Introducing Back After This by Linda Holmes

The Audacious Book Club March selection

In the beginning of Evvie Drake Starts Over, Linda Holmes’ 2019 debut, it’s four in the morning, and the protagonist is lying awake on the floor of the small apartment at the back of her house because she’s had a dream about her husband Tim again. Evvie Drake is a widow—Tim died in a car accident—and she’s stuck in the house, unable to break out of her self-isolation, not because she’s grieving the way that everyone thinks she is, but because her husband was killed the day she was planning to leave him, and she hasn’t been able to bring herself to tell anyone that her marriage was built on a lie.

The apartment, Evvie notes, “was still her favorite place in the house and would remain so, unless Tim’s ghost started haunting it just to say he’d noticed a few little bubbles in the paint, and it would really look better if she did it over. Nice, she’d thought to herself when that thought first intruded. Welcome to Maine’s most ghoulish comedy club. Here is a little joke about how my husband’s ghost is kind of an asshole. And about how I am a monster.” Evvie’s monstrosity is more about her lack of self-confidence and her inability to move on than it is about cruel behavior. It’s not until a baseball player named Dean, struggling to come to terms with his failed career, comes to stay in Evvie’s apartment that Evvie’s self-confidence returns alongside Dean’s. They are two wounded people who are able to forge a friendship, and then a romance, and find their way back to a better kind of life.

Holmes’s third novel, Back After This, brings us characters who are similarly struggling with failed love and thwarted life paths. Cecily Foster is a podcast producer who is still nursing the wound of a breakup from four years earlier with a man who stole both her heart and her project. With a lot of prodding from her boss, she reluctantly agrees to host a podcast where she follows the advice of a relationship guru and goes on 20 dates in search of a love match. The first problem is that Cecily doesn’t believe in the project—it’s not what she wants to be known for. The second is that just before the podcast begins, she meets Will, a photographer and waiter who seems like he could be just the kind of guy she’s looking for—except the timing is all wrong.

What makes Holmes’s novels so engaging is that her characters are achingly human - Cecily is a workaholic with big dreams who cares much more about her friends and family than she does her clothes and who always has a snack in her purse; Will is talented and kind but his life seems both unsettled and unsure, and all of his furniture is secondhand. What makes Holmes’s novels work is that, beyond the excellent dialogue and well-considered plots, they adeptly chronicle the very real ups and downs of romance. Cecily and Will start as friends, have sex and have fights, hurt one another’s feelings, try to make up, and most of all, work hard to see one another not as fantasies, but as real people.

Back After This is a delightful read, full of wit and human connection and the intrigue and mundanities of a career in media in the nation’s capital, plus the addition of a very large, very endearing dog named Buddy. I’m looking forward to discussing this book with you throughout the month of March and we will be in conversation with Linda on March 26th at 8 pm EST/5 pm PST.

Have you started reading Back After This? What are your initial impressions?