I loved this audiobook so much! First it centers in part on theater and the actors involved in a production of Our Town, but it’s also a story about family and identity; and it is a reminder that parents have had a full life often before they became parents. Meryl Streep’s narration is spot on perfection (no surprise!) and listening to this while I was commuting was engaging yet relaxing.

Here’s the scoop:

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family’s orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.

I got my copy through Audibile with my monthly credit.