What This Theme Explores
Family love in The Most Fun We Ever Had is expansive, intoxicating, and often suffocating—a contradiction embodied by David Sorenson and Marilyn Sorenson, whose marriage radiates through every corner of the Sorenson household. The theme explores how sisterhood holds opposing forces at once: loyalty beside rivalry, intimacy beside secrecy, and protection beside control. It asks how a shared past can both cement identity and trap it, and whether unconditional love can coexist with the resentments that accumulate over decades. Ultimately, the novel suggests that family isn’t a fixed refuge but a living system—one that demands negotiation, forgiveness, and a tolerance for mess.
How It Develops
The novel opens in a present where the Sorenson sisters have drifted into uneasy or superficial contact, their estrangements papered over by family rituals and the gravitational pull of their parents’ home. The arrival of Jonah Bendt—the son Violet Sorenson-Lowell secretly gave up for adoption as a teenager—reorders everything, forcing proximity and reopening the raw seam between Violet and Wendy Sorenson. As Jonah threads into the family’s daily life, the novel moves backward and forward, revealing how early patterns of rivalry, rescue, and concealment became the sisters’ default languages.
Summer intensifies these patterns. Wendy’s choice to house Jonah is both an act of devotion and a bid for control over a narrative she’s kept for years. Liza Sorenson, isolated by her secret pregnancy and an affair, strains against a family template she can’t seem to fit, while Grace Sorenson feels both distant and watched, the “epilogue” child negotiating the family’s accumulated mythos. Their tentative attempts to rely on one another—practical help offered alongside sharp judgments—expose a paradox: even at their most combative, the sisters are scripted to show up.
In the fall and winter crises, the stakes sharpen. David’s heart attack collapses performance and exposes core loyalties: the sisters must triage old resentments to care for their parents, and each other. As secrets unspool—especially between Wendy and Violet—their confrontations are less about victory than clarity. The novel closes on an earned détente: not harmony, but an adult acceptance that their bond is real because it survived what tested it.
Key Examples
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The Secret of Jonah’s Birth: As a teenager, Violet hid her pregnancy by moving in with Wendy and Wendy’s husband, Miles Eisenberg, creating a sealed sisterly world. The choice is at once a staggering act of loyalty and a betrayal of the larger family, a duality that defines their dynamic. Jonah’s eventual reappearance makes secrecy itself a family inheritance the sisters must reckon with.
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Wendy and Violet’s Rivalry and Intimacy: Born less than a year apart, Wendy and Violet oscillate between jealous competition and ferocious protection. In their explosive confrontation in Chapter 31-34 Summary, Wendy reveals she knows Jonah’s father is Aaron Bhargava—her former boyfriend—collapsing decades of unspoken knowledge into one moment. The scene distills their bond: mutual surveillance, mutual sacrifice, and a bruising honesty no one else is allowed to wield.
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Liza as the Middle Child: Liza’s affair and her secrecy around Ryan’s depression spring from feeling both invisible and responsible for being “the functional one.” Her confession to her father in Chapter 6-10 Summary is a pivot away from sisterly patterns of concealment toward a different model of vulnerability. It shows that connection in this family can be rebuilt not by perfection but by truth-telling.
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The “Unfathomable Orb” of the Parents: The daughters grow up watching Marilyn and David’s incandescent marriage, an image that unites them while also setting an unmeetable standard. Their parents’ love becomes both compass and burden, shaping the sisters’ expectations of intimacy and fueling their self-reproach when they fall short. This dynamic dovetails with the book’s inquiry into The Ideal vs. Reality of Love and Marriage.
Character Connections
Marilyn and David Sorenson anchor the family with a romance that feels fated, abundant, and endlessly regenerative. That plenitude steadies the household but also crowds the daughters’ attempts to define love on their own terms. The parents don’t demand perfection; their example silently does, producing daughters who ricochet between emulating and resisting the standard set before them.
The Sorenson sisters embody four angles of the same problem. Violet’s poise and competency harden into secrecy and control, a perfectionism that protects and isolates. Wendy’s bravado masks grief and guilt, making caretaking indistinguishable from domination. Liza’s quiet competence curdles into self-erasure, then cracks under the pressure to appear fine. Grace, forever arriving after the family’s great dramas, struggles to become legible to a clan that already feels complete. Together, they show sisterhood as a system that can wound and repair with the same hand.
Jonah Bendt begins as the family’s most volatile secret and becomes its most clarifying presence. His arrival forces the Sorenson women to narrate themselves—who hid what, who decided for whom, and why. As he shifts from problem to person to son, the clan’s capacity to expand without breaking proves the difference between exclusivity and true belonging.
Symbolic Elements
The House on Fair Oaks: The home is both cradle and crucible. It stores the family’s joys and humiliations, making every return a reencounter with older versions of themselves. Gatherings there can heal, but the house also intensifies role-play, amplifying the sisters’ tendency to revert to childhood scripts.
The Ginkgo Tree: Rooted in the backyard, the ginkgo tracks the family’s lifecycle—from the parents’ early romance to David’s heart attack while trimming its dying branches. Its eventual removal is a ritual of mourning and renewal: the family must change form to endure.
Second Thanksgiving: Their invented holiday turns improvisation into tradition, a reminder that this family’s resilience is self-authored. By choosing to gather on their own terms, the Sorensons transform chaos into continuity and claim the right to keep rewriting their story.
Contemporary Relevance
In a culture of curated images and performative harmony, the Sorensons’ messy constancy feels truer—and more comforting—than perfection. The novel speaks to readers who love their siblings fiercely while resenting the roles they can’t seem to shed, and to anyone who’s learned that secrecy, though protective, corrodes intimacy over time. Its portrait of sisterhood validates ambivalence as part of devotion, suggesting that durable families are not the ones without conflict, but the ones that metabolize it.
Essential Quote
“But of course they saw. All four of the girls watched their parents from disparate vantage points across the lawn... each of their four daughters paused what she was doing in order to watch them, the shining unfathomable orb of their parents, two people who emanated more love than it seemed like the universe would sanction.”
This image fuses the theme’s contradictions: the sisters are unified by a shared awe even as they stand apart, measuring themselves against an impossible glow. The “unfathomable orb” crystalizes how parental love becomes both a beacon and a blinder—orienting the girls toward intimacy while making their own attempts feel lesser. The novel’s arc asks whether they can step out of that light without losing what warms them.