There’s a scene in The Latecomer by Jean Hanff Korelitz that I cannot get out of my head.
The mom, Johanna, is sitting at the dinner table with her family, trying to have a conversation and hold everyone in one place for one meal. One by one, each of her three kids says they have somewhere else to be. They get up and leave, not dramatically and not in anger. They just have other things to do.
And Johanna sits there and realizes this is over. The family she built around these people being together is done, not because something terrible happened, but because her kids grew up and stopped needing to be there.
I had to pause the audiobook because I was crying in my car.
Not because I was afraid that scene was coming for me. Because I’ve already lived it.
Before anyone left
The table started getting quieter before anyone moved out.
My three kids all had busy school and sports schedules, so we didn’t always get to eat together. But we tried. We didn’t allow phones at the table or eating in rooms. We made it a thing, and for a while it worked. The conversations were real. We talked about our days, our struggles, what was funny, what was hard.
But somewhere in the high school years, the drift started. The conversations got shorter and the answers got vague. One of them would cut dinner short for some reason that didn’t seem important enough, and I’d sit there feeling something tighten in my chest. When it was time to clean up, suddenly everyone had somewhere critical to be. And I’d think, this is winding down. They can’t see it, but I can. The clock is running out on all of us being under this roof, and they’re already halfway out the door before they’ve actually left.
My daughter and I are both eldest daughters. We carried things without talking about it. We were the ones who tried to make dinners feel like something, who asked the questions, who kept the conversation going when everyone else was ready to check out. I didn’t fully realize how much of the family’s connective tissue ran through the two of us until she was gone.
The first shift
When my daughter left for college, the house changed overnight.
It wasn’t just quieter, it was a different house. My best friend was gone, and suddenly it was me and three boys, two sons and a husband. I didn’t realize until she left how much she and I had carried the conversation together. Without her, dinners went from meaningful to a lot of guy jokes, or the three of them ganging up to make fun of me, which is their love language when they’re all together but is a very different energy than what the table used to feel like.
I missed her in a way I wasn’t prepared for. Not just as my daughter, but as my partner in trying to hold the family together, the person who cared about making it special the way I did.
The second shift
When my middle son left for college, it was a different kind of hole entirely.
I can’t fully explain why, but losing the second kid felt different than losing the first. My middle son and my youngest are very different personalities, and when the middle one left, the dynamic shifted again in a way I didn’t expect. Now it’s just three of us. The conversations are more personal in some ways because there’s only one kid to focus on instead of three. But they’re also quieter, or they’re my son and husband talking about sports or Star Wars or things I’m not as familiar with as I was with the interests of my other two kids.
Three people at a table that used to seat five. That math never stops being strange.
Ships in the night
As I write this, all three of my kids are home. That only happens about twice a year now, around Christmas and sometime in the summer. My two college kids both play college sports, so they’re lucky to get a week to ten days off at a time. Between their jobs and friends and schedules, we’re lucky to overlap for four or five days.
This is one of those weeks. And here’s the honest truth: even with everyone under one roof, we’re passing like ships in the night.
My husband and I both work during the day. I go to bed early and the kids stay up late. My middle son has always been a social butterfly, and he makes plans with his hometown friends at the worst possible times, missing family dinners that are the only chances all four of us (minus him) are together. I can usually grab my daughter for breakfast or a walk or coffee, but I can never seem to get her and my middle son in the same room at the same time.
And the thing I worry about most isn’t whether they’ll stay close to me. It’s whether they’ll stay close to each other.
My daughter and my youngest are tight. They do a great job of staying in touch even living hours apart. But my daughter and my middle son don’t, and they have differing political views that lead to arguments that leave someone angry for days of the visit. Days we don’t have enough of to waste.
When they were little, they were inseparable. We lived in the country and there weren’t a lot of other kids nearby during summers, so they made their own fun and did everything together. I would have bet anything they’d always be that close.
The mirror I don’t want
I have one sister. We’re not close. We weren’t that close growing up either, but once I left for college, I didn’t look back. She was younger, and I was gone. The time passed, the bond never really formed, and neither of us put in the effort to fix it. Now we see each other on holidays because we’re expected to, and we don’t know much about each other’s actual lives.
I see that same story starting to write itself with my kids, and it terrifies me.
The political arguments between two of them that go nowhere and cost everyone days of tension. The one who’d rather see his hometown friends than sit at a table with his family for an hour. The slow, quiet drifting that doesn’t feel like a crisis until you look back and realize the distance became permanent somewhere along the way, and you can’t pinpoint when.
I can’t preach about it, either. I’m not a good example. I did the same thing to my sister that I’m afraid my kids will do to each other. So I just watch, and hope, and try to make the times we’re all together matter enough to hold.
What Johanna knew
Johanna doesn’t scream or cry or beg her kids to stay at the table. She just sits there. And that quiet sitting, that moment of recognition without any power to change it, is the most honest thing I’ve ever encountered in fiction about a specific kind of parental grief.
It’s not the grief of something going wrong. It’s the grief of something going exactly the way it’s supposed to. Kids grow up and leave and build their own lives. Every parenting book will tell you this is healthy and good and developmentally appropriate, as if knowing it’s normal makes it hurt less.
It doesn’t.
Every mom I know carries this somewhere, even if she doesn’t name it. The fear that the closeness was the peak. That the noise and the mess and the fighting over who sits where was actually the golden age, and you were too tired and too busy to recognize it while it was happening. That one day you’ll sit at the table and realize you didn’t know the last time everyone was there together was the last time.
I didn’t know, and I don’t think any of us ever do.
I just got back from a trip with my college-aged son and his girlfriend. While we were there, I don’t think he cared that I was there. I was the Uber and the grocery shopper and the adult with the credit card. He never said, “Hey Mom, let me just do something with just you.” And that stung. But he’s in love, so I get it. I just wonder if someday he’ll look back and realize that trip could have been as great for me as it was for him, if he’d just looked up for a minute.
Contrast that with my daughter. When she turned 13, we let her pick a place to visit and plan the trip. That place has become ours. We’ve been back just the two of us and with the whole family a handful of times. It’s on the ocean, which happens to be a weakness for both of us. But what makes it special isn’t the place. It’s the memories we built there. That’s the trip where the gratitude already arrived. She sees it, and she holds it the way I hold it.
The other two aren’t there yet, and that’s okay. The gratitude runs on a delay, and I know that. I just have to survive the in-between.
When did your table start getting quiet? I’d love to hear yours in the comments.
The review
Format: Audiobook (narrated by Julia Whelan) | Source: Library | Rating: 5 stars
I picked this up strictly because Julia Whelan narrated it and it was available when I needed a new audiobook. I didn’t do any research beforehand, because a Julia Whelan narration rarely lets me down, and that turned out to be the right call. The first half builds a portrait of a family held together by grief and obligation, triplets conceived through IVF after their parents lost their first child, and you think you know what kind of book this is. Then the second half takes a turn you don’t see coming, and the whole thing opens up into something bigger and stranger and more interesting than a family drama.
Julia Whelan’s voice is what sent me to The Latecomer. The Latecomer sent me down a Mormon history rabbit hole that ended at The Nineteenth Wife, and it kept handing me essays along the way. This is the first. The next one, about the gap between loving your kids and savoring them, is coming soon.
Where else The Latecomer has shown up:
Love is a Pie and You Only Get So Many Slices (the Mormon rabbit hole it sent me down)
What I Read in May 2026 (where I first ranked it)
Grab a copy of The Latecomer. Library first, always. But if you’re buying anyway, my Bookshop.org links back indie bookstores and a sliver comes to me. No pressure.
My son is 14 and in Australia it is very rare to move out of home for University, but I already feel this happening and have started the grieving process. I know it is going to feel empty around here more and more often in the years ahead.