We All Live here by Jojo Moyes: Divorced, Grieving, and Still Standing

A big, beautiful chaos of a novel, and every layer of it rings true.

Synopsis

The #1 New York Times bestselling author, whose books so many love, brings us a fresh, contemporary story of a woman and her unruly blended family

“Nobody writes women the way Jojo Moyes does.” —Jodi Picoult

Lila Kennedy has a lot on her plate. A broken marriage, two wayward daughters, a house that is falling apart, and an elderly stepfather who seems to have quietly moved in. Her career is in freefall and her love life is . . . complicated. So when her real dad—a man she has barely seen since he ran off to Hollywood thirty-five years ago—suddenly appears on her doorstep, it feels like the final straw. But it turns out even the family you thought you could never forgive might have something to teach you: about love, and what it actually means to be family.

Review

5 stars

This book was a big, beautiful chaos, and I loved every messy page of it.

I felt so much for Lila. Divorced at forty-two, alone raising two daughters, caring for both her stepfather and her father, grieving her mother’s sudden death, and somehow still on deadline to write a book. I couldn’t help but commiserate, and I also couldn’t help wondering: what would I do if I had to get back on the dating market after decades with the same man? I think I would be more than rusty. And I would have absolutely no trust in dating apps.

This story is multi-layered, and Moyes handles every layer with care.

The first is recovering from a divorce when your husband left you for someone younger. Lila is understandably bitter, and she has a long road ahead before she can even begin to think about forgiveness or healing.

The second layer is grief. Lila’s mother died suddenly, and being motherless while raising two daughters and desperately needing advice is its own particular kind of hard. Lila kept thinking about that: what would Francesca have said when Celie skipped school to smoke weed?

The third layer is abandonment, because it didn’t start with Dan leaving. It started much earlier, with her father Gene walking out on their family to pursue his acting career in the US. That leaves scars, and Lila carries them. So when Gene, now seventy-five, shows up on her doorstep needing somewhere to sleep “for a few days”, she is nowhere near ready to welcome him with open arms. And honestly, who could blame her?

And yet. There is also a redemption story woven through all of this, because for all his faults, Gene will get through to Celie in ways no one else can, giving her something she needed without even knowing it. He will find his way to Violet too, and he will make a kind of peace with Bill, Lila’s stepfather. It’s imperfect and hard-won and completely believable.

This is a book about being human: flawed, scarred, capable of making a mess of things and still, somehow, finding your way to the people who matter. It’s about family in all its exhausting, infuriating, irreplaceable complexity. It is deeply entertaining, deeply relatable, and exactly what I needed to read.

Thanks for reading.

Sophie