Same As It Ever Was: A Novel

The primary protagonist of Same as It Ever Was is 56-year-old Julia. Using third-person limited perspective, the text traces her entire life history, primarily focusing on her life in the literary present. In midlife, Julia is a part-time librarian with a teenage daughter soon leaving for university, Alma, and a 24-year-old son, Ben.

Julia’s third-person narration is unreliable. She’s exceedingly self-deprecating, often focusing on her failures and mistakes. As she says to her husband during a fight, “It’s me that’s wrong, all right?” (162). This cynical self-image frequently leads her to misjudge or mischaracterize situations because she assumes that others think as badly of her as she does of herself. For instance, when she first meets Mark’s friends Francine and Bradly, she feels intimidated and out of place: Given their wealth, marriage, and pregnancy make her “feel sort of diminutive and whorish alongside Francine’s robust fertility, and aware of [having] brought wine into a nursery […] and also the stale smell of cigarettes” (285). Later, though, the text reveals that Francine felt intimidated by Julia’s “cool” during that initial meeting. This is a jarring revelation because it shows that Julia’s self-perception is often skewed by her self-lacerating