Review by Jane Ward
Jen Michalski, award-winning author of 2021’s You’ll Be Fine, returns in June with All This Can Be True. Using alternating narratives, Michalski first explores the complex interior lives of two women as they take stock of their lives after tragedies, before finally weaving the two narratives into a rich story of love and motherhood, daring to live one’s true life, and the awakening of hope after heartbreak.
Forty-something Lacie Johnson is on a flight with her husband, heading home after accompanying him on one of his many work trips. In the cross country solitude, Lacie looks over at Derek, sleeping, and a thought pops into her head: “I want to leave you” (13). The sentiment has been brewing for a while, as the marriage that looks ideal from the outside hasn’t been. Derek has been unfaithful many times. Lacie has struggled with post-partum depression and an addiction to anti-anxiety medication. More than that, she is awakening to the idea that she is sexually attracted to women, something she has repressed while raising her two daughters, choosing instead to keep her family intact at the expense of herself. In this contemplative mood, she thinks of an art exhibit that she’d seen only a few days earlier—a collection of photographs showing people falling from buildings, their bodies forever frozen in the space between leap and land:
Even if she could convince herself to be grateful in the moment, she couldn’t convince herself to be happy….She was afraid of being trapped and somehow also falling, out of control, through her life. (14)
Once divorced, she thinks, with her daughters grown and living independently, she might study landscape architecture and pursue any relationships she desires. When the pilot announces an imminent landing, Lacie shakes off these thoughts and tries to wake Derek only to find he hasn’t been sleeping for the entire flight; he’s had a stroke. Hours later, with her husband in a coma and facing long-term care or death, Lacie sees her needs being set aside once again.
At this low moment, she has a moving encounter with another visitor to the hospital. Quinn Greaves, former member of a 1990s post-riot grrrl band, is in the middle of her own cross-country trip in a camper van to see a dying friend in California before continuing on from there to a cooperative living community in British Columbia. Unknown to Lacie, however, is that Quinn has detoured to the hospital expressly to see Derek. Their one night stand years before left Quinn with a daughter to raise on her own. The child, Liv, has died recently from a hereditary disease and Quinn, nearly broke, hopes that Derek might give her some money to cover past medical and burial expenses. Instead, she bumps into Lacie, and what happens next takes both women by surprise:
The moment felt as impossibly long as it was short, and in that expanse, Lacie felt as she had when she realized she had a crush on her best friend when they were juniors at Rutgers. The electricity, the unplaceable feeling of familiarity and connection, the lit sparkler in her stomach. (19)
The lit sparkler becomes a steady flame as the strong feelings the women have for each other develop across their alternating narratives. Sentence by careful sentence, Michalski constructs the histories of the two women until we have a clearer and truer picture of their lives and the flawed and aching selves they bring to the relationship. As inevitable as it is that they fall in love, it is equally inevitable that the big secret Quinn harbors might threaten anything lasting. Inevitable, too, that endings never really mean over; they are instead loaded with remnant longings and regrets, anger and wistfulness.
And, surprisingly, such an end might mean the beginning of something else, something more fulfilling. As Lacie reflects one year on from Derek’s stroke: “She had left her marriage, her family, her home, for a future. A place where anything was possible, where people could meet halfway if they were ready. When they were ready” (266). Quinn, on tour after recording a solo album, reaches a similar understanding. “Maybe after they moved on from their grief, they would have more room to love” (254).
To love, yes, although not necessarily to love each other. Nevertheless, any deep love, whether long- or short-lived, can be healing and liberating and empowering for both lovers. In All This Can Be True, Jen Michalski offers a poignant story about this transformational power of love—even when that love is not destined to be the forever kind.
All This Can Be True by Jen Michalski
Keylight Books, June 2025
Paperback $17.99
ISBN-13 978-1-68442-609-6
Jane Alessandrini Ward is the author of Should Have Told You Sooner (She Writes Press, 2026), In the Aftermath (She Writes Press, 2021), The Mosaic Artist (2011) and Hunger (Forge, 2001). She has been a contributing writer for an online regional and seasonal food magazine and a blogger and occasional host of cooking videos for an internet recipe resource. Jane lives in Massachusetts. To learn more, visit janeaward.com.