Lorna Mott Comes Home: A Novel

Written by Diane Johnson

Narrated by Maggi-Meg Reed

From the author of the best-selling Le Divorce and Le Mariage, a comedy of contemporary manners, morals, (ex)marriages, and motherhood (past, present, and future)--about an American woman leaving her 20-year marriage to her French second husband, returning to her native San Francisco and to the entwining lives of her children and grandchildren. “Delightful”--Claire Messud (Harper’s Magazine); “Razor-sharp prose and astute observations … a treat”--Publishers Weekly (starred review).

Lorna Mott Dumas, small, pretty, high-strung, the epitome of a successful woman--lovely offspring, grandchildren, health, a French husband, a delightful house and an independent career as an admired art lecturer involving travel and public appearances, expensive clothes. She's a woman with an uncomplicated, sociable nature and an intellectual life.

But in an impulsive and planned decision, Lorna has decided to leave her husband, a notorious tombeur (seducer), and his small ancestral village in France, and return to America, much more suited to her temperament than the rectitude of formal starchy France. For Lorna, a beautiful idyll is over, finished, done . . .

In Lorna Mott Comes Home, Diane Johnson brings us into the dreamy, anxiety-filled American world of Lorna Mott Dumas, where much has changed and where she struggles to create a new life to support herself. Into the mix--her ex-husband, and the father of her three grown children (all supportive), and grandchildren with their own troubles (money, divorce, real estate, living on the fringe; a thriving software enterprise; a missing child in the far east; grandchildren--new hostages to fortune; and, one, 15 years old, a golden girl yet always different, diagnosed at a young age with diabetes, and now pregnant and determined to have the child) . . .

In the midst of a large cast, the precarious balance of comedy and tragedy, happiness and anxiety, contentment and striving, generosity and greed, love and sex, Diane Johnson, our Edith Wharton of expat life, comes home to America to deftly, irresistibly portray, with the lightest of touch, the way we live now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
• Release date: Jun 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9780593349182

Diane Johnson

DIANE JOHNSON, a three-time National Book Award finalist (most recently in 1997 for Le Divorce), is the author of twelve previous books. She divides her time between San Francisco and Paris

Reviews for Lorna Mott Comes Home

[froxgirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"Happiness runs in a circular motion" - Donovan - and this novel is La Ronde indeed! Lorna, mom and grandmother, art expert, is fed up with the flirtations of her French husband and returns to San Francisco and her kids, grandkids, and a mess of a city. She's got to find an apartment (nothing affordable) and re-establish her career (no one's interested). Her progeny are also neck-deep in financial problems and it seems that only Lorna's first ex-husband's second wife's money can solve them. But it might be even worse for Ran, the ex-husband, and Amy, his wealthy second wife - their daughter Gilda, a fifteen year old with diabetes, becomes pregnant after a back seat stand with a twenty year old college student. Lorna's two families, the two ex's, and her two countries all seem doomed to disaster. There's a big cast here, but Lorna's character, wisdom, and humor shine through and her light leads the way to a satisfying conclusion that begs for a sequel.

[bookwyrmm_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This was too slice-of-life-y for me and just seemed directionless with characters I could give or take.

[etxgardener · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Diane Johnson, the queen of novels about American ex-pats in France, now follows one of her ex-pats back home. Lorna Mott is a woman of a certain age who has been living in France with her second husband (French) for twenty-five years. Now finding him still philandering (a his age!), decides to throw him over and go back home to San Francisco. She has a plan to pick-up her long-discarded career as a lecturer on art history, to have a little pied-a-terre in San Francisco, and to straighten out her grown children.
However, she soon finds that things have really changed in twenty-five years. The only apartment she can afford is a semi-seedy one in the foggy Avenues, the powers to be in the art world don’t seem very anxious to set her up on the lecture circuit, and her children…well, one is a depressive divorcee eking out a living selling crafts on Etsy, another seems to have absconded to Thailand with funds belonging to his business, and the third while still dreaming of being a musician, is pretty much just a failure. And let’s not even discuss her former husband who has taken a tech zillionaire for his second wife and is living the life that Lorna thinks that she deserves.
Johnson throws all these characters into a wonderful stew of international manners as Lorna comes to realize that just maybe you can’t go home again after all.

[marthajeanne · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book gets a bit overwhelming with all the complications of the various members of the family. Only a few of the narrative strands get resolved.