this one's on fire

Jenny Green feels like a loser. While her friends from college have gone on to get married, have successful careers, make a lot of money, and hang out with famous people, Jenny has a job at a fundraiser that she’s half-hearted about and a boyfriend that she thinks is cheating on her with a neighbor. And her 15th college reunion is coming up. She wants to go to the reunion to see her two best friends from college, but she can’t help but feel like everyone else got the memo about how to be successful in life except for her.

And then the text comes through on her phone. You’re right. You didn’t get the memo.

Jenny wonders if she’s losing her mind. How could someone else know that she’d just been thinking that? But she shrugs it off and heads out of town to the reunion. Once she’s there, she finds her old roommates, Leigh and Geeta. And she also meets up with Desiree, an independent career counselor Jenny had met shortly before her graduation all those years ago. Desiree is the one who had texted Jenny about the memo, and she says that there is still time for Jenny to change her life.

Back when they’d first met, Desiree had encouraged Jenny to drop out of school. Jenny had refused, but she had gone on to win a prestigious baking fellowship in Italy, where she had accidentally burned down a historic bakery. But Desiree is offering her the chance to go back and change her life, starting with that fateful day at the bakery. Jenny takes that chance, and finds herself traveling in time back to that day, setting things right and changing the course of her life.

Desiree tells Jenny that her 36th birthday is the key, that she can makes changes to her life up to that date, but after she turns 36, her life’s trajectory will be set. As the weeks go by, Jenny finds herself bouncing back and forth between the life she could have had, making course corrections that will end on her being incredibly successful, and the loser life she’d been living in Pittsburgh. But she also finds that some of the choices she finds herself contractually obligated to make takes her away from the person she wants to be. Jenny realizes that she can be successful beyond her wildest dreams, or she can be true to herself.

Which path will she choose?

The Memo is a fascinating look at what could have been from authors Rachel Dodes and Lauren Mechling. This story bounces back and forth through time, and offers a glimpse of the kind of life that takes you towards crazy success verses a life that is genuine and heartfelt. The time travel in the narrative adds tension, since every time Jenny jumps from one timeline to the other, she has to figure out what has changed and adapt to her new life in minutes. And there is always the question of where Jenny will end up when it’s all over. And I never would have guessed where that turned out to be.

I went into this book knowing that there is a lot of buzz around it, as readers try to figure out what their own memo might have said. And as a big fan of the movie Sliding Doors and the book Oona Out of Order, I had high expectations for The Memo. But as it turns out this one wasn’t quite like those stories. There is some overlap, but because Jenny’s choices when she jumps back in time changes both of her timelines, there is extra tension each time she’s back home in Pittsburgh to find out what’s changed for her in that story.

I really got sucked into this story, and I loved it. The more times Jenny went back in time, the more changes she made to her old story, and the more things changed in her Pittsburgh timeline because of that, the more I wanted to find out more. I thought this was such a clever idea for storytelling, and it really worked for me. I do think that you need to read this book pretty quickly, or maybe even read it twice, to keep track of all the people and all the changes that were happening, and since I got so absorbed in the story so quickly, that was not a problem for me. I think this book is really clever and will start some interesting conversations for book clubs or even just for twentysomethings to take a hard look at their life choices and how things might unfold for them. But I do recommend this one, and I hope readers love it as much as I did.

Egalleys for The Memo were provided by Harper Perennial through NetGalley, with many thanks.