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Dear Reader,

It is an absolute joy to be sharing The Most Fun We Ever Had with you. This is a marriage story, a reunion story, a decades-long family saga, a meditation on sibling relationships, on life choices, on love—romantic, familial, platonic. It’s also a novel about empathy—about trying to understand where others come from, trying to love those you may not especially like.

I started writing this novel when I was in graduate school to become a therapist, and I kept writing this novel—and, well, dropped out of graduate school—because I became obsessed with the Sorenson family, with finding out as much about them as I could, following them through the most cinematic moments of their lives—births, deaths, weddings—and the quietest ones as well—domestic labor, petty fights, underwhelming preschool recitals. I lived with these characters for years, for better or worse, lived with them when I wasn’t sure what was next for them, lived with them when I didn’t particularly like them, lived with them through highs and lows and everything in between. I wanted to understand each of them, take in each character’s unique map of the human experience and figure out what made them tick. And from there the story grew—and grew, and grew, and grew…

This is the reading experience I hope for you—I hope you fall for the Sorensons as hard as I did, even when they are misbehaving (and reader, they are, usually, misbehaving), and I hope you recognize yourself in some of them, or recognize someone you know, or recognize nobody at all but consider, perhaps, what it might be like to be one of them, because this is one of my goals as a writer and a reader—that kind of empathy, of understanding—and because it is, I believe, one of the many ways that being readers can make us better people.

The Most Fun We Ever Had is my first novel—the second one, Same As It Ever Was is coming out in June!—and this book and its characters hold a very special place in my heart. I hope they will for you as well.

With hope and gratitude,

Claire Lombardo