Memory Piece
Ratings4
Average rating3.3
15
Ratings4
Average rating3.3
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.
Reviews with the most likes.
Normally bleak is a plus for me but here it was the kind of bleak that depressed me even though part of me felt it was a needed one.
I'm also sort of conflicted about the part of the book that Focused on Giselle, on the one hand I thought it was way too long but on the other hand I'm not exactly sure how it could have been made shorter without losing some if its point.
Three preteen girls meet at a Fourth of July BBQ in the 80's which marks the beginning of their loosely intertwined lives. From there they being to forge distinct paths for themselves that frame the three sections of the book.
Giselle Chin is a performance artist seeking to fully become an art monster, Jackie Ong is a coder trying to build and sustain an online community, and Ellen Ng is a commune living squatter eking out an existence at the edges of society. All three are creatives in a world that pushes back against the purity of the work and any hope of escaping the clutches of capitalism. Their work is compromised in some way, inevitable in the world of art and technology, but even in the dystopian future, Ellen's punk ethos still can't completely escape big corporate.
But it's about navigating that reality and emerging into the possibility of something better. That capitulation may be inevitable, but there still remains the chance of something more. The project is ever ongoing.
