A Reason to See You Again: A Mother and Daughters Navigate Four Decades of Inherited Trauma and Love in America

From the New York Times bestselling author Jami Attenberg comes a dazzling novel of family, following a troubled mother and her two daughters over forty years 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. After 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 each woman must learn in her own way that running from the past can’t save you—and they must make life-altering decisions about what they want their family to be and what they need for themselves 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.

Jami Attenberg is a New York Times bestselling author of nine books of fiction, including The Middlesteins and All Grown Up; a memoir, I Came All This Way to Meet You; and a craft book, 1000 Words: A Writer's Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round. She is the creator of the annual #1000WordsofSummer group accountability writing project. Her work has been published in sixteen languages. She lives in New Orleans.