From the outset I was lured into expecting a typical broken family drama, but around a quarter into the story, I experienced that something wider was evolving. “This house feels as if it’s filling up with people, with their stuff.” (p.138) After her husband left to start a new family, Lila remained in the family house with her two daughters, nine year old Violet, rather unconventional, and her teenager, Celie, with her own set of challenges.
Enters her stepfather, intent to stay, with his cooking and tidying which makes her feel inadequate and before long, her own father who walked out on them when she was just a kid. A totally dysfunctional crowd with “mad history and chaos, heartbreaks, stupid jokes, ridiculous triumphs” (p.260), but this is Lila’s family, she realizes.
We all live here is about relationships, that between spouses, parents and children, sexual, professional. It is also about trust, grief, forgiving and growing older. The plot is character driven, with Lila eventually reaching a point where she “feels something in her soften, some long-held tension start to evaporate, replaced instead by a sense of wonder, of the impermanence of things and how that, too, can be blissful and heartbreaking at the same time.” (p.416)
The story is narrated primarily by Lila, but also by Celie, broadening the perspective. An unusual touch is a chapter told by Lila’s late mother, shedding new light on the image that the reader has of Francesca.
Jojo Moyes, being the accomplished writer that she is, once again manages to tuck at the heartstrings, although not entirely as heart wrenching as Me before you. Once I really focused on the story, I was not eager to put it down.
We all live here is a publication of Penguin fiction, distributed in South Africa by Penguin Random House SA.
