All This Can Be True
In Jen Michalski’s queer romance novel All This Can Be True, two women find each other and themselves after grief.
Just before Lacie asks her husband for a divorce, he has a stroke and winds up comatose. While torn between supporting her husband and starting fresh, Lacie sparks with another hospital visitor, Quinn, an ex-punk rock star reeling from the death of her daughter. The women bond over their grief. But Quinn has a secret connection to Lacie’s husband, and revealing it could upend Lacie’s life. As the women grow closer, they deal with the consequences of their actions to create a promising future.
Told via alternating viewpoints, the novel explores different aspects of grief. Lacie laments her husband’s condition but also regrets having put her husband first so often, while Quinn grapples with the guilt of keeping her secret from Lacie. The discussions of grief are complex, as are conversations about joy, connection, and progression. Lacie’s mother, for example, says, “We all make mistakes. But we’re human, and we deserve understanding and love. All this can be true”; these observations are later transformed into song lyrics by Quinn.
As grief, romance, and secrets blend together in complex ways in the novel, the prose remains accessible, with equal weight given to conversations and descriptive narration. Evocative similes, as of Lacie clinging to others like flotsam while dreaming of building her own boat to captain, and of Quinn filling the empty space in her life like cotton in a wound, are used to build empathy. As Quinn and Lacie’s stories interweave, each woman recognizes the joys and disappointments involved in relying on each other. They weigh the realities of what they want against what they truly need.
Reviewed by
Allison Janicki
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