TOM LAKE by Ann Patchett

Lara and her husband Joe own a Michigan cherry orchard, and all three of their adult daughters are at home helping out during the Covid lockdown.  It’s the perfect time for Lara to share the story of her brief career as an actress and her involvement with an actor named Peter Duke who became a movie star.  The rapt attention of her three daughters eggs Lara on, starting with her unplanned audition for the role of Emily in her high school’s production of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town.  She goes on to play Emily in two other venues, and the final production is the one in which she meets Peter Duke, referred to simply as Duke throughout this book, who plays her father.  Lara so thoroughly embodies the Emily of the play, that the cast and crew call her Emily, which is also the name of her oldest daughter.  Two characters with essentially the same name occasionally caused me some mild confusion in distinguishing between the past and the present or the mother and the daughter, but not to a degree that detracted from my enjoyment of the story.  The real questions that we readers wanted answered were why she gave up acting, why did she break up with Duke, and how did she meet Joe.  The answers to all of these questions are unexpected.  This is just a delightful and beautifully written story of family and the regrettable mistakes we made when we were young.  Lara’s mistakes are myriad and embarrassing, often reflective of poor judgment, but they all lead to the contentment that she now enjoys.