Memory Piece by Lisa Ko is a fascinating novel that spans the past (1980s) through to the present and finally the future (a decidedly dystopian 2040s) following the lives of 3 Asian American women from their teenage years in the 1980s through to adulthood with the 3 women initially being drawn together through the shared experience of being second generation immigrants to the US, and each being driven to change the world in their own way with Giselle the artist who seeks to communicate her own life experiences through the medium, Jackie's rise and challenges with the tech industry and Ellen's environmental activism. With the novel being split in 3 parts and following each women's story and life. The dystopian 2040s future really resonated in that Ko has much like Orwell depicted a future that works on the general fears society has about unknown futures that are ruled by essentially dictators.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Dialogue Books for the ARC.

While this book was compared to "tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow" – which I LOVED – "memory piece" sort of fell flat for me. Maybe it was the anticipation reading something said to be similar to one of my dearest book, maybe it wasn't just the right time for the book.

Memory Piece

Lisa Ko

An interesting and unusual novel. I loved the fact that we got to follow the lives of the characters over many decades ….but unfortunately I didn’t love this one as much as I loved The Leavers. There was just something missing this time around. I will still happily read whatever Ms Ko writes next however as I think she’s a writer with lots more to offer.

Many thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this title.

Review: Memory Piece by Lisa Ko

In Memory Piece we follow artist Giselle, programmer Jackie and housing and labor activist Ellen, from pre-digital 1980s to technology rise in 1990s and throughout the 2040s. As the narrative unfolds, the three women find themselves crossing and uncrossing each other's paths. Their lives serve as mirrors reflecting the complexities of a changing world.

Memory Piece is a tale of friendship and growth that transcends time. It took me a bit to finish the book, which might be due to it tackling a lot of themes all at once. But I overall enjoyed Ko’s exploration of technology and the power of holding onto memories in our digital age.

This has been compared to Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and I, like everyone else last year, loved that book, but I’m always wary of comparisons.
I can see the logic in the comparison. Both follow friends over a number of decades, from the 80s to the 90s to the 00s, onto the present and even beyond.
I’m a sucker for anything set in the 80s so the early days were really my favourite bits. I loved following the characters throughout time but as the book went on and I did feel the characters weren’t quite fleshed out enough to follow over such a long period.
I think what the final future section did was interesting, but this wasn’t really for me and I found myself bored by this last stretch. But there was enough other elements I enjoyed for this to be a fun read and one I’d recommend.

4 stars.

The quest for identity in the Asian American community. Braking free from family/community's clutches and forging yourself in an image that is different from the common mould. Memory piece is a quirky piece of literature and that offered a lot of enjoyment. But the individual voices have been rather hit and miss. I truly loved Giselle's hypnotic voice and daring to go where no one else has. Moulding herself into a cult artist with a vision and strong inner persona, growing and reinventing herself until the end. But then Jackie's voice has been a bit bland, with a simplistic narrative stile, especially coming after the whirlwind of Giselle's prose. Ellen might be the most interesting character of them all, with her quest for equally, for living with less, for fighting to forge a community in the middle of all that greed! But the problem is I really disliked the doom day scenario used as a background of her story. And what's worse is that I don't think the timeline really worked. 2040 may have seemed far away a few years ago, but really we are rather close to it and I am really struggling to see New York as described in just a bit over 10 years from now!

That being said, Memory Piece remains an interesting exploration of identity, sexuality, friendship, love, society!

A book about three friends navigating their lives differently - Through art, the internet and activism.

Split into three parts for each character across various timelines, sometimes interwoven with encounters with one another.

Whilst the text is beautifully written, I found myself wanting to know more about the characters beyond surface level and feel this was only achieved with Jackie, whose story and character I found the most compelling.

I would’ve liked to have learnt more about Gisele’s motivations for her art and her relationships.

Thanks to Netgalley for the advance copy!

Memory Piece tells the story of an enduring friendship that begins when three tweenage Asian-American girls nonchalantly walk into someone else's barbecue and help themselves to burgers. This minor transgression, committed on a whim and by unspoken agreement, sets the foundation and the pattern for their friendship. Each section of the book leads us through the life of one of these girls, each covering a different time period and showing how their lives continue to overlap and diverge.
Giselle Chin becomes a performance artist, helped by Jackie Ong - the coder whose photographs are often the sole artifacts of Giselle's earliest pieces. Giselle's work is also supported by Ellen Ng, who sees it as a sort of analog to her own activism and encourages both Giselle and Jackie to take part in demonstrations and other acts of rebellion. Jackie and Ellen are sometime squatmates and lovers, even though one is a techie and the other is intent on building a life that's community-based and outside any sort of "system".
The book moves between the '80's and a dystopic near-future (it elides the precipitating events but drops clues enough to let the reader form their own opinion). Giselle, Jackie, and Ellen are the constants, their faith in and support of one another an unshakeable bedrock even through times where they have no contact with one another.
There's a lot going on here in terms of themes - art, tech, connection, surveillance, greed, the gig economy, community, memory (and who owns it) - and it may have felt overstuffed as a result, but the friendship that's the connecting thread of all these themes is so well-drawn that it all works. I enjoyed spending time with Giselle, Jackie, Ellen (and her friends from Sola) and am still thinking about what it means to hold the truth of your friends strong in the face of other people's versions of them.

Ko's novel traces the lives of three Asian-American women, Giselle, Jackie and Ellen, from childhood through to old age.

I really enjoyed the first two-thirds of the novel, with Ko painting a vivid picture of 80s, 90s and 00s New York. The intertwined relationships of the three women feel realistic and ebb and flow in a way that resonated with me and my own friendships. The way the sections of the novel focus on life through the eyes of Giselle, Jackie and Ellen in turn provides an interesting 360 degree view of the characters and allows for deeper understanding of their flaws and motivations.

The final section flashes forward to a near future, a dystopian one where humanity exists under hypersurveillance and segregation on grounds of wealth and race is in effect.

I found the stylistic shift in the final section from third- to first-person jarring; I felt a reluctance to continue reading as the world depicted felt claustrophobic and riddled with anxiety, compared with the hope and expansive thinking of the previous two sections.

It's a thought-provoking read and the future Ko sets out feels uncomfortably close to coming true.

Thank you to Netgalley and Dialogue Books for the digital ARC.

I had high hopes for this literary fiction novel but it failed to set my world alight.

I found the narrative terribly disjointed, with one sentence followed by another that was a complete non sequitur, followed by another. I struggled to find any enthusiasm for the writing or for the characters and when the story was still drifting purposelessly by the 40% mark, I decided to stop reading as I was finding any excuse not to pick up the book.

I might go back to this another time and I'm interested in reading the author's earlier work The Leavers. Incidentally this arc e-file was titled "The Leavers" on Netgalley, as opposed to its correct title Memory Piece. Thanks to the publisher, author and Netgalley for the advance copy. Sadly, not for me in this instance. 2/5

I loved Lisa Ko's debut novel, The Leavers, and so I was eagerly anticipating her second, Memory Piece - partly because of her track record, and partly because I just loved the blurb. Three Asian-American teenage girls, Giselle, Jackie and Ellen, are drawn together in New York in the early 1980s, then strike out on their own paths: one as a performance artist, one as a coder, and one as a community activist. It's a shame, therefore, that I ended up with such a mixed impression of this one, although there are definitely things to admire about it. The first two-thirds of Memory Piece are familiar literary-fiction fare on fast-forward: we skim across the surface of Giselle's, then Jackie's young adulthoods, without ever pausing to give any moment more weight than another. I was underwhelmed by both women's stories. Giselle's performance art, loosely based on the work of Tehching Hsieh, had potential, but Ko didn't convince me that this character would come up with it nor explore the effect it had on her (living in a mall with no human contact for a year has to change you, but we never really find out if it does). Jackie's story faced the same problems, and by this point, I was also wondering why the relationships between these three are meant to be central to this story when they seem to have little contact as a group. The 1980s and 1990s New York art scene has been done better in Rachel Lyon's Self-Portrait With Boy and Siri Hustvedt's The Blazing World, while the dot-com boom is more vivid in Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector.

But then, Memory Piece does an about-turn. We jump forward to 2043, when Ellen, now in her seventies and still clinging onto the communal house she built in the 1990s, is suddenly telling us, in first person, about the way things are now. Does this twist save Memory Piece? Partly. I appreciated the juxtaposition of the women's early lives with this vision of a difficult future, and how it shed new light on the choices they'd all faced about 'selling out', and what 'selling out' even means when a few big companies owned everything. But because so much time has been taken up already with Giselle's and Jackie's life stories, Ko doesn't leave herself space to develop this much past a generic dystopia either. There's absolutely a great novel buried here, but I'm not sure what would have allowed it to get out. 3.5 stars.

Lisa Ko's "Memory Piece" offers a refreshingly original story of three Asian American girls whose childhood bond endures into their twilight years. The narrative, cleverly delivered in third-person present tense, pulsates with a raw immediacy, drawing the reader into the uncertainties and triumphs of each character. Giselle, Jackie, and Ellen, with their vastly different ambitions, paint a captivating portrait of individual journeys. Shifting perspectives – Giselle in their youth, Jackie in their twenties, and Ellen in a chillingly dystopian future – showcase the evolution of their relationships.

While the interlinked narratives are undeniably strong, a stronger emphasis on the themes of memory and the enduring power of friendship could have further solidified the emotional connection between the characters. Despite the distinct perspectives, the novel excels at weaving together past and future in a satisfying conclusion. It's as if the girls' individual experiences, unwittingly, become threads in a larger tapestry, ultimately preparing them for a purpose they couldn't have foreseen.

There are books about life, and there are books that are life itself. Memory Piece is the latter, a splendid work so full of being, that it exudes from the pages with a striking vitality and vividness. It captures the very essence of existence and encapsulates it in effulgent prose, radiant structure, resplendent narrative. The world is brought into light with a sharp clarity, a diverse prism of insightful commentary and wit, the work astounds with its scintillating ideas and startling commentary. Lisa Ko’s second novel is a modern masterpiece, a response to changing times, a recollection of moments gone, and moments to be, at once a speculation and a chilling reminder of futures filled with all consuming darkness, blackened more so by their potential actuality.

Memory Piece is a dance across time itself, the novel taps into a childhood of growing up in a foreign culture, at once familiar and alien, the experiences of being whitewashed, and whitewashing in return, the process of assimilation, the losses and gains in the arduous steps to the music, as we examine three young girls connected by their heritage, crossing paths in Chinese school. A sway across the pre digital 80s, leads to exploration of art and meaning, as the girls form their own desires and dreams, just to be led onwards by the ever present partner of ticking minutes. Then, moving to a whole new beat, the digital age, the subcultures of the 90s, the threat of Y2K. Suddenly aspirations become muddled, the world not so clear, the tempo has changed, and the smooth waltzes of a well orchestrated rite of passage dissolve into uncertainty. What to do when the choreography has not been practiced? How to live in a world you have not know before? How to find harmony in a cacophony of sound?

“What would I remember; what would I be remembered for; who would remember me?”

The work confronts these questions with bravery, and courage, for the patient reader it reveals itself in provoking challenges to find and develop an according philosophy, to adapt, overcome, make do, find resilience. Thematically the novel leaps across space and substance in graceful bounds, from an expansive perspective on nostalgia; to a terrifying portrait of America in the future, the fraying fundamentals of democracy and the decaying glamour of ubiquitous surveillance. Seemingly nonsensical childhood moments, and trivial instants beautifully solidify into a comprehensive background, the shared past before a collective future, as the reader gets inextricably drawn into Giselle, Jackie and Ellen’s story.

Beauty standards and collective erasure of history, loud and quiet activism, the ethicalities and sustainability of corporations and housing, the trio teach us to savour the present, grasp at the past, lean towards the future. Giselle, Jackie and Ellen are uniquely fleshed out characters with raw stories and remarkable emotions, and their perspectives colour the novel with impressive symbolism and sharp dialogue. Giselle, a striving artist, a disappointment to her immigrant family who stress hard “traditional” labour, Giselle who embarks on poignant performative pieces first for herself, and then with an urgency that assaults the entirety of New York, spreads like wildfire across the States. She spends a year writing down everything she does every day with a burning dedication, then she aptly sets it on fire. A year gone, time gone. Memory Piece she calls it. Memory Piece in a meta nod, Lisa Ko calls the work she presents to us now, an expo of not just a year, but decades upon decades, lives upon lives, generations upon generations. The result does not fail to astound. Memory Piece in both worlds is ambitious, intentionally disruptive, effective, succinct.

After Giselle’s section, the best section in terms of flow, we follow Jackie, a leading developer, a rising tech star, Jackie who feels lost and never hides it, who appears and disappears, lives a life in the digital world, elusively comes up for air only to see Giselle, comment on her new piece, find comfort in Ellen’s company. Ellen, the mystery of the novel, she attracts and repels, she is unapologetically of the revolutionary, upending type, the generation that shapes the 70s and 80s, topples civic order, distinguishes herself from Giselle’s high end pieces, Jackie’s corporate aspirations. Ellen’s perspective picks us up, after the slight shift in timing following Jackie’s life, apt considering the black hole the digital age brings. The girls, teenagers, women mothers, retired, are so different yet all so familiar, by the end they are ours, as much a piece of us as the work we have utterly fallen in love with.

Memory Piece leaves no one unaffected, the crossing and tangling of life paths and journeys is masterfully done, grabbing attention from the onset. This is a novel of intense creative ambition, and the final work accomplishes this extraordinarily well. A literary fiction to be thought about long after the end. Truly the heartfelt fresh perspective our time deserves. So many lines of evocative descriptions and striking prose. Without further spoilers, the novel glows brighter with the element of surprise and a sense of blindness, I leave you with these gems:

“You could spend a lifetime subsisting on the fumes of your own memory. The past was an easy drug to fall into, especially when it contained love. We loved the dead and disappeared because in their loss and immobility, they remained always at their best unable to hurt us any more than they already had.”

“It was history while it happened; it was already over.”

Following three American women of Chinese heritage over the course of sixty years, Lisa Ko's Memory Piece is a genre-blending work of art in itself, traversing the connection of friendship in an ever-changing world.

The summary had me interested, but the plot had me hooked. From cover to cover, Lisa Ko kept me invested in the intertwining stories of Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng with sections dedicated to each friend over a different period in their lives. The way Ko writes is something I haven't really read before, but now I want to read more like Memory Piece; it felt both expansive of the three friends' worlds and yet very intimate in their relationships with each other and their thoughts as they traverse into a future that feels quite dystopian. The lack of quotation marks had my brain working overdrive with how to view the conversations; are they placed in the past? Do memories fragment them? Memory Piece is a novel that will make you think and view contemporary literature differently. I found Lisa Ko's second novel an impressive, intriguing read that left me with much to think about. If you loved Lisa Ko's debut, The Leavers, or want a novel that explores friendship intertwined with feelings of loneliness and alienation (not the most pleasant topics but prevalent in modern history) then Memory Piece should be on your shelf.

Thank you, NetGalley and Dialogue Books for sending me an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Memory Piece is the story of three Asian American women, Giselle, Jackie and Ellen, whose lives collide in a small moment of rebellion when they are teenage girls searching for more from life, and they continue to go in and out of each other’s lives, in person and digitally, for over half a century. From 1980s New Jersey, to a dystopian vision of future New York, their stories are explored through the worlds of art, technology, and community activism, with their dynamic of friendship, admiration, envy, insecurities, desire and need drawing the story of these three very different women together. Giselle, from a young age, captures and seeks to understand life through art, eventually progressing to performance pieces that she becomes acclaimed for. Jackie is deep in the world of technology. Ellen is a passionate community activist kick-starting communal projects from abandoned buildings. As each achieves their own successes, they also become disillusioned with the reality of their worlds. With a main section dedicated to each character, the book is a meditation on many things, including these women trying to find their place in an increasingly hostile world.

The writing style is at once direct and eloquent. There is a bleakness to the story, a sense of unease running throughout, and yet there are beautiful moments of connection, of understanding, dry humour, personal victories and love that bring hope to the story; a sense that as the world around us becomes more unsettled, and increasingly enslaved by technology and greed, it’s the moments of love and friendship that may sustain us. The importance, and recording, of memory, both individual and collective, emerges as a key theme to this novel, along with the dynamics in friendships and relationships that can be at once solid and fragile, art and life as experienced through art, the power and peril of technology, identity and culture, and family duties and expectations. The more I think about it the more I liked this book. Multi-layered and thought-provoking, I’m looking forward to seeing the discussion around this one.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for my eARC.

This novel seems to aim for a vibe reminiscent of Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and I believe it will appeal to fans of that book or of The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker, as well as readers who enjoy authors like Meg Wolitzer or Ann Napolitano. I hate to dnf a book so far in, but I can tell that my feelings for Memory Piece won't change. I'm not drawn to the writing, which is passive, heavily reliant on telling rather than showing, and at times impersonal (not restrained in the way Jhumpa Lahiri's is, but more generic).

The first section of the novel follows Giselle, who aspires to become a performance artist. While the novel appears to articulate why she wants to do this, it doesn't convincingly or deeply explore her motivations, let alone why she chooses to express her creativity through these performance pieces. We're presented with shallow artspeak that could easily have been lifted from artybollocks. Ko's portrayal of New York and its artsy milieu lacks the bite, or even substance, of say Ottessa Moshfegh or Rachel Lyon. One of Giselle’s pieces had the potential for further exploration, but the narrative summarises it in a couple of dull paragraphs.

There's a lot of this: periods of Giselle's life are condensed to a few sentences, or at most a couple of paragraphs. While this may allow the author to cover longer periods of time concisely, it comes at the expense of establishing Giselle's character, her arc, her relationships, and her various environments. It seemed to me as if Ko was cramming too much into too little space.

The novel also heavily relies on 80s/90s nostalgia, which is fine, but not when we learn more about certain trends than about the impact of AIDS, which is reduced to an afterthought in a paragraph mentioning that the 'hippie-grunge thing was over'. This felt glib to me. The few episodes we are actually 'shown' seem to exist solely to make a point, such as when a woman asks Giselle to walk with her, leading Giselle to make a banal observation on the matter (which felt wholly unnecessary given the novel’s target audience…).

Not only were Giselle’s pieces pretentious, but they also served to consolidate my negative impression of performance art. Her art seemed to lack depth, as if she was merely selecting the most extra thing to do without much thought behind her choices (as profound as ai art). Yet, I am supposed to find her and her art intriguing? Sure…

There is nothing subtle about Ko's storytelling, and I mostly felt detached, if occasionally irritated by the content of her story. I wish I could have liked this novel, but it wasn't meant to be. If you enjoy book-clubby books, this might be right up your street. Or, if you were a fan of Zevin's bestseller, do not give this one a miss.

Memory Piece
by Lisa Ko

Ambitious in scope and immensely profound, this is a book about friendship and nostalgia that has kept me awake over the past few nights, digesting the ways we intersect with others that we call friends and how individual memory and shared memory layer to form the pieces of our lives that define who we are, where and what we come from and shape who and what we become.

Structurally interesting, I found this incredibly difficult to get into, despite the 1980s setting which I crave in my reading. The performance art of the first third just wasn't capturing my interest and the characters felt narcissistic and stroppy, but I'm so glad I stuck with it, because the second section, set in the 90s tech growth world is so on the nose, it evoked a surge of nostalgia that I want prepared for. I was definitely not a person who gave anything technological to that world changing era, but socially I was tech-nerd adjacent, and I recognise all the characters that are on display here.

As the story takes a dystopian turn in the last third I simply couldn't stop reading. The 2040s that Ko predicts is believable and tangible. The arc from algorithms and data analytics to extreme gentrification and checkpoint controlled zones has enough legs to stand on.

With so much to unpack, witty so many thought provoking ideas this would make a fantastic book club pick.

Protect your data privacy, save your memories and value your friends.

Publication date: 21st March 2024
Thanks to #NetGalley and #DialogueBooks for the ARC

We get three big sections concentrating on the three main characters - Giselle Chin, who becomes a performance artist then stages her own disappearance, Jackie Ong who is right there in the early, optimistic days of the internet, and Ellen Ng, who becomes an activist and squatter - in the 80s, around the turn of the millennium and then in the 2040s, when they're in their 70s. They all crop up in each other's stories and the narratives are closely and cleverly woven together. The art, the tech and the activism are all carefully portrayed in detail and the community Giselle, Jackie and Ellen have in their respective lives is examined.

What is it to live a good life? Should you give your art prize to your mother / sell your ethical business to a high bidder but then turn to helping people avoid surveillance / stay on in a crumbling co-op or escape, talk or remain silent? Big questions like these are asked, and others about friendship. This is essentially a book about friendship, with lovers and partners coming and going, and it sometimes reminded me a little of "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" with its long story line and technology development thread.

And of course it's about memory, about preserving memories and histories, from time capsules buried by schoolchildren to bigger projects. This seemed pertinent to me as I finished this last holiday read and set about photographing all our receipts so I only had a photograph and not a load of receipts! And although the third, post-apocalyptic, section seems grim, there is hope as we travel to the end of the book but not the end of the world. An unexpectedly original, wonderful and absorbing read which I very much recommend.

Blog review will be published 24 March https://librofulltime.wordpress.com/2024/03/24/book-review-lisa-ko-memory-piece/

Thanks to Netgalley and Dialogue Books for my free digital ARC of Memory Piece! I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed this expansive novel which manages to fit so much into just over 300 pages. It has a really interesting structure. It moves from the 1980s to the near future 2040 and follows three Asian-American women who are trying to make their lives matter.

I thought it was interesting in that their stories are not told at the same time - or rather, we don't get a picture of their lives in the same time. Giselle's story is told mainly in the late 90s/early 00s, Jackie's starts around the same time and then (I think) into the 2010s. But then Ellen's section jumps far into 2040. The women weave through each other's lives at various points, so we do get a sense of where they're all at at each stage, but I just thought that was such a unique way of telling the story!

Judging from other reviews, it seems like people either prefer the first two narratives or Ellen's, in the nigh-on dystopian world where gentrification has made New York unrecognisable, with checkpoints to get from various neighbourhoods. I'm in the first camp. While Ellen's section was still good, it was Giselle's art journey and Jackie's experience with the dot.com that really had me gripped. I wouldn't go so far as to say Ellen's section felt like a different book... But almost.

Covering everything from class, sexuality, gentrification, policing, environmental activism, tech, the gig economy and art, this is an ambitious novel to say the least. I think it had the potential to be longer and better for it.

The writing is stunning as well. I haven't read The Leavers yet, but you can bet I'll be making it a priority for 2024!

A great story about female friendship, identity, art, the early Internet and activism. The fast forward to 2040 felt a bit out of place, but apart from that a well paced and very enjoyable read.
Thank you Dialogue and Netgalley UK for the ARC.