remember me?

'Shopaholic' Author Returns With New Book

British author Sophie Kinsella, best known for the Shopaholic series, is back with a new book, ``Remember Me'' about a young woman who loses her memory of the last three years of her life.
By Cathy Rose A. Garcia
Staff Reporter

What if you woke up one day to discover you are living a ``dream'' life? You're beautiful, rich, successful and married to a millionaire. The only problem is: you don't have any memory of how you got this ``dream'' life.

This is the plot of the new novel ``Remember Me,'' by British chick lit author Sophie Kinsella, best known for the hugely successful Shopaholic series.

Kinsella once again created an endearing character named Lexi Smart, who wakes up on a hospital bed after a car accident. Suffering from retrograde amnesia, Lexi thinks it is still 2004 and she's 25 years old with bad teeth, a horrible boyfriend and crappy job.

It turns out it is 2007 and she now a 28-year-old executive with perfectly fixed teeth, a slim figure, a millionaire husband and a Louis Vuitton handbag. Lexi goes home and finds she's living in a posh apartment and has a closet full of designer clothes, bags and shoes.

At first she's ecstatic about her ``new life," but cracks begin to show as she wonders why her best friends never call back and her co-workers treat her with disdain.

To her dismay, she discovers the ``new'' Lexi is an aggressive executive who ruthlessly climbed the corporate ladder and had no qualms about selling out her friends and co-workers.

``The more I learn about 28-year-old Lexi, the more I feel like she's a different person from me. She doesn't just look different. She is different. … She's a grown-up. I gaze into the mirror and my 28-year-old face stares back. How on earth did I get from me to her,'' Lexi asks herself.

Even her perfect husband, Eric, is not so perfect after all. He's drop-dead gorgeous but a complete control freak who gets annoyed when Lexi leaves her purse in the hallway, forbids any carbohydrates in the home and asks her to pay for a pricey sculpture she breaks.

Then a good-looking architect named Jon enters her life and reveals a shocking secret, Lexi tries to find out what exactly happened during the last three years. Even as you find out more about Lexi's past, you'll find yourself rooting for her until the end.

Remember Me is a typical chick lit novel that indulges in women's wish fulfillment. In the Shopaholic series, it was all about shopping, but in Remember Me, it's about leading the ``perfect'' life.

``Remember Me is maybe the ultimate form of wish fulfillment. What if you didn't recognize your life ... because it had become so perfect? The image that kept coming to me was of a girl, blinking up at her Greek God of a husband, whom she doesn't recognize. It made me giggle every time I thought about it. And so I created my amnesiac heroine Lexi, and her perfect new glossy, unrecognizable life. The potential for comedy was irresistible,'' Kinsella wrote on her Web site.

In typical Kinsella fashion, Lexi is placed in hilarious situations as she forgets how to drive, tries to figure out her new hi-tech home and a little something called the Mont Blanc.

Women always dream of having it all: money, career and husband, and work so hard to achieve this dream. But when their dreams come true, it is usually not what they expect.

Any woman one can relate to Lexi's search for her identity. Women often lead busy lives that leave little time to look in the mirror and think about who they have become.

``Our lives take unpredictable turns and we all change over time. But it's so gradual we don't always notice it. Would your younger self recognize your older self? Put another way, if you woke up tomorrow in the year 2011 ... what would you find,'' Kinsella asked.

The amnesia storyline is not something new. A recent American TV comedy ``Samantha Who,'' stars Christina Applegate as a young woman who wakes up from a coma with no memory at all of her previous life. As she discovers more about her life, the more Samantha realizes she wasn't a good person.

Like Samantha, Lexi tries to compensate for her past misdeeds and struggles to build a new life. Does she succeed? Well, read the book to find out.

No chick lit book would be complete without the requisite romantic storyline, but it is not the main focus of the book. Then again, the book is about a woman's journey to find out who she really is and every woman knows that you don't need a man to do that.

Overall, Remember Me is the perfect summer book: funny, entertaining and hard to put down.

cathy@koreatimes.co.kr