The Memo
Lauren Mechling and Rachel Dodes
(HarperCollins)
Did you ever feel like everyone around you has their life together and you’re the one left behind? I don’t want to say that everyone’s had that sentiment—Donald Trump, perhaps, has not—but it is, as feelings go, a relatable one. And it’s the one at the centre of Lauren Mechling and Rachel Dodes’s new novel, The Memo.
Jenny Green, who graduated from college in 2007, was on a path to culinary-world success when a kitchen mishap had her accidentally setting fire to the bakery in Italy she was apprenticing in as part of a prestigious fellowship. From that moment on, her life fell apart, or, rather, stalled into mediocrity. After a stint living back home with her parents on suburban Long Island, she’s on the cusp of 36, living in unglamorous Pittsburgh, working a generic office job as the underling to a dreadful girlboss, dating a hot-but-untrustworthy man. Neither kids nor home ownership are on the horizon.
None of this would be remarkable except for the fact that her best friends from college, Geeta and Leigh, are big-shot professionals. They’re flitting around, attending galas, and just generally being the sort of people who can hold their heads up high at the college reunion where everything will, of course, come to a head. They are, crucially, hanging out without her.
Jenny bemoans having not gotten the memo, by which she means, not learning how to be a winner at life, and suddenly a message appears on her phone, offering her the Memo she’s been waiting for. In a sci-fi-lite twist, a secretive self-improvement scheme, with offices right on her old college campus, is waiting to allow her to redo her adult life, tweaking choices so as to wind up a power player in her own right. A mysterious entity (but with embodied human representatives) effectively redirects her life, step by step. They’re trying to see if it’s possible for someone to turn their life around as old as she is, as part of an experiment. These are literal sci-fi-level stakes, but there’s also the more everyday question of old dogs and new tricks and all that.
As in Lauren Oyler’s 2021 novel Fake Accounts, the internet is woven into the plot in ways that go beyond see everyone is on their phone all the time these days. But despite the Memo itself being transmitted via text message, The Memo is a novel of the before-times. It’s about people who hang out in person and communicate by postcard. The drama takes place at parties and in physical offices, and thank goodness.
The Memo is the twist that makes this novel different from what it first seems to be, and what it on some level is: a will-she-won’t-she about whether a 35-year-old woman will stay with her bad-news boyfriend or accept that this relationship has run its course and try things with a single dad—also nice-looking, don’t worry—from her hobby singing group. Whether she’ll stick with her dead-end job or follow her dreams.
At first, The Memo seems like a story about unrealized potential. All the woulda-coulda-shouldas of life. It’s about the way a certain sort of high-achieving young person imagines their life will go, and then all the stumbling blocks they encounter. The Consortium’s Memo thing a self-help program aimed at letting women make the most of their raw material, and its organizers deemed her unusually in need of their services:
“We review an array of things like your social skills, likeability, and your upbringing as well as natural advantages such as body type and BMI. We also look at your economic class and your attendant privileged, and we evaluate your cognitive abilities and self-awareness. And then by exploring your life’s various branch points—your mistakes, your regrets, your paths not taken, and so on and so forth—we can determine the size of the gap, or in your case, the gulf between your potential and your actual achievement in the game of life. Your failure is of majestic proportions!”
A lot of the story takes place in the time-travel limbo where Jenny knows what the future holds but is living in an alternate version of her past. So her husband is a virtual stranger, and she doesn’t know basic things like where she’s currently living. None of it makes sense, but the discombobulating effect is enjoyable and—to my knowledge—original.
The Memo soon starts to seem like it’s centrally about success and failure, being a sellout and selling your soul to something like the devil. Because following your Memo means not just abandoning free will and doing things like wearing a red dress the day the Memo asks this of you, but also being nasty to your friends, in some cases more than nasty. Jenny is happy eating carbs and earning enough to get by. An alternate-universe version of herself with the perfect body and husband feels inauthentic to her. She isn’t—paging Holden Caufield—a phony.
The book’s message—and I suppose it does have one—is that phoniness and stomping over your loved ones are of a piece. To be one of life’s winners, you have to cheat. Thus the mark of a good person is having demonstrated capacities to achieve great things but turning away from that to do something humble. A finance bro turned math teacher is a good person. A crypto-investing douchebag is what you expect him to be.
By the end, it seems more about the difference between following your dreams and doing what others ask of you. Jenny is ambitious, in her way, and doesn’t wind up somewhere ultimately that different in her non-Memo reality than in the Memo one. Becoming a celebrated Pittsburgh bakery owner isn’t the same as running your own vegan girlboss empire (her alternate-life path), nor is coupling off with a divorced middle-class dad the same as marrying a self-made gazillionaire turned inspirational speaker. She isn’t a heroine who rejects the alternate route, but rather she wavers, then opts for it, but learns—echoes of real life—that it’s too late. She is who she is.
The superlative angle is interesting though, and what I kept getting stuck on. Jenny needs to be the world’s greatest failure to be useful to the Consortium, to show that someone can turn their life around that close to 36. But even before she gets her act together on her own terms at the end of the book, she’s doing sort of… fine? She’s employed, she has a partner, hobbies, old and new friends, tolerable if not blissful relationships with her family of origin. How is this missing the memo? Surely there are people in the world doing worse than she is?
Jenny Green belongs to a milieu in which it’s considered the height of failure in your 30s to have an office job and a hot live-in boyfriend. Her life is unremarkable. Mid. She’s ordinary, and this is her tragedy. Hers is a world where if you aren’t the highest of high achievers, you’re a loser. This despite Jenny herself not seeing the world like this, or not entirely. I could never quite tell whether she envied her more ambitious friends, or whether she felt as though she ought to and that this amounted to the same. Then again, the gist seems to be that she can’t decide this, either.
Fiction is meant to cover the range of human experience, very much including the unremarkable. Who’s the nobody in the apartment next door? A novel or short story offers an imaginary, invented, but no less valuable window.
But there’s a structural obstacle to loser lit, and it’s this: anyone publishing a novel has gotten it together to… publish a novel. This doesn’t mean they’re rich and famous (most authors are neither), but it suggests a degree of commitment and confidence beyond that of your average shlub. A skilled novelist can depict the mindset of characters who are not novelists, but if there’s a nagging sense in certain novels that the loser isn’t a loser-loser, this may get at why. There will never be an #OwnVoices treatment of the demographic consisting of people who would never in a million years write a novel. It’s a limitation, it is what it is.
The authors of The Memo—Dodes and Mechling (the latter is a Canadian-American whose career started at the National Post)—are not just esteemed writers with a long presence in major English-language publications (Vogue, the Wall Street Journal, etc.), but (it takes three seconds to Google) people who attended the kinds of elite academic institutions (Harvard, the London School of Economics) that really do tend to graduate life’s unambiguous winners. Places where if you go to them and go on to lead a perfectly nice but not A-list life, you very well might be remembered as the class dud. This is just a theory I have of why Jenny, who seems to have her life pretty together by millennial standards, is meant to be plausible as the face of loserdom.
That said, a more generous interpretation is that this isn’t an authorial blind spot regarding who would, in the population at large, count as a loser, and rather that this is simply who Jenny is: a normal person in a world of overacheivers. Maybe that’s it, but it is easier to find out the backstory of the co-authors than that of Jenny herself.
Cultural specificity is at a minimum in The Memo, which keeps the focus strictly on the plot and conceit. Geeta, one of Jenny’s best friends, is brown-skinned and named Geeta. Jenny’s grandmother would have used the word “fakakta”—a nod to the shared Jewishness of the co-authors—but beyond this, these are generic liberal-arts-college-educated millennials, sometimes living in New York City, sometimes not. There is a third friend/frenemy, Leigh, who’s a lesbian art/drug dealer, and who—very Sex and the City—doesn’t make sense as a friend for these other women.
It’s not just that these characters lack distinct ethnicities—which, whatever; given today’s publishing industry, specificity in such areas may have gotten them cancelled—but they have so little in the way of background. Where did Geeta, Leigh, or any of the other people we meet come from? A question it’s microaggresive to ask of someone at a party but that comes to mind with fictional characters. Not as in, which ancestral villages, but what’s their deal, beyond ambitiousness level and relationship status? Maybe this is less a critique than an observation. It reads as intentional, as if the point is that it truly doesn’t matter, as ambition is what’s under the microscope here.
But the lack of specificity may be a detriment where humour’s concerned. It’s satirical but more clever than laugh-out-loud funny. It captures moments I feel as though I lived: Jenny’s mother, using “striking” as a euphemism for slim and then denying this, or Geeta swinging between faultless best friend and someone who only likes her when she (Jenny) is in loser mode. I wish there’d been more of these moments.
What I’m left wondering, though, is whether the girlboss path The Memo lampoons and then explicitly rejects is at, in 2024. When Leigh Stein’s novel Self Care appeared, in pre-pandemic 2020, girlbosses—women like original self-proclaimed #Girlboss, Nasty Gal fast-fashion company founder Sophia Amoruso, the Glossier cosmetics company founder Emily Weiss or Leandra “The Man Repeller” Medine, or Emily Schuman of Cupcakes & Cashmere, or Audrey Gelman of now-defunct co-working space The Wing, or that lady from the athleisure with block-coloured leggings, or or or—were still earnestly admired figures. They’ve had their downfalls. The hyperambitious woman as a figure of ridicule or cautionary tale hits differently depending its moment. But the relative appeal of vegan versus non-vegan baked goods is, alas, timeless.
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The CJN’s senior editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai.
