Lara, they learn, once had ambitions to become an actor, and played Emily in a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in a theatre on the edge of a lake. During an idyllic summer, she had an intense romance with her leading man, Peter Duke, with the pair spending all their time rehearsing or swimming in the lake: “We could get from the stage to being nearly naked and fully submerged in four minutes flat,” Lara recalls. But she quit acting soon after, had a family and threw herself into small-town life; Peter, meanwhile, became an Oscar-winning film star who died prematurely.Patchett has made her name unpicking complex family dynamics and how people respond to trauma. In Tom Lake, those themes are softened as she interrogates ideas around choice and the roads not taken. Streep’s narration is nuanced and thoughtful as it moves between wistful memories of Lara’s past (she keeps the more colourful parts of her story from her daughters) and the gentle melancholy of her present. For Lara, to look back is to confront old disappointments while cherishing all that she has now.
