Who We Are Now by Lauryn Chamberlain

Writer-to-watch Lauryn Chamberlain’s sophmore novel, a paperback original, is a poignant, incisive story about life’s “Sliding Doors” moments; it explores the disproportionate impact that the seemingly small choices we make in our youth have on the rest of our lives, jumping boldly through the years in alternating points of view, moving at the same unforgiving pace as do those precious, confusing years between college and real life.

This is a novel of epic friendship. We meet Clarissa, Rachel, Nate, and Dev in their last year at a liberal arts college, where these four friends are preparing to take their first steps into adulthood. Then they do. We follow them for fifteen years, through their twenties and then their thirties as their lives change and complicate, as do the ties between them. Two find fame, two sacrifice idealism for a secure paycheck. Two are locked in a will-they-won’t-they holding pattern. Some of them mature into fabulous human beings. Others lose their footing, and let their friends down with catastrophic results. 

This novel is a meditation on life and friendship, and exemplifies Lauryn’s talent for writing utterly relatable stories and lovable characters. Who We Are Now examines way that our early relationships encourage us forward and sometimes hold us back. It questions how the seemingly small decisions we make in our youth send us down wildly diverging paths. In other words, this is a perfect novel for the current zeitgeist, as we all assess and reassess our priorities in a fast-changing world.

Lauryn Chamberlain was born and raised in Michigan. She studied journalism and French at Northwestern University and then moved to New York City, where she worked for several years as a journalist, freelance writer, and content strategist (sometimes simultaneously). She currently lives in Toronto.

Author Residence: Toronto, Canada