What This Theme Explores
Secrets in Claire Lombardo’s The Most Fun We Ever Had are not isolated acts but systems of avoidance that reshape the Sorensons’ sense of self, love, and belonging. The novel asks what people believe they’re protecting when they hide the truth—and what they actually destroy: intimacy, trust, and the ability to see one another clearly. It probes how secrecy feeds perfectionism and shame, how one lie invites another, and how the fallout rarely stays confined to the original participants. Most crucially, it suggests that revelation, however painful, is the only way to recover a shared reality and move from myth to authentic connection.
How It Develops
The seed of secrecy is planted in the family’s past when Violet Sorenson-Lowell conceals her teen pregnancy, and Wendy Sorenson helps her stage a yearlong disappearance to “Paris.” The sisters’ elaborate fiction hardens into habit: secrecy becomes a coping mechanism, a way to preserve the Sorenson ideal of success and composure by banishing mistakes from the record. But it also fuses Violet and Wendy into a codependent pair, bound by guilt, power, and mutual surveillance. The lie’s elegance—postcards, cover stories, silence—models how to hide, and the family never quite stops learning that lesson.
A second fracture appears when David withholds his growing emotional intimacy with a colleague from Marilyn Sorenson. When Marilyn discovers the omission, their marriage endures its most serious rupture, not because of physical infidelity but because he entrusted his inner life to someone else (Chapter 18). Their children feel the chill without knowing its cause, and that opacity lodges in them—especially Liza—as a vague but enduring suspicion that what looks perfect can’t be trusted.
In the present, Wendy detonates the family’s biggest secret by tracking down Jonah Bendt. Violet’s panicked, public meltdown upon seeing him for the first time is the novel’s flare gun—proof that what was hidden has been running the show all along (Chapter 1). The revelation ricochets: parents must be told; sisters pick sides; old grievances reawaken. The Sorensons begin the messy work of replacing a mythologized past with a complicated, truer one.
Smaller, parallel secrets erupt alongside the central one. Grace Sorenson, terrified of being the family disappointment, claims she’s headed to law school and exiles herself to live out the lie (Chapter 2). Liza Sorenson conducts an affair she can’t contain, and Jonah accidentally exposes it; later, a long-suppressed detail—Jonah’s true paternity—forces a final reckoning with the depth of what Violet concealed and the years of emotional labor Wendy shouldered alone (Chapter 34). With each reveal, the family learns that secrecy doesn’t prevent pain; it compounds it, and delays the possibility of repair.
Key Examples
-
Violet’s Confession to Her Parents: When Violet finally tells David and Marilyn about Jonah, her delivery is cold, rehearsed, and stripped of tenderness, dramatizing the emotional dissociation secrecy requires. Marilyn’s initial disbelief underscores how thoroughly the “Paris” fiction colonized the family’s memory; truth feels absurd because the lie has become communal fact.
“I wasn’t in Paris,” Violet said, as though from a script. “I was here, and I was pregnant, and I had a baby and I gave him up.” Marilyn suppressed the hysterical impulse to laugh, despite the gravity of her daughter’s angular face, because though Violet had always been the least funny of her children, of course this had to be some misguided attempt at a joke... (Chapter 4)
-
Grace’s Snowballing Lie: Grace’s evasion begins as a technicality and instantly swells into an identity she must perform. The rush she feels—“leveling the playing field”—exposes the family’s perfection economy, where appearing accomplished is a form of currency that secrecy counterfeits at high psychological interest.
“Goose! God, talk about burying the lede. Oh, that’s— Gracie, that’s fantastic. Oh, I knew you would— Oh my God, my little sister’s going to be a lawyer. You know I used to change your diapers, right?” “Yes, it’s been brought to my attention before.” The feeling of having leveled the playing field a bit was definitely not unpleasant... Technically she had still not said anything untrue, despite what her racing heartbeat might suggest. Liza had made the leap herself. (Chapter 2)
-
The Rift Between David and Marilyn: David’s secrecy about dinners with Gillian injures Marilyn not as a trespass of the body but of intimacy; he has given his confidence to someone else. The scene reframes secrecy as an assault on mutuality—the core of their marriage—rather than a mere moral failing.
“Do you understand why that offends me?” she asked. “Do you get why that hurts me? That you’d rather go talk to a colleague than to me? Because all I want to do lately is talk to you, David. And if the feeling isn’t mutual, then—fine.” (Chapter 18)
Character Connections
Violet Sorenson-Lowell is the architect of the novel’s central concealment. Her fear of flaw—of falling short of the Sorenson ideal—drives the “Paris” lie and teaches her to dissociate from pain. Motherhood becomes a site of penance; the distance she maintains from Jonah morphs into a general rigidity, as if control could retroactively sanitize what was messy.
Wendy Sorenson is both vault and detonator. Keeping Violet’s secret binds her to power—she alone knows the truth—but also to bitterness, because she bears the cost of the lie without the public reputation. Seeking Jonah is impulsive and punitive and loving all at once: a refusal to keep curating a fantasy that has been starving them.
Liza Sorenson is shaped by secrecy she only half understands. As a child, overhearing fragments of her parents’ conflict calcifies into adult vigilance; later, her own affair repeats the family pattern, confirming that suspicion and concealment are communicable. Her breakup with Ryan shows how easily one secret dispatches a relationship built on partial truth.
Grace Sorenson reenacts the family script on a smaller stage. Her lie isolates her geographically and emotionally, proving that even “white lies” demand constant self-erasure. Grace’s arc highlights the cost of perfectionism for the least confident Sorenson: loneliness, anxiety, and the collapse of trust when the performance ends.
David demonstrates that even a devoted partner can rationalize omission as protection. His near-affair clarifies the novel’s ethics: secrecy is corrosive not because it always masks betrayal, but because it privatizes what must be shared for intimacy to survive.
Marilyn Sorenson counters the family’s secrecy with confrontation. Her insistence on naming injuries, and later on integrating Jonah into the family’s narrative, models the painful honesty required to rebuild trust after the spell of a long lie breaks.
Symbolic Elements
The house on Fair Oaks functions as the family’s memory palace—and its vault. Spaces like the pantry, the upstairs bedrooms, and especially the backyard ginkgo tree hold the residue of private rendezvous, whispered fights, and reconciliations; the tree’s association with romance and David’s heart attack collapses intimacy and crisis into a single emblem, reminding us that the family’s most cherished places also bear witness to what they hide.
Paris is a glittering placeholder for absence, the cosmopolitan mask covering Violet’s exile. As a symbol, it literalizes the seduction of a beautiful lie: a perfect postcard that anesthetizes the pain of what actually happened.
Letters and phone calls, instruments of connection, become the conduits of deceit. Violet’s fake postcards, Grace’s fateful call, and Marilyn’s discovery via a call to David’s office invert communication’s purpose, showing how easily language itself can be recruited to maintain distance.
Contemporary Relevance
In an age of curated feeds and polished family narratives, the Sorensons’ story indicts the fantasy of effortless perfection. The novel maps the psychic toll of presenting a spotless self—anxiety, isolation, performative success—and the relief (and upheaval) that follows truth-telling. It also resonates with the realities of modern genealogy and DNA testing, which have surfaced long-buried adoptions and affairs; the Sorensons’ reckoning mirrors real families forced to integrate unexpected kin into their histories. Lombardo’s message lands squarely in the present: vulnerability is the cost of real intimacy, and the truth, though destabilizing, is ultimately liberating.
Essential Quote
“Do you understand why that offends me?” she asked. “Do you get why that hurts me? That you’d rather go talk to a colleague than to me? Because all I want to do lately is talk to you, David. And if the feeling isn’t mutual, then—fine.” (Chapter 18)
Marilyn reframes secrecy as abandonment: not a moral lapse but a refusal of shared life. The passage crystallizes the novel’s thesis that intimacy is sustained by mutual disclosure; once one partner withholds their inner world, the relationship becomes a performance that cannot hold.