A sprawling Chicago-set family saga, The Most Fun We Ever Had follows the Sorensons—two parents whose incandescent marriage sets an impossible bar and four daughters who grow up in its glow and shadow. When a long-buried secret resurfaces in the form of a teenage boy, the family’s myths, loyalties, and private aches collide, forcing everyone to renegotiate love, identity, and belonging. What emerges is a portrait of a clan whose bonds are as constricting as they are sustaining.
Main Characters
Marilyn Sorenson
Bold, exacting, and fiercely loyal, Marilyn Sorenson is the Sorenson matriarch whose forty-year love story anchors—and haunts—the family. Her marriage to David is both a refuge and a radiant ideal, a private language of need and tenderness that dazzles her daughters even as it alienates them. The glossy competence she projects masks exhaustion and grief; motherhood, social performance, and old losses have left her quietly depleted until she claims a late-life independence running a hardware store. The arrival of Jonah and the unspooling of a long-kept secret force Marilyn to confront her complicity and reconsider what it really means to be a “good” mother when children become complicated adults.
David Sorenson
Gentle, wry, and conflict-averse, David Sorenson is the retired physician whose steady presence counterbalances Marilyn’s blaze. He is an ardent husband first and a sometimes-baffled father second, orbiting his daughters with care but often from an outsider’s distance. Adrift after medicine, he gropes for purpose in small obsessions—rare quarters, a vulnerable ginkgo tree—signaled early in the Chapter 1-5 Summary. Confronted by seismic family revelations and his own mortality, David must recalibrate intimacy with Marilyn and the girls, discovering new ways to be essential that don’t depend on the white coat.
Wendy Sorenson
Caustic, seductive, and catastrophically tender, Wendy Sorenson is the eldest daughter, a wealthy widow undone by the death of Miles. She performs her grief in barbed wit and reckless choices, but her volatility hides a fierce, almost maternal protectiveness—especially toward Violet, with whom she shares a fraught, binding secret. Tracking down Jonah jolts Wendy out of stasis; in taking him in, she finds purpose that complicates her role as sister and aunt yet begins to heal the rawest parts of herself. Her arc reveals how love can be both a weapon and a balm, and how caretaking can save the caretaker.
Violet Sorenson-Lowell
Poised and hyper-competent, Violet Sorenson-Lowell has curated the perfect suburban life—marriage, two sons, a home precisely in order—only to see it threatened by the reappearance of Jonah, the baby she relinquished. Control is her religion; vulnerability, her terror. Her bond with Wendy—intimate, adversarial, codependent—was forged in secrecy and sustained by denial, and it frays as truth intrudes. Violet’s journey dismantles her armor: she is pushed toward an honest reckoning with guilt, toward a more nuanced motherhood, and toward imperfect but real connection with both Jonah and Wendy.
Liza Sorenson
Measured, kind, and chronically overlooked, Liza Sorenson is the academic middle sister who has long served as family mediator. Loving Ryan through severe depression trains her to disappear her own needs, until an unplanned pregnancy and his departure force her to step into the center of her own life. As she faces single parenthood and sheds the “peacemaker” role, Liza discovers sturdiness she didn’t know she had and a voice that can assert boundaries without withdrawing love. Her evolution reframes what resilience looks like in a family that mistakes drama for depth.
Grace Sorenson
Restless, bright, and starving for definition, Grace Sorenson is the “afterthought” youngest child, raised like an only child in the long echo of her sisters’ departures. Isolated in Portland, she props up a lie about law school to spare Marilyn and David disappointment, a deception that deepens her loneliness. Falling for Ben Barnes gives her a listener before she can become one for herself. Grace’s growth hinges on confession and consequence: by telling the truth, returning home, and admitting what she actually wants, she begins to craft a life unshackled from Sorenson expectations.
Jonah Bendt
Dryly funny, watchful, and wary, Jonah Bendt is the fifteen-year-old catalyst whose reentry detonates the Sorenson status quo. Shuffled through foster care after his adoptive parents’ deaths, he arrives armored in cynicism but aching for a place to land. He forms a surprising, loyal bond with Wendy, clashes painfully with Violet, and is steadied by the capacious welcome of Marilyn and David. Jonah’s arc traces a movement from displacement to belonging; in finding family, he also becomes the mirror that forces the Sorensons to finally see themselves.
Supporting Characters
Miles Eisenberg
Miles Eisenberg is Wendy’s late husband, fabulously wealthy yet unpretentious, whose adoration anchored her and whose death from renal cancer shattered her. His absence is the novel’s loudest silence, shaping Wendy’s grief, her self-destruction, and her eventual caretaking of Jonah. He remains a tender ghost in Wendy’s inner life, the measure against which all love is calibrated.
Matt Lowell
Matt Lowell is Violet’s pragmatic, level-headed lawyer husband, a stabilizing counterpoint to Sorenson volatility. Knowing about Jonah’s existence, he fears the blast radius of the boy’s return on their carefully built home and on sons Wyatt and Eli, yet he stays constant even as Violet’s certainties crumble. His steadiness both supports and subtly challenges Violet’s need for control.
Ryan Marks
Ryan Marks is Liza’s brilliant, depressive partner and the father of her daughter, Kit. His illness exhausts Liza’s reserves and ultimately ends their relationship, forcing Liza into single parenthood and a new self-definition. Ryan’s arc underscores the limits of love as a cure and the cost of long-term caretaking.
Ben Barnes
Ben Barnes is Grace’s first serious boyfriend, a perceptive Portland barista and bike messenger who becomes her confidant. By inviting honesty instead of performance, he helps puncture the Sorenson myth Grace has been living under. His presence marks Grace’s first steps toward adult intimacy grounded in truth.
Minor Characters
- Wyatt and Eli Lowell: Violet and Matt’s young sons, embodiments of Violet’s “perfect mother” identity and poignant reminders of what stability looks like as Jonah returns.
- Kit Sorenson-Marks: Liza and Ryan’s newborn daughter, whose arrival crystallizes Liza’s shift from mediator to self-possessed mother.
- Hanna and Terrence Danforth: Jonah’s well-meaning, flaky foster parents whose plan to decamp to Ecuador precipitates his collision course with the Sorensons.
- Gillian Levin: A physician who was David’s colleague and Marilyn’s OB/GYN; she delivered Grace under traumatic circumstances and later becomes an object of Liza’s suspicion.
Character Relationships & Dynamics
At the center stands Marilyn and David’s marriage—the family’s gravitational field. Its heat and constancy provide a template for devotion but also cast a glare that makes the daughters’ own relationships look lesser by comparison. The parents’ united front often reads as impenetrable to their children, who alternately bask in and rebel against it.
Among the sisters, roles calcify early: Wendy as the mercurial provocateur, Violet as the perfectionist curator, Liza as the conciliator, and Grace as the cherished afterthought. Wendy and Violet’s “Irish twin” bond is the most combustible—founded on a shared secret about Jonah, it breeds both complicity and resentment. Their love is bone-deep, but their intimacy is laced with power plays: Wendy’s need to shock meets Violet’s need to control, and Jonah’s return forces a reckoning neither can finesse.
Jonah functions as both wedge and bridge. He destabilizes Violet’s carefully edited motherhood while unlocking Wendy’s capacity to nurture; he is also the conduit through which Marilyn and David expand their love to include a grandson they never raised. Around him, fault lines become visible: spouses (Matt) and partners (Ryan) either absorb or crack under Sorenson turbulence, while Grace watches and learns which myths to keep and which to discard.
Character Themes
- The Complexity of Family and Sisterhood: The sisters embody competing modes of kinship—rivalry (Wendy and Violet), mediation (Liza), and outsider longing (Grace)—revealing how history and hierarchy can both wound and bind.
- The Ideal vs. Reality of Love and Marriage: Marilyn and David’s “shining” union sets a mythic standard that the daughters’ messier relationships inevitably challenge, from widowhood (Wendy) to secrecy-strained marriage (Violet) to illness-fractured partnership (Liza) to hesitant beginnings (Grace).
- Secrets and Their Consequences: Hidden truths—Violet and Wendy’s concealment of Jonah, Grace’s law school lie—fester in the dark, shaping identity and trust until exposure forces painful but liberating realignment.