What This Theme Explores
The Ideal vs. Reality of Love and Marriage asks whether a love that looks flawless from the outside can ever exist without fractures, and what damage an idealized model can do to those living in its shadow. In Claire Lombardo's novel, the epic romance of Marilyn and David Sorenson becomes the Sorenson family’s founding myth—a radiant story the daughters inherit as a standard. But the daughters’ adult lives expose love as work: difficult choices, miscommunication, illness, grief, and moral gray areas. The book ultimately suggests that maturity means trading the fantasy of perpetual bliss for the sturdier truth of imperfect endurance.
How It Develops
At first, the narrative bathes Marilyn and David’s marriage in near-mythic light: they are a magnetic pair whose shared glow turns family gatherings into proofs of everlasting love. Their daughters absorb this spectacle as a blueprint, measuring their own relationships against their parents’ warm, sunlit certainty. The ideal appears both enviable and inevitable—until the daughters’ lives refuse to comply.
Midway, the story shifts focus to the daughters’ messy realities. Wendy, who loved Miles fiercely, is remade by bereavement; Violet discovers that a handsome family and Evanston address cannot paper over secrets, especially the long-buried truth of Jonah; Liza wrestles with the relentless gravity of Ryan’s depression; and Grace feels stalled before romance even begins. In counterpoint, flashbacks to Marilyn and David’s early years reveal loneliness, anger, and separations that complicate the myth.
By the end, the binary collapses: the ideal and the real are not opposites but layers of the same marriage. The revelation of David’s emotional affair with Gillian Levin forces the daughters to reinterpret their parents’ story not as a fairy tale but as a history of recommitment. The daughters, in turn, begin to recognize their own flawed relationships as credible forms of love—less luminous, perhaps, but no less real.
Key Examples
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The ideal on display: At Wendy’s wedding, the daughters watch their parents’ incandescent connection and codify it as the family’s gold standard of love. The spectacle is formative, creating a dazzling image that becomes the lens through which the daughters judge their own relationships.
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.
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Violet’s facade: Violet and Matt’s marriage presents as suburban perfection, but a petty argument—over a dishwasher, no less—exposes the strain caused by concealment, especially the secret of Jonah. The smallness of the fight underscores a bigger truth: when intimacy is built on omissions, ordinary moments become pressure points.
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Liza’s despair: When Liza earns tenure, Ryan’s depression prevents him from sharing her joy, turning a milestone into isolation. The scene punctures the myth that love conquers all and shows instead how mental illness can reorganize a relationship around caregiving, silence, and exhaustion.
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Marilyn and David’s early reality: In Iowa, the beloved ideal gives way to claustrophobia and anger as Marilyn confronts the domestic script she never chose. The marriage we later see as effortless is revealed to have been forged through argument and renegotiation.
"But it doesn’t occur to you why I might feel crazy? Because you’ve set me up in this fucking dollhouse and left me to do all of the boring stuff while you get to go be productive and never spend any time with me?"
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The daughters’ burden: When Liza admits that her parents’ marriage sets an unattainable bar, the ideal becomes not inspiration but indictment. The line captures how admiration curdles into shame when a model feels impossible to match.
“We all desperately want your life,” Liza said. “And we all know we’ll never have it.”
Character Connections
Marilyn and David anchor the myth and then complicate it. Their decades-long devotion is genuine—tender, physical, habitual—but it survives precisely because they encounter distance, fight, and choose each other again after Gillian Levin’s emotional intrusion. Their marriage becomes a case study in how an ideal is not a mask for perfection but a memory made from repeated acts of repair.
Wendy embodies the danger of a consuming ideal. With Miles, she comes closest to her parents’ blazing intensity, only for illness and death to extinguish it. The void left behind reveals how an identity built around epic love can collapse without it, forcing Wendy to piece together a self that is not defined by a partner.
Violet curates appearance—house, husband, sons—to approximate the family model, but secrecy erodes the foundation. Her withholding of Jonah’s existence turns domestic friction into a referendum on honesty, showing that a marriage can look immaculate while remaining emotionally undernourished.
Liza’s partnership with Ryan dramatizes love’s unglamorous labor: showing up when celebration is impossible, wanting closeness that illness cannot reciprocate. Her affair does not simply “betray” the ideal; it exposes how prolonged deprivation distorts choice, and how fidelity itself becomes complicated under the weight of daily survival.
Grace, the daughter who has not yet loved deeply, experiences the ideal as exclusion. Watching her parents’ marriage from the outside makes her feel defective, suggesting that ideals can marginalize as much as inspire—especially for those whose timelines don’t conform.
Symbolic Elements
The ginkgo tree in the backyard of the house on Fair Oaks stands for enduring love that also ages and ails. It shelters early courtship and a stolen wedding kiss, then later shows disease, mirroring David’s heart attack and reminding the family that longevity includes weather, wounds, and the possibility of loss.
“The most fun we ever had,” Marilyn’s wry refrain about motherhood, doubles as a family slogan and a mask. It is both heartfelt and performative—an attempt to narrate chaos as joy—capturing how families construct ideals that are partially true and strategically incomplete.
Contemporary Relevance
In an age of curated feeds and anniversary tributes, the Sorenson myth feels familiar: public love that looks effortless, private reality that is anything but. The daughters’ struggle maps onto the anxiety many feel when comparing their lives to others’ highlight reels—where a relationship’s best moments become a punishing benchmark. Lombardo’s portrait invites a more compassionate standard: that success in love is measured not by shine but by the quiet, persistent work of repair.
Essential Quote
“We all desperately want your life,” Liza said. “And we all know we’ll never have it.”
This admission distills the theme’s core tension: admiration turning into self-erasure under the weight of an ideal. Liza names both the magnetism and the damage of her parents’ model, transforming the myth from a North Star into a shadow—and clearing space for the daughters to define love on more human, sustainable terms.