AILSA CHANG, HOST:
If you could go back and do it all over again, what would you change? Would you spend more time with family, focus more on school, maybe not get that awful regrettable tattoo? Well, "The Girl I Was" is a new novel about a woman whose life is a bit of a mess, but she gets a chance for a do-over. Andrew Limbong, host of NPR's Book of the Day podcast, has more.
ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE: This is a story about a redo. Yes, "The Girl I Was" is about a woman named Alexis who goes back to 2002 and meets her younger self in college. The thinking being, if Alexis can stop her younger self from partying so much and take school seriously, maybe current-day Alexis would have her stuff more together. But I mean, the novel itself is a redo. Here's author Jeneva Rose.
JENEVA ROSE: "The Girl I Was" was the first book I ever wrote, and it was in 2016. It was shortly after I started a corporate job, and I had decided that I wanted something for myself.
LIMBONG: She tried writing a book a few times before but never made it past page 80. But this time, it was for real.
ROSE: I had decided I was going to write one book. It was going to be a bucket list item, and then I was going to be done.
LIMBONG: And she did it. She finished it. She tried to get it published, but says she got over a hundred rejections.
ROSE: I do think those were rightfully so, 'cause it was not ready.
LIMBONG: But it turns out she wasn't done writing. She wrote a dark and sexy thriller, "The Perfect Marriage," which got on The New York Times' Best Sellers list, which kicked off her career as a successful thriller writer. But that still didn't result in any publishers buying that first book. So she just put it out independently a couple years ago.
ROSE: And it kind of just was out there. I promoted it here and there, but it found its readership. And I got the most heartfelt and touching emails and DMs and comments when people would read it.
LIMBONG: Which finally convinced a major publisher to release it. And so she decided to revisit the text, change it up, add a few chapters. Much like her character Alexis, it was a chance to redo past mistakes.
ROSE: There was just a lot of novice errors that you - I would cringe reading it.
LIMBONG: But besides fixing sentence structure and stilted dialogue, Rose says she found the experience therapeutic.
ROSE: And I think there's always things that when you look back and you self-reflect, that you can learn and even give yourself even more grace.
LIMBONG: In the book, Alexis has to confront who she was. And it isn't always flattering. For instance, she had a pretty tight-knit crew in college, or so she thought.
ROSE: And you think, like, oh, my God, these are going to be my best friends for life, and then you all grow apart. And when you look back, you're like, were we that great of friends?
LIMBONG: But that's fixable. Some things you just can't redo. Rose first wrote the original version of the book as a way of processing her mom's death. And not to spoil too much, but the second half of the book is a meditation on what we can and can't change. When we talked, Rose was about 38 weeks pregnant with her first child, and the thought experiment at the core of this book - what would you do differently given the chance to go back in time? - it feels different now.
ROSE: I'm always like, if I could have gone back in time and, you know, make it so my own mother doesn't pass away and she's still here. But then I also think about, what would be different now? Would I have met my husband? I don't know. Would my niece and nephew have been born? I don't know. Would I be with this child that I'm with right now? I don't know.
LIMBONG: Rose thought about writing a version of "The Girl I Was" where the mother character makes it, that time travel fixed everything, and the mom is alive and present in Alexis' life. But that would just be a fantasy, wouldn't it?
Andrew Limbong, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
