiest time of my life: Joe and I here on this farm, our three girls grown and gone and then returned, all of us working together to take the cherries off the trees. Ask that girl who left Tom Lake what she wanted out of life and she would never in a million years have said the Nelson farm in Traverse City, Michigan, but as it turned out, it was all she wanted.”

Lara has just told her daughters about the end of her relationship with Duke—that he had, in their terms, ghosted her. They are outraged on her behalf, while Lara is more philosophical about it, since the sting of Duke’s behavior has long faded away. Instead, she characteristically notes that even in the worst circumstances, there are good times, and in this way, connects her past story with the present, as the pandemic has afforded her an opportunity to reconnect with her family in a way she couldn’t have anticipated.

“I’ve laid out the entire summer at Tom Lake with bonus tracks on either side. I’ve given my girls the director’s cut.”

Lara is finally finished with her story, having told her daughters more about her history than they’ve ever known. Throughout the novel, Lara reminds the reader that the story she is telling is constructed, shaped by her, connecting to the theme of How Storytelling Shapes Understanding. Nowhere is this clearer than in this passage, where Lara actually compares her narrative to a movie. Her comparison to the director’s cut is apt because she has the final say about what her daughters hear, and in fact, has chosen to keep some things to herself.

“‘So you never saw him again.’ Emily has made her peace with this, and I give serious consideration to leaving that in place, peace being a hard commodity to come by in this world. But one thing is left, that part of the story I wouldn’t have told her when she was young because there would have been no context for it, the part of the story I couldn’t have told her when she was a teenager because she would have submitted it into evidence against me. And so I’ve held it all these years, the random thing she would most want to add to her collection of ephemera.”

Emily now knows the worst about Duke, and whatever remained of her hero-worship is gone. Lara is reluctant to disturb this new phase of their relationship, in which Emily has allied herself with Lara. In spite of this, she reveals to the reader that she is about to share one of the pieces of the story that, at the beginning of the novel, she had decided not to tell. The decision to do this shows how far Lara and Emily have already come in their relationship, and that they are now building on the intimacy that Lara’s truths have built—a new aspect of How Daughters Reflect and Refract Mothers.

“I had been paying attention. I had not been paying attention. Duke hadn’t taken me to the hospital or visited me or brought me home. His brother did all that because Duke was very busy with his important work and he was drunk and the hospital was fifteen minutes away.”

Lara is going to visit Duke at a residential facility, where Duke has added her to the visitation list as “Emily Webb,” the name of the character from Our Town. This forces Lara to reconsider their entire relationship: To Duke, she never really existed outside the confines of Tom Lake—once she had been taken to the hospital, she left his frame of reference and no longer figured in his mind.