The Memo
An excerpt of one of the hottest novels of the summer—a story of time-traveling to the past to correct errors made in young adulthood.
Readers,
Have you wondered whether, somewhere along the way in life, you failed to receive a memo that everyone else around you had—a document that would have clued you in to more advantageous life choices? Have you ever wished you could time-travel to certain junctures in the past, so you could choose differently? Have you ever imagined going back to your early 20s and starting over, altogether? I mean, who hasn’t?
Even though I’m quite content with where I’m at in my life, it’s often tempting to wonder how things might have turned out if…I’d taken that first job offer out of college at a paper in the Berkshires…I took that mentor’s advice to live abroad for a while before settling down in life…I hadn’t been in such a rush to marry the first time, at 23. If I’d received a memo advising me which direction to go in, at every turn—something my more successful peers seemed to have gotten.
In their hilarious new novel, The Memo, authors Lauren Mechling and Rachel Dodes send up this very common train of thought. At a college reunion, surrounded by former classmates who seem to have it much more together than she does, protagonist Jenny Green is offered an opportunity to go back in time and undo what she believes were big errors in her past. It’s a great premise, and a great read—I devoured an advance copy last fall, and highly recommend it! (In an Instagram post I called it “a pile of fun” and I stand by that!)
Per the book’s promotional materials: “If you could rewrite your life story, would you dare? That’s the question at the heart of this funny, sharp and propulsive debut novel about love, life, and a woman finding herself and what it means to be happy and successful.”
Here, Lauren and Rachel provide a little more setup for this excerpt:
Hello! We are huge fans of the Sari Botton-verse, and it is so exciting that she has offered to share a morsel of The Memo with all of you. Below you'll find the second chapter of the book, which is at a point in the novel before the timewarp-y magic starts happening. We were still setting the stage and we wanted to establish where our dear Jenny Green found herself in life. Once upon a time, not long ago, she was a promising young woman. And now, well, just read ahead to see what's going on with Jenny.
Here we go… - Sari Botton
The Memo
by Mechling and Dodes
The best way to describe what I did for a living would be to say I was a professional beggar. I raked in contributions for the Aurora Foundation, whose lofty mission was to demolish structural barriers to gender equity. In more tangible terms, this meant directing small grants to girls clubs and female entrepreneurs across the nation, but mostly in western Pennsylvania. It was stable work, occasionally inspiring. Well, it used to be occasionally inspiring, when our pockets were a bit deeper. We would
have had a lot more money to invest in demolishing structural barriers to gender equity were it not for our executive director’s exorbitant personal expenses that somehow were always “work related.”
I reported to Executive Director and Founder Alice Hustad, who happened to have graduated from Coleman College a few years ahead of me. She had already tried her hand at becoming an actress, a stockbroker, and a raw foods restaurateur before settling on philanthropy as an occupation. She’d come up with the idea for the foundation while adventure-vacationing in the Arctic with a famous astrologer, and named it for the northern lights, those gorgeous disturbances in the magnetosphere that turn the night’s sky into a swirl of green. The astrologer told Alice that, as a Taurus, her aura was green like the northern lights and that she had the power to bring out the best in other people through her bull-like determination. It was at that moment that Alice realized the universe was speaking to her.
As the foundation’s key relationship officer, I was responsible for securing our financial support. But since we had to trim staff of late due to a precipitous fall in philanthropic donations across the board, I was wearing a lot of other hats, too: media strategist, spokesperson, and therapist. It fell on me to soothe the increasingly fragile ego of my insecure boss. I had to remind Alice repeatedly how astute her vision was, how important the foundation’s work was, and how essential our objectives were, not just for women, but for society. Without people like us, the world would spin off its axis, swinging the arc of the moral universe away from justice. At first, I believed all of this. As a woman who hadn’t exactly been served by the system, I was an easy mark.
The rest of the world took a little more work. There were other, more pressing causes out there than helping stay-at-home moms launch their low-sugar brownie and event-planning businesses, as potential donors were quick to remind me. But Alice had her network of Pittsburgh millionaires looking for an easy tax deduction, and they usually could be relied upon to continue their dwindling contributions, provided that I continued flattering and wining and dining them at the city’s finest restaurants,
regaling them with inspiring stories of entrepreneurs seeking to save the world. Alice’s latest pet project was a start-up that specialized in portable bidets for children. Admittedly, putting the bill on my corporate credit card was getting a little harder, given that Alice had said I needed to tighten my belt. I was now expected to split the check with putative donors, which was not a great look.
My first task of the day was to reply to an email from Christy Spector, the director of marketing at Pittsburgh’s Slime Museum, the site of a Father’s Day Parade after-party we were hosting. I was behind schedule, as I’d spent the previous month trying—and failing—to secure a partnership with a more august local institution.
I’m soooooooooooo sorry, but a request for a big birthday party just came in, Christy wrote. We’re going to need the main slime stations. Your group can use the basement room. Let me know if you’re still interested—and how many slime dumps we should plan on setting up!
The Slime Museum basement seemed a poetically just place to celebrate our Feminists for Father’s Day float, an idea that Alice had dreamed up during one of her spin sessions. After failing to convince her that Father’s Day might not be the right holiday to market a women-oriented foundation, I’d mapped out the route of the float, approved the designs, and followed up with a few potential sponsors, securing their participation. A local jazz band led by Alice’s ex-husband, Deck—who worked at the foundation as a vice president of operations, but rarely showed up for video meetings, let alone made in-person appearances—was set to perform on the float and perhaps at the after-party too. I prayed he wouldn’t be too deep in his beer by then.
I replied to Christy:
That’s fine! We can do it in the basement, I typed. And I think just one slime dump will be perfect. A surprise for Alice. She’ll love it!
Right. She was going to love having slime dumped all over her straight-from-the-runway ensemble. I had to entertain myself when I could.
Just as I was hitting “send,” a new email from Alice popped up in my inbox. She must have sensed that I was plotting the destruction of one of her silk outfits. Now she was haranguing me about some inane thing she’d seen on Instagram: An account with fifty-five followers, all of which appeared to be bots, was impersonating her. Hadn’t she warned me that there were saboteurs lurking everywhere? I was about to respond in a perfectly professional message—As per my previous email, I began—when
my phone went off again. It was a text from Hal’s number.
Yum.
For a second I wondered if he’d reconsidered the muffins. My mouth fell open. This was not about a muffin. Was this my first dick pic? Why yes, it was. I stared at it in disbelief. Weren’t we a little too old for this type of behavior? I checked to make sure nobody in the communal work room was close enough to see the contents on my screen, then studied the image. This organ was certainly Hal’s. As I tried to come up with reasons he had chosen to send this to me at this moment, it dawned on me that perhaps he intended to send the picture to someone else. Hal barely even texted, believing abbreviations and emojis to be two of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The other two were social media and reality television.
I tried to steady my breathing and pulled up Geeta’s number.
Emergency update: Hal just texted me a picture of his penis with the word “yum.” I don’t think it was for me. Help me process this, I wrote.
Yuck. I was trying to eat my breakfast, Leigh replied.
Crap. I suddenly realized that I had accidentally responded to the long-dormant, recently resurrected thread that included both Geeta and Leigh. Geeta and I were still best friends, but Leigh and I had had a fallout and were just recently back in touch.
Still, I didn’t want Leigh to be receiving my most intimate cries for help. Dealing with someone else’s vulnerability was not her forte. Leigh Sullivan, former champion rower turned noted queer artist, and I had drifted apart years ago. We no longer even qualified as Facebook friends since she quit the network, though she would occasionally “like” my Instagram posts—typically steamed-up images of baked goods—from her checkmark-verified personal account. Every time Leigh engaged with something I shared on social media, I’d get an influx of new followers, a gnawing reminder of her ever-expanding sphere of influence.
But I wished she hadn’t bothered. To me, going from practically being sisters to tapping hearts on an app was heartbreaking. It was worse than if we’d had a blow-out fight. She liked my sporadic content even though she didn’t appear to like me.
Meanwhile, Geeta wouldn’t accept Leigh’s and my ever-widening rift. Optimistic to the point of delusional, she believed that all we needed was some actual face time—not FaceTime—to rekindle our relationship.
Just minutes earlier, Geeta had sent Leigh and me a text saying how excited she was for the reunion, sharing that she’d heard that her college crush Dave Smalls was going to be there.
Maybe this will finally be our moment, Geeta wrote, followed by an upside-down smile emoji. I responded by telling her there would be “no judgment” from me. I didn’t think Geeta would ever cheat on her husband—but she did believe that the reunion was just the thing to summon all the energy of our youth, and I was willing to play along. And now I’d sullied the thread with a confession that my
commitment-phobic, probably-cheating boyfriend had just sent me a dirty picture I highly suspected wasn’t intended for me. A great way to show my fabulous friends that I was progressing in life.
Adulting FTW, I wrote, then added an embarrassed-face emoji. I saw the three dots indicating that Geeta was composing a message. She sent a smile emoji followed by a gentle reminder: Much as I love and embrace all forms of adult entertainment, no more texting me about anything until you’ve signed up for the reunion. We won’t let you ditch us this time. Can’t wait to see you. I’ll even try to be nice to Hal.
She tacked on an eggplant emoji followed by another embarrassed face. I groaned. We’ll be there, I replied.
Statement of intent is not enough, Geeta shot back. Send proof of registration.
Given my decision to bail on our last big reunion, her due diligence wasn’t entirely unwarranted. I’d never been much of a planner. This bothered Geeta to no end. She was the kind of person who mapped her weekend getaways in a multi tabbed spreadsheet of the hotels, hiking paths, and dinner reservations she’d scored, replete with links to reviews and maps. Ever the power entrepreneur, Geeta always wanted documentation, agendas, projections, and action items for follow-ups. She and her husband Matt even scheduled sex via their shared calendar when their lives were getting too busy. Rather, her life. Matt was never that busy.
U got it, I fired off begrudgingly.
I searched through my email for the various reminders from our alumni class president, Alessandra D’Ouros of East Sixtieth Street, New York City, formerly known as Allie Dourous of East Lansing, Michigan. Somehow she had become a wildly successful independent film producer. At the bottom of Alessandra’s note detailing the links to the registration page was a bullet-
point request:
Record a quick video on your phone re-introducing yourself to the Class of ’07.
Upload the video to this Google Drive! And please don't peek at the other videos :).
Keep it fun!
Fun. Right. Another thing I had forgotten to do. I looked at my watch and I had some time before my next phone call. There was no way I was shooting a video in SteelHaus’s bustling common area, so I made sure no one was watching me, and sneaked off to Alice’s private office, the last place she’d be at nine a.m., even though the rest of us were expected to be at our desks by then. (Her hair took ages to blow-dry into barrel curls; it couldn’t be helped.)
The latest issue of Moment magazine was on Alice’s coffee table, a reminder of another impossible task she’d asked me to complete. Alice felt entitled to be profiled in the magazine’s annual Changemakers List, a round-up of women making an impact on society around the world. The problem was, nobody cared about a forty-something white woman who’d inherited millions from her industrialist father and rented out space in a coworking facility in Pittsburgh. Stop the presses.
I took a seat at Alice’s desk and opened my browser to the reunion’s registration page. Not only had I missed the deadline for the 30 percent early-bird discount, but the Coleman College class of 2007 bulletin board was now full of impressive information, more than I could possibly absorb. I scanned the bios sent in by some of my former classmates. Certain words kept coming up: CEO. Cofounder. Head of Something. Chief of Operations of Something Else. Partner. Leader. Chairman. Producer. Even though the woman formerly known as Allie had urged us not to look in the video folder, I couldn’t help myself. I saw her thumbnail and clicked the little triangle. There she was, introducing herself as “Alessandra.” She was on a movie set in what appeared to be Venice, Italy, and she was speaking in a vaguely Italian accent.
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Amanda Rosenbaum, an annoying know-it-all from my American studies class, shared that she had won a Peabody Award for an online series exposing war crimes in Myanmar. Lyndsey Bogatsky, a poetry major, was now a rocket scientist—a true rocket scientist!—at SpaceFisch, one of a handful of entities run by Levi Fischer, a billionaire fixture of the tabloids who was always getting sued by someone. Alexis Wilson, a math prodigy who’d lived directly across the hall from Geeta during sophomore year, was an archeologist with her own lab at UC Davis. “I just returned from Egypt, where I co-led a dig in collaboration with Oxford University and uncovered a cache of teenage mummies,” Alexis wrote. “Our discovery of new clues helped deepen our understanding of human adolescence. I can’t wait to see you
and hear your news!”
My news. What was my news again? What the hell was I doing with my life? This was the question I tried to constantly keep at bay. I grabbed a handful of licorice all sorts from the antique glass jar Alice kept on her desk and nervously stuffed them into my mouth. Then I walked over to the wall where Alice hung her prized photography collection, swallowed hard, and turned on my phone’s camera. I held the device a few inches at an angle above my head to suggest the existence of cheekbones, a neat
trick Sophie had taught me. I tapped the red “record” button.
My news. What was my news again? What the hell was I doing with my life? This was the question I tried to constantly keep at bay.
“Hey there,” I said, “your old friend Jenny Green here. You remember me, the eco-chic econ major, raging against the machine, writing papers on Engels while dreaming of becoming America’s favorite artisanal baker?” I paused and thought about what to reveal next. “You probably read about how I burned down an Italian bakery right after college. Not just any Italian bakery—an official UNESCO cultural heritage site. Impressive, am I right? More recently, I moved, perhaps against my better
judgment, from New York to Pittsburgh with my boyfriend, who is annoyingly good-looking and used to organize the most fantastic exotic vacations for the two of us but now seems to be busy drooling over one of our new neighbors. So that’s cool. And what am I doing? I am now working as a professional groveler at a nonprofit organization that none of you has ever heard of. I have two friends in the city: a coworker who isn’t old enough to rent a car and a man I met in my a cappella troupe, the Looney Tunes, who is awkward as they come and currently estranged from his wife. And yes, I am still baking! But my boyfriend has sworn off gluten, so I eat everything I bake and as a result no longer fit into most of my clothes. But on the plus side, he just texted me a picture of his dick that I think was intended for that neighbor girlie. Don’t be too jealous!”
I pressed play to review the recording and chuckled imagining Geeta watching this summation of my life. Yes, I’d squandered my potential, but at least I could make fun of myself.
“That. Was. Epic.”
Sophie was standing in the doorway. Had she seen it all? Heard it all? The humiliation made me go stiff.
“I’m in the middle of something, Soph,” I said.
“Evidently.”
“It was just a joke,” I said. “I was just doing a warm-up. Making sure the sound levels were okay.”
“Yeah, sure,” Sophie said. “Are you okay, Jenny?”
“Me? Of course I’m okay,” I said reflexively.
But I wasn’t. I could feel my mouth begin to tremble the way it did when I was about to cry. Nobody had asked me if I was okay in such a long time.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe not?”
Thankfully, Sophie had a plan for everything. She handed me her jumbo water bottle and proceeded to turn off all the lights except for a neon plaque—the words “Interactive Reactive” glowing in yellow—that hung on the wall. The piece was by an acclaimed artist named Ezra Lightfoot who I knew about through Hal.
I took a sip of water and wiped the corners of my eyes. Sophie came over to where I was standing and wrested the phone from my hand. “Don’t you dare move. The lighting is perfect.” Leave it to Sophie to leverage a $59,000 art installation into a flattering light source.
She ran off and in a moment was back with her enormous makeup bag. Sophie knew more about contouring than any Sephora employee. She opened the bag and took out what looked like mascara, but explained it was brow gel.
“I came looking for you to see if you wanted to order smoothies from that new organic place. Thank god I found you,” Sophie said, in a voice slightly sweeter than her usual tone, brushing my eyebrows. “You’ve got this, Jenny. Those college friends are going to be blown away by your refreshing realness. Just don’t be so real that you self-sabotage at your reunion!”
That was another thing about Sophie. I had told her about my reunion months ago, when I first began stressing about it, and she remembered everything.
“Easy there,” I said when she started yanking on my hair. Sophie frowned, then stepped back, looking pleased with her work.
“Ready to start over?” Sophie asked. She was still too young to know just how good starting over sounded. I hoped she never would.
Highly recommend Matt Haig's "Midnight Library" who did this genre magnificently.
Co-authors? How does that work? I have a hard enough time agreeing with myself : )