“Memory Piece” by Lisa Ko

theSkimm

Giselle, Jackie, and Ellen meet as kids in the early 1980s and bond by crashing a neighbor’s Fourth of July barbeque and successfully pilfering hamburgers. That’s the beginning of their stories, which we follow through the ‘90s and finally into a dystopian 2040. Giselle becomes a performance artist, Jackie a software engineer, and Ellen an activist in New York City. Each woman gets her own section of the book, and each one has to contend with the changing world as she figures out what really matters to her. We asked Lisa Ko — whose first novel was the highly acclaimed “The Leavers” — a few questions. Here’s what she had to say…

Q: Like some of your “Memory Piece” protagonists, you were also raised in the New Jersey suburbs during the 1980s. How much did you draw from your own experiences?

Ko: Their experiences are not mine and their characters wholly fictional, but the landscapes in which they grew up are familiar to me — Jackie and Giselle’s New Jersey childhoods, and Ellen’s in New York City during the same time. The mall where Giselle does a year-long art project is my childhood mall, Paramus Park; like Jackie and Giselle, I, too, was a reluctant Saturday-morning Chinese school attendee. I also grew up on a steady diet of MTV and dreamt of one day moving to the city and becoming an artist, like Giselle.

Q: What’s one thing from the ‘80s you wish still existed today?

Ko: Telephone landlines still exist (for now!), but I haven’t had one in decades, and sometimes I yearn for that pre-text-messaging, pre-internet-in-your-hand world where we weren’t all contactable at all times.

Q: In a recent X post, you gave followers a peek at some of the Post-It notes and index cards that helped you plot “Memory Piece.” How many did you go through, and how exactly do you use them?

Ko: Hundreds, I’d guess. I like to use index cards as an analog way to map out more precise scenes when I’ve already drafted some initial ones, trying to figure out how to write more intentionally. On each card, I’ll write out a line or two about the external action I want the scene to include, as well as the internal action for the characters, and the change that occurs in the scene … I’ll then lay them out and move them around to see if the order makes sense — it’s all open to lots and lots of change. I’ll do the same thing with Post-Its, but put them up on the wall, using different colors for different sections.

Q: What’s the best book you’ve read recently and why?

Ko: I’m reading Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s “Chain Gang All Stars” and it’s just exhilarating — an abolitionist text that’s part satire, part horror, implicating the reader at every step.