We Came All This Way: A Novel

We Came All This Way is the first novel in eight years from the author whom Entertainment Weekly calls ... a fearsome cultural critic disguised in a novelist’s clothing,” and the Washington Post calls ... a young master of this old art.” It’s the story of Roseanne Okerfeldt, a thirty-one year old mother of four who finds her life in Grand Rapids, Michigan stultifying, and runs off with her brother and eldest child to live on a decommissioned oil rig in the middle of the North Atlantic.

There, Roseanne and the thirty-seven other residents of Mobility” (as they call their new home) struggle against the elements and their own basic oddness to establish an independent society based on utopian principles of cooperation and self-sufficiency. As the months pass, the pressure increases on Roseanne to return to Michigan and confront her former life, while Mobility itself - with its delicate balance of extreme personalities - splinters toward chaos.

Roseanne tells her own story in a comic, aware, and self-deprecating voice, starting with her childhood in suburban Ohio, her early marriage and pregnancies, and her experiences on Mobility, which involve pirate attacks, the vague omens of a Belgian soothsayer, and a man with blue skin. We Came All This Way is about finding a place in the world and trying to grow up before your kids do.