Claire Lombardo is an American writer. Her novel The Most Fun We Ever Had was a New York Times bestseller^[1] and was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction.^[2]

Career[edit]

Claire Lombardo has said that she started The Most Fun We Ever Had as a short story.^[3] She studied at the University of Illinois-Chicago and later attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop.^[4]

The Most Fun We Ever Had was published by Doubleday in 2019.

The Observer wrote in a review: "If ever there were to be a literary love child of Jonathan Franzen and Anne Tyler, then Claire Lombardo's outstanding debut, which ranges from ebullience to despair by way of caustic but intense familial bonds, would be a worthy offspring."^[5] Booklist wrote: "Though it resembles other sprawling midwestern family dramas, like Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, Lombardo's book steers clear of social critique and burrows into the drama of familial relationships."^[6]

The Wall Street Journal called it "an assured first novel", writing: "The strength of the book is in its unsentimental limning of the past, of dinner-table conversations, pillow talk, sisterly intrigues and alliances, of creaking floors and sheltering trees, of petty resentments and small rapprochements. The plot lines and complications are many—perhaps a bit too many. The cast is large. But Ms. Lombardo manages to keep all the balls in the air."^[7] For The Washington Post, it is "an ambitious and brilliantly written first novel, sometimes amusing and sometimes shocking, but its unrelenting nature and lack of context is ultimately off-putting."^[8]

The New York Times Book Review wrote: "Of course it's not the responsibility of every novel to wrestle with cultural shifts, with politics and war, but the near total absence of even a whiff of non-Sorenson-related events over 40 years and 500-plus pages must be a conscious choice. It reads, eventually, as a deliberate and fascinating commentary on how a particular kind of moneyed white family can choose the degree to which they engage with such. . . unpleasantries."^[9]

NPR described it as "a wonderfully immersive read that packs more heart and heft than most first novels. . . notably apolitical, all-white, all-straight", adding that it "is operatic in both good ways and bad."^[10]

In 2019, the novel was reported to be in development at HBO, with actors Amy Adams and Laura Dern as executive producers.^[11][12]

Bibliography[edit]

• The Most Fun We Ever Had (Doubleday, 2019)
• Same As It Ever Was (Doubleday, forthcoming June 2024)^[13]

References[edit]