A Reason to See You Again A Novel

From New York Times bestselling author Jami Attenberg comes a dazzling novel of family, following a troubled mother and her two daughters over forty years and through a swiftly changing American landscape as they seek lives they can fully claim as their own. The women of the Cohen family are in crisis. Triggered by the death of Rudy Cohen, the glue that held them all together, everyone’s lives soon take a dramatic turn. Shelly, the younger of the two Cohen sisters, runs off to the West Coast to immerse herself in the emerging (and lucrative) world of technology. There she enters into a fraught and dramatic relationship with her womanizing boss and a roller coaster of a friendship with her (mostly beloved) coworker Margaret. Her sister, Nancy, marries young, to a traveling salesman with a shadowy lifestyle, while their mother, Frieda, hurls herself into a boozy, troubled existence in Miami, trying to forget the past even as it haunts her. But they each learn in different ways that running from the past can’t save you—and then must make life-altering decisions about what they want their family to be and what they need to move forward. Beginning in the 1970s and spanning forty years, A Reason to See You Again takes the reader on a kaleidoscopic journey through motherhood, the American workforce, the tech industry, the self-help movement, inherited trauma, and the ever-evolving ways we communicate with one another. Perhaps more than anything, this is a novel about women claiming their agency in uncertain times. With her inimitable verve and compassion, Jami Attenberg, “the poet laureate of difficult families” (Kirkus Reviews), tells a story of the bonds and scars that come from less-than-perfect families—and the many unexpected forms that love can take.