A Reason to See You Again
A Novel
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
From the New York Times bestselling author Jami Attenberg comes a dazzling novel of family, following a troubled mother and her two daughters over forty years through a swiftly changing American landscape as they seek lives they can fully claim as their own.
The women of the Cohen family are in crisis. After the death of their patriarch, Rudy, the glue that held them all together, everyone’s lives soon take a dramatic turn.
Shelly, the younger of the two Cohen sisters, runs off to the West Coast to immerse herself in the emerging (and lucrative) world of technology. Her sister, Nancy, gets married at the age of twenty-one to a traveling salesman with a shadowy lifestyle, while their mother, Frieda, hurls herself into a boozy, troubled existence in Miami, trying to forget the past even as it haunts her.
But each woman must learn in her own way that running from the past can’t save you—and they must make life-altering decisions about what they want their family to be and what they need for themselves to move forward.
Beginning in the 1970s and spanning forty years, A Reason to See You Again takes the reader on a kaleidoscopic journey through motherhood, the American workforce, the tech industry, the self-help movement, inherited trauma, the ever-evolving ways we communicate with one another, and the many unexpected forms that love can take.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Attenberg (The Middlesteins) chronicles the lives of the dysfunctional Cohen family over four decades in her nuanced latest. The opening scene, set in 1971 Chicago during a game of Scrabble, delineates their fraught dynamics. Frieda, the mother, sneaks away to take shots of Slivovitz, then berates her 16-year-old daughter, Nancy, for playing a three-letter word ("That's all you have to show me"?). Her husband, Rudy, a gay Holocaust survivor and loving father to Nancy and their brainiac younger daughter, Shelly, wonders if the couple made the right decision to be together. After Rudy dies the next year from heart failure, Frieda grows more critical of the girls, prompting Nancy a few years later to move in with her college boyfriend, Robby, with whom she's unexpectedly pregnant, and Shelly to accept a scholarship to UC Berkeley. In the late 1980s and '90s, Nancy and Robby's daughter, Jess, becomes enamored with Shelly, an innovator in cell phone technology, while Frieda lives in Florida and works in elder care. Attenberg brings the disparate threads together as Frieda falls ill in the 2000s and the sisters must decide whether they'll care for her. There isn't much of a plot, but the novel is carried along by deliciously realistic descriptions of the Cohens' complex relationships. It's an admirable portait of a distinctly unhappy family.
