A Reason to See You Again

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 their patriarch, Rudy, 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. Her sister, Nancy, gets married at the age of twenty-one 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, the ever-evolving ways we communicate with one another, and the many unexpected forms that love can take.