Lisa Ko

The award-winning author of The Leavers offers a visionary novel of friendship, art, and ambition that asks: What is the value of a meaningful life? In the early 1980s, Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng are three teenagers drawn together by their shared sense of alienation and desire for something different. “Allied in the weirdest parts of themselves,” they envision each other as artistic collaborators and embark on a future defined by freedom and creativity. By the time they are adults, their dreams are murkier. As a performance artist, Giselle must navigate an elite social world she never conceived of. As a coder thrilled by the internet’s early egalitarian promise, Jackie must contend with its more sinister shift toward monetization and surveillance. And as a community activist, Ellen confronts the increasing gentrification and policing overwhelming her New York City neighborhood. Over time their friendship matures and changes, their definitions of success become complicated, and their sense of what matters evolves. Moving from the predigital 1980s to the art and tech subcultures of the 1990s to a strikingly imagined portrait of the 2040s, Memory Piece is an innovative and audacious story of three lifelong friends as they strive to build satisfying lives in a world that turns out to be radically different from the one they were promised.

A Novel

Memory Piece

Lindsay

Giselle wondered how important it was to have a complicated life in addition to making your art.

She was tired of having to be attentive about everyone else’s feelings, the expectation that it was her job to make things better, a disposable filter for a man’s shittiest emotions, managing his concerns, comforting him.

karina

‘Everyone’s so concerned with working all the time, and I know we have to, but maybe it’s not the only type of work, you know?’

Ellen and Giselle both turn to her, and at once, she has their attention. It feels a little like love. 

Memory Piece quotes

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