Younger, p.1
Younger, page 1
Praise for New York Times bestselling author Pamela Redmond’s novels
THE POSSIBILITY OF YOU
“Seamlessly weaving the present with the past, The Possibility of You is an exploration of love and family, of race and relation- ships that combines the best elements of a family saga with an intricate, Chinese box of a mystery story. Complex and compelling and compulsively readable.”
—Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize–winning author
“Engrossing. . . . Bring this on your next beach vacation. Order a margarita. Open to page one and dig in.”
—Glamour
“Am I ready for motherhood? That’s the question that reverberates through three generations of New York women in Pamela Redmond’s compelling family saga. Woven into their absorbing stories are issues of gender and reproductive rights that are still red hot today.”
—More
“With a nod to The Hours, Redmond’s fictional saga personifies the hidden history of unplanned pregnancy as it strains—and blesses—three generations of mothers and children.”
—Good Housekeeping
“Redmond’s beautifully written novel explores the choices women make and the way decisions can influence lives for generations to come.”
—SheKnows
“Deeply satisfying and enjoyable and juicy. I loved the characters, loved the history, and felt like I was absorbed in a world that I didn’t want to let go.”
—Peggy Orenstein, New York Times bestselling author
“Every mother, daughter, wife, and friend will love this novel about women’s lives across the generations: their passions, their challenges, their unbreakable bonds. A gift to savor for yourself and to share with every woman you know.”
—Dorothea Benton Frank, New York Times bestselling author
“For big fans of stories of mothers and daughters and intergen- erational ties, Redmond delivers.”
—Library Journal
“Mesmerizingly good.”
—Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author, for Dame
“A crisply paced novel.”
—Publishers Weekly
SUBURBANISTAS
“A delightfully lighthearted story. . . . Funny, sexy, and heartwarming.”
—Fresh Fiction
“Engagingly told, funny, and real, Suburbanistas will capture the hearts of readers.”
—Booklist
“Redmond’s writing just keeps getting better, and her stories are an absolute delight. . . . A wonderful book.”
—Dorothea Benton Frank, New York Times bestselling author
BABES IN CAPTIVITY
“Through her women characters, Redmond tells realistic and intriguing stories that will enthrall, and ultimately, surprise readers.”
—Booklist
“A breath of fresh air. . . . It’s delightful to read about women attempting to find out what really makes them happy, without thro wing away their families to accomplish it.”
—BookLoons
“A fast, funny read, with characters you’d love to have as friends.”
—Parenting
THE MAN I SHOULD HAVE MARRIED
“This witty first novel . . . is utterly charming.”
—Jacquelyn Mitchard, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“I love, love, love The Man I Should Have Married. Pamela Redmond has captured Kennedy’s dilemma with energy and wit. I couldn’t put it down.”
—Alice Elliott Dark, author of Think of England
“This first novel by Redmond differs from standard chick-lit fare in that the heroine has the responsibilities and challenges of motherhood, giving the text added dimension.”
—Library Journal
“Kennedy’s spunk is what elevates this first novel above the average jilted-woman-finds-true-love romance.”
—Booklist
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To my daughter, Rory Satran
Acknowledgments
Younger has a radically bigger life and broader audience now than when it was first published, and for that I have to thank Darren Star. His interest in the material, his sensitivity to the story and the characters, his brilliance in translating my novel to a television show that’s a fully realized work of art is every writer’s dream.
So thank you to Darren Star and the other producers and writers of Younger who’ve each added their own special flavor to the mix, especially Eric and Dottie Dartland Zicklin, Alison Brown, Ashley Skidmore, Lyle Friedman, Eliot Glazer, Brandy Barber, Grant Sloss, Rick Singer, and Don Roos.
Thank you to Sutton Foster, who’s invested the heroine of this story with her incredible beauty, humor, and soul. I am so thrilled and honored to have you on the cover of my book. Hilary Duff, I cannot imagine another actress who could bring so much strength and glamour to this role. Debi Mazar and Miriam Shor, I worship you. Nico Tortorella and Peter Hermann, thanks for portraying two such radically appealing men that your fans have formed teams. Thank you all, as well as the fabulous Molly Bernard, Charles Michael Davis, and Dan Amboyer, for letting us use your pictures in the book.
To John Thomas, aka JT, Younger’s brilliant director of photography, thanks for always making me feel like part of the action.
I am so delighted that Gallery Books has created this gorgeous new edition of Younger. Thanks to my editor, Lauren McKenna, who was there at the beginning, and to Aimée Bell, who breathed fresh enthusiasm into the project. Also thanks to Abby Zidle, Hannah Payne, and Maggie Loughran.
My literary agent, Johanna Castillo at Writers House, has poured hundreds of hours into shepherding this project to completion, for which I am enormously grateful. Thanks, too, to Wendy Sabrozo for her invaluable help. To the agents who sold the original book, Deborah Schneider, and who sold it as a TV project, Melissa Flashman, I owe years of gratitude. Thank you too to Dana Spector at CAA, who manages everything on the Hollywood side of the . . . not a wall.
I am so grateful to everyone at Viacom, Paramount, and TV Land who so generously contributed their talents, time, and property to this new edition of Younger: Barbara Pereda, Caroline Schneider, Alizee Serena, and Sarah Coulter. Thank you also for the introduction to Zoe Worth, who will one day be running Hollywood.
Younger is dedicated to my daughter, Rory Satran, who was a new college graduate living in Paris when the book was first published. Now she’s a fashion editor at the Wall Street Journal and mother of her own beautiful daughter, Plum. Thanks, Rory, as well as my son-in-law, Nathaniel Kilcer, and sons, Joe Satran and Owen Satran, for reminding me what it’s like to be young in fact, not just at heart.
I have so many friends who help me with my work and my life that they’re too numerous to mention here, but special thanks go to Christina Baker Kline, who first suggested that Alice might simply fake being young, as well as to Kate Juergens, my guide to life in LA, and Kim Bonnell, who’s been there since we were Kelseys together.
Thanks also to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, who gave me the space and time to nurture the seed of this book, which has now grown into such a magnificent tree.
Foreword
By Darren Star
Creator, Younger the TV show
Embarking on a TV series is like entering into a marriage. It’s a long-term relationship and you want to make sure you’ve chosen a partner who you can grow with, will challenge you, will surprise you, and, most of all, will make you laugh.
When I first read Pamela Redmond’s Younger, I immediately felt I was ready to propose. A story of reinvention, set in New York in the world of publishing—its theme resonated with me. How do we stay relevant in a culture that values youth above all? How can we bridge the gap between generations—and learn from one another? And if we had the chance to relive our twenties—would we do it better from the perspective of our forties? The book itself was prescient, anticipating the rise of millennial culture and the lopsided value placed on youth and digital expertise. The generation gap had never yawned wider, with the bar to reentering the workplace rising impossibly out of reach.
The TV series Younger takes this premise as an invitation to explore ageism, millennial culture, and the value of growing older. How are we defined by our age and experience—and not? We develop our stories in a multigenerational room of writers—from millennials to Gen X to Baby Boomers—and in the process learn and grow from one another, mirroring the journey of our characters.
Of course, none of this would be possible without a stellar cast led by Tony Award–winning Sutton Foster. For those who felt Liza was an impossible role to cast—what forty-year-old actor could believably pull off twenty-six?—enter Sutton. A brilliant comedienne, Sutton plays Liza from the inside out. She brings “younger” Liza to life through her attitude, her openness, and sheer joy. It’s an amazing magic trick that she pulls off every week, and there wouldn’t be a show without her.
Younger is an intergenerational romance. There is the impossible choice between Team Josh and Team Charles, impossible because Liza straddles two worlds. She is of both and neither .
But the true love affair is between Kelsey and Liza. Their friendship is at the heart of the show. They are the wind beneath each other’s wings in love and work. Especially work, because Younger at its core is about a woman who will do almost anything to regain her place at the table and find meaning and passion in her life.
If Liza is a superhero—a millennial with a secret identity as a fortyish suburban mom—this is her origin story. Prepare yourself to fall in love with how it all began.
chapter 1
I almost didn’t get on the ferry.
I was scared. And nervous. And overwhelmed by how out of place I felt, in the crowd of young people surging toward the boat bound for New York.
Not just New York, but New York City on New Year’s Eve. The mere thought of it made my hands sweat and my feet tingle, the way they did the one time I rode to the top of the Empire State Building and tried to look down. In the immortal words of my daughter, Diana, it made my weenie hurt.
I would have turned around and driven right back home to my safe suburban house—I can see the ball drop better on TV anyway!—except I couldn’t leave Maggie waiting for me on the freezing pier in downtown Manhattan. Maggie, my oldest and still closest friend, didn’t believe in cell phones. She also didn’t believe in computers, or cars, or staying in New Jersey on New Year’s Eve, or for that matter, staying in New Jersey ever. Maggie, who came out as a lesbian to her ultra-Catholic parents at sixteen and made her living as an artist, didn’t believe in doing anything the easy way. And so I couldn’t cancel our night out, and there was nothing for me to do but keep marching forward to my potential doom.
At least I was first in line for the next boat. It was frigid out that night, but I staked my claim to the prime spot, hanging on to the barricade to keep anybody from cutting in front of me. These kind of suburban yos who were milling around on the dock with me, I knew, majored in line-cutting in kindergarten.
Then a weird thing happened. The longer I stood there, guarding my turf, the more I began to want to go into the city—not just for Maggie, but for myself. Looking out across the dark water at the lights of Manhattan sparkling beyond, I began to think that Maggie had been right, and going into New York on New Year’s Eve was exactly what I needed. Shake things up, she said. Do something you’ve never done before. Hadn’t doing everything the way I’d always done it—the cautious way, the theoretically secure way—landed me precisely in the middle of my current mess? It had, and no one wanted that to change more than me.
And so when they opened the gate to the ferry, I sprinted ahead. I was determined to be the first one up the stairs, to beat everybody else to the front of the outside deck, where I could watch New York glide into view. I could hear them all on my heels as I ran, but I was first out the door and to the front of the boat, grabbing the metal rail and hanging on tight as I labored to catch my breath. The ferry’s engine roared to life, its diesel smell rising above the saltiness of the harbor, but still I sucked the air deep into my lungs as we chugged away from the dock. Here I am, I thought: alive and moving forward, on a night when anything can happen.
It wasn’t until then that I noticed I was the only one standing out there. Everybody else was packed into the glassed-in cabin, their collective breath fogging its windows. Apparently I was the only one who wasn’t afraid of a little cold, of a little wind, of a little icy spray—okay, make that a lot of icy spray—as the boat bucked like a mechanical bull across the waves. It was worth it, assuming I wasn’t hurled into the inky waters, for the incredible view of the glowing green Statue of Liberty and the twinkling skyscrapers up ahead.
As I gripped the rail even tighter, congratulating myself on my amazing bravery, the boat slowed and seemed to stall there in the middle of the harbor, its motor idling loudly. Just as I began to wonder whether we were about to sink, or make a break for the open seas at the hands of a renegade captain running from the law, the boat began to back up. Back up and turn around. Were we returning to New Jersey? Maybe the captain had the same misgivings about Manhattan on New Year’s Eve that I did.
But no. Once the boat swung around, it began moving toward the city again. Leaving me facing not the spectacular vista of Manhattan but the big clock and broken-down dock of Hoboken, and darkest New Jersey beyond. Frantically, I looked over my shoulder at the bright, snug cabin, which now had the prime view of New York, but it was so crowded, it would have been impossible to squeeze inside. I was stuck out in the cold facing New Jersey, all alone. The story of my life.
* * *
Half an hour later, I was hobbling through the streets of Soho arm in arm with Maggie, cursing the vanity that had led me to wear high heels and fantasizing about grabbing the comfy-looking green lace-up boots off Maggie’s feet. Maggie was very sensibly striding along beside me in skinny jeans, a down-filled coat as enormous as a sleeping bag, and a leopard-print hunter’s cap, with the earflaps down and a velvet bow tied under her chin.
“Are we almost there yet?” I asked, the shoes nipping at my toes.
“Come on,” she said, tugging me away from the crowded sidewalk of West Broadway toward a dark, unpopulated side street. “This’ll be faster.”
I stopped, looking with alarm down the deserted street. “We’ll get raped.”
“Don’t be such a scaredy-cat.” Maggie laughed, pulling me forward.
Easy for her to say: Maggie had moved to the Lower East Side at eighteen, back when Ratner’s was still serving blintzes and crackheads camped under her stairwell. Now she owned her building, the entire top floor turned into a studio where she lived and worked on her sculptures, larger-than-life leaping, twirling women fashioned from wire and tulle. All those years in New York on her own had made Maggie tough, while I was still the soft suburban mom, protected by my husband’s money, or should I say, my soon-to-be-ex-husband’s ex-money.
My heart hammered in my ears as Maggie dragged me down the black street, slowing only slightly when I focused on the sole beam of light on the entire block, which seemed, for some strange reason, to be pink. When we reached the storefront from which the light was emanating, we saw why: in the window was a bright pink neon sign that read “Madame Aurora.” The glow was further enhanced by a curtain of pink and orange glass beads covering the window, filtering the light from inside the shop. Beyond the beads, we could just make out a woman who could only be Madame Aurora herself, a gold turban askew on her gray hair, smoke curling from the cigarette that teetered from her lips. Suddenly, she looked straight at us and beckoned us inside. Taped to the window was a hand-lettered sign: “New Year’s Wishes, $25.”
“Let’s go in,” I said to Maggie. I’d always been a sucker for any kind of wish and any kind of fortune-telling, so the combination of the two was irresistible. Besides, I wanted to get out of the cold and off my feet, however briefly.
Maggie made a face, her “You have got to be out of your fucking mind” face.
“Come on,” I said. “It will be fun.”
“Eating a fabulous meal is fun,” Maggie said. “Kissing someone you have a crush on is fun. Dropping good money on some phony fortune-teller is not fun.”
“Come on,” I wheedled, the way I did when I called to read her a particularly good horoscope, or suggested she join me in wishing on a star. “You’re the one who told me I should start taking more risks.”
Maggie hesitated just long enough to give me the confidence to step in front of her and push open Madame Aurora’s door, giving Maggie no choice but to follow.
It was hot inside the room, and smoky. I waved my hands in front of my face in an attempt to signal my discomfort to Madame Aurora, but this only seemed to provoke her to take a deeper drag on her cigarette and then to emit a plume of smoke aimed directly at my face.
I looked doubtfully at Maggie, who only shrugged and refused to meet my eye. I was the one who’d dragged us in here; she wasn’t about to get us out.
“So, darling,” said the Madame, finally removing the cigarette from her mouth. “What is your wish?”
What was my wish? I wasn’t expecting her to pop the big question right out of the gate like that. I figured there’d be some preamble, a few moments examining my palm, shuffling the tarot cards, that kind of thing.
