Liza Sorenson

Quick Facts

• Role: Third Sorenson daughter; the family’s steady center and often-overlooked “good one”
• Occupation: Psychology professor (recently tenured)
• First appearance: Early chapters
• Key relationships: Ryan Marks (long-term partner), Marilyn and David Sorenson (parents), Wendy and Violet (older sisters), Grace (younger sister), Kit Sorenson-Marks (daughter)
• Core conflict: Trying to model her life on her parents’ seemingly perfect romance while confronting the messy truths of her own relationship—an arc that embodies The Ideal vs. Reality of Love and Marriage

Who They Are

A clear-eyed observer and the Sorenson family’s quiet ballast, Liza begins as the daughter who rarely worries her parents and rarely takes up space. Her steadiness, though, conceals how much she measures herself against Marilyn and David’s mythic union—and how that comparison corrodes her self-confidence. Even her appearance mirrors this theme of subtlety and self-effacement: Wendy jokes that Liza’s hair is “not even a color… Ecru. Like a Band-Aid” (Chapter 6), while others note her bright green eyes and “shiny goldish ponytail” (Chapter 7). Behind the polished ponytail lies a woman who wants love to be simple and decent, and who must learn to accept that love is neither.

Personality & Traits

Liza’s personality blends competence with a private undertow of anxiety. She’s a consummate caretaker—of students, of Ryan, of her siblings—but that caretaking doubles as avoidance, allowing her to sidestep her own hungers until they breach the surface.

• Responsible and reliable: Liza is “the good one,” the daughter Marilyn claims she never has to worry about—“I never have to worry about you, Lize” (Chapter 7). Her dependability becomes both armor and cage.
• Analytical and observant: As a psychology professor, she reads family dynamics astutely, yet that expertise falters when applied inward; knowing what a pattern is doesn’t mean escaping it.
• Insecure and anxious: She admits to Marilyn, “We all desperately want your life… And we all know we’ll never have it” (Chapter 22), revealing how her parents’ example has morphed into an impossible bar.
• People-pleaser: Liza manages Ryan’s depression with exhausting gentleness, suppressing resentment to keep the peace—even as the silence compounds her loneliness.
• Impulsive under pressure: The affair with Marcus Spear (Chapter 7) is an eruption against her own restraint, an attempt to feel something uncomplicated and undemanding.
• Dryly funny, self-aware: Her bleakly comic description of Sorenson sisterhood—“a vast hormonal hellscape”—shows a capacity to puncture the family myth with humor, even as she’s trapped inside it.

Character Journey

Liza’s arc is the slow dismantling of a fantasy. Tenure brings prestige, but not stability at home; Ryan’s depression swallows the space where intimacy should be. Their “willed optimism” after her tenure announcement leads to a pregnancy (Chapter 2), and with it the hope that a baby might stabilize what feels unsteady. Instead, the pressure exposes fault lines. Feeling invisible and starved for uncomplicated affection, Liza has a brief affair with Marcus Spear (Chapter 7), which detonates her “good girl” identity. Her anxiety then spills outward—she lashes out at Gillian Levin (Chapter 11), projecting her fear that even her parents’ love contains hidden betrayals. When Jonah Bendt reveals the affair, Ryan leaves (Chapter 16), and Liza confronts single pregnancy and the end of the life she thought she was building. The family she feared burdening becomes the family that steadies her. By the novel’s end, she co-parents with a recovering Ryan, accepts limits without mistaking them for failures, and chooses an honest, improvisational love over an inherited ideal—an evolution that also reflects the cost and comfort of the Sorenson web, the The Complexity of Family and Sisterhood.

Key Relationships

Ryan Marks Liza and Ryan’s bond is tender but battered by his severe depression, which makes her both partner and caretaker. The pregnancy born of “willed optimism” strains them further, and Liza’s affair ruptures the trust holding them up. Their separation forces Liza into autonomy; later, co-parenting with a recovering Ryan allows her to practice a love grounded in reality rather than fantasy.

Marilyn and David Sorenson Liza reveres her parents’ marriage as the family’s shining proof that love can be seamless. That reverence curdles into inadequacy—she asks Marilyn whether she ever doubted David, confessing, “We all desperately want your life… And we all know we’ll never have it” (Chapter 22). Her confrontation with Gillian Levin exposes how myths invite paranoia; yet in crisis, Marilyn and David’s steady support helps Liza reform her idea of what “good” love actually looks like.

Wendy Sorenson Not as bonded to Wendy as Wendy is to Violet, Liza nonetheless finds in her eldest sister a bracing, pragmatic ally when Ryan leaves. Wendy’s cynicism cuts through Liza’s idealism, but her loyalty—equal parts tough love and tenderness—gives Liza permission to be imperfect and still be loved.

Grace Sorenson Grace looks up to Liza’s approachable competence, and Liza, in turn, is protective of Grace’s innocence. Serving as Grace’s confidante lets Liza inhabit the role she understands best—quiet guide—even as she privately fumbles with her own upheavals.

Kit Sorenson-Marks Kit’s birth reorders Liza’s priorities, shifting her self-image from “good daughter/partner” to “good-enough mother.” Loving Kit becomes the daily practice that steadies her—evidence that love can be built, maintained, and repaired, not merely inherited.

Defining Moments

Liza’s turning points are not explosions but small, seismic slips that change her relationship to the family myth and to herself.

• Learning she’s pregnant (Chapter 2): Conceived in a rare moment of connection after tenure, the baby is framed as “willed optimism.” Why it matters: The pregnancy tests Liza’s belief that love can be engineered into stability—and shows how hope can coexist with fear.
• The affair with Marcus Spear (Chapter 7): Seeking “something easy,” Liza chooses a secret that contradicts her identity. Why it matters: The betrayal doesn’t make her a villain so much as a woman breaking under pressure; it exposes the cost of being endlessly “good.”
• Confronting Gillian Levin (Chapter 11): Liza impulsively accuses her obstetrician of having slept with David. Why it matters: The outburst externalizes Liza’s dread that even the Sorenson marriage—her template—contains rot, forcing her to disentangle love from legend.
• Ryan’s departure (Chapter 16): After Jonah Bendt reveals the affair, Ryan leaves. Why it matters: The loss collapses the fantasy but creates space for a truer life, one where Liza leans on her family, survives single pregnancy, and later co-parents without pretending things are perfect.

Essential Quotes

“ It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products. ” — Liza, at Wendy’s wedding (The Offspring) This gallows humor captures Liza’s wry self-awareness and the Sorenson sisters’ chaotic intimacy. It hints at the novel’s tone: love and kinship as beautiful, exhausting projects that require equal parts resilience and hairspray.

“ I’m just wondering whether or not you ever had any doubts about Dad... We all desperately want your life. And we all know we’ll never have it. ” — Liza to Marilyn (Chapter 22) Liza articulates the family’s central pressure: the parents’ romance as a measuring stick no one can meet. The confession is both envy and grief, revealing how aspiration turns to self-critique when the model is idealized beyond recognition.

“ She would try, ardently, not to associate the baby with the day it was conceived. ” — Narrator (Chapter 2) Even in joy, Liza anticipates ambivalence. The line foreshadows how the pregnancy will carry mixed meanings—hope, fear, and the memory of a fragile truce—insisting that love’s beginnings are rarely clean.

“ She’d just been so horny, and so desperate for something easy, for the pleasure of doing something simply because it felt good, fallout be damned. ” — Narrator on Liza’s affair (Chapter 7) The bluntness refuses a neat moral. Liza’s choice comes from deprivation, not malice; she wants relief from caretaking and uncertainty. The moment reframes her as a human being with needs, not only the family’s reliable daughter.