All This Can Be True

All This Can Be True

By Jen Michalski
Turner Publishing, 2025, 288 pages
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As we approach or make our way through middle age, many of us ask some difficult questions of ourselves: Are we truly living the life our earlier selves envisioned? What dreams, or great loves, did we abandon–or not even give a real chance? This perceptive, emotionally complex, and often-heartrending novel grapples with these questions and more, while also suggesting that new possibilities aren’t just for the young.

The novel is told through the points of view of two characters: Lacie Johnson and Quinn Greaves. At the start of the novel, Lacie is considering ending her 25-year marriage to a serial cheater, and finishing her master’s studies in architecture, which she’d put aside for marriage and motherhood. To Lacie, it feels like the right time to make a new start given that her daughters have reached adulthood.

Meanwhile, Quinn is living a rootless life on the road, part of trying to cope with the recent loss of her daughter, Liv, to a genetic disease. Quinn’s pregnancy with Liv ended Quinn’s shot at success as a member of the band The Clit Girls, part of the riot grrrl music movement. After becoming pregnant, she left the group a month before a major label released the band’s first full-length album.

Lacie’s and Quinn’s lives intersect after Lacie’s husband, Derek, suffers a stroke and then falls into a coma. At first, Quinn is just a stranger Lacie encounters in the hospital, where Derek may or may not emerge from his coma. But as Quinn offers comfort and support to Lacie, the two women become closer, and a romance begins to blossom. For Lacie, this seems like a chance at real, mutually felt love–something she never really had with Derek.

Yet there are complications. With the uncertainty surrounding Derek’s future, and his possible ongoing dependence on her, Lacie no longer feels as free as she once did to make a fresh start. An even bigger complication is posed by Quinn, who is holding onto a secret related to Derek. If he wakes from the coma, and if Quinn remains on the scene, there will be no way for her to keep the secret hidden, with potentially devastating consequences for her and Lacie’s burgeoning relationship.

Through Lacie’s and Quinn’s stories, Michalski paints a vivid picture of the lives and dreams the women set aside before meeting each other, not always by their choice. She also conveys other difficulties that have shaped who the two women have become. For Lacie, those difficulties include Derek’s infidelities and a Klonopin addiction for which she remains in  recovery–sometimes, just barely. (The addiction began years before, during a potentially deadly case of postpartum depression.) 

Then there’s Lacie’s habit of putting on a brave face for family and friends while repressing her own dreams and desires, including the pursuit of a relationship with another woman she felt a real connection to, before Quinn came onto the scene. At one point in the novel, Lacie criticizes her own behavior and then makes this observation:

She presented well, though. She had that going for her. It was one thing her mother had taught her: No matter how you felt inside, appearances mattered. If you kept a neat appearance, had your hair colored and Brazilian blow-dried every six weeks, wore tailored clothes, and always smelled nice …, people assumed that you had it together. You were trustworthy, someone to confide in, to aspire to, to lust after. No one knew you dreamed of walking out of your own fortress of a house, starting a new life somewhere else, and never returning.

For Quinn’s part, there’s the success she might have achieved with The Clit Girls. But that lost opportunity is overshadowed by her ongoing grief over the death of her daughter, which Michalski writes about with deep feeling. At one point, Quinn observes:

She worried that people might ask her if she thought about having another child … . Perhaps they were well-meaning, but it was a cruelty she could not bear to hear. The real cruelty was wanting to talk about Liv all the time but knowing that no one, aside from Quinn herself, would ever really know her. It was like trying to explain she had seen a unicorn, or an angel. And what about the person Liv would never become? Would she have learned to play the guitar, like her mother? Maybe she would’ve become an artist or majored in biology in college. Not only had the past been stolen from both of them, but the future as well.

Despite all the difficulties that Lacie and Quinn are struggling with, the novel points toward hopefulness, and for futures that seem far from backsliding for the two women–futures that hold out the possibilities of truly loving and meaningful relationships, and of meaningful life pursuits. (In Quinn’s case, a new song that she writes, inspired by her relationship with Lacie, ends up going viral on social media, thanks to one of Lacie’s daughters, and this opens up a promising new chapter in Quinn’s music career.)

By thoughtfully weaving together the stories of Lacie and Quinn, and by showing how the pull of love can be as devastating as it is irresistible, Michalski has written an authentically complicated and perceptive novel about romance and second chances, a novel that in the end, is also inspiring.

I should also mention that I’m a big fan of Michalski’s other books, including You’ll Be Fine and The Summer She Was Underwater. Like those books, this new novel is not to be missed.

Would My Pick be Your Pick?

If you're interested in ________, the answer may be "Yes":
￭ Stories about second chances
￭ Romance novels with depth
￭ Stories about marital and family conflicts