Show notes
Clementine is twenty-nine, a book publicist in New York, six months into grieving the aunt who left her an apartment. The apartment occasionally deposits her seven years in the past, where a man is subletting for the summer. Full spoilers throughout. Content note: suicide.
Alex and Lindsey get into what the book argues about change: that loving someone means falling for them again as they become new people, and that refusing to let someone change is its own denial of the future. They work through the aunt as the cautionary version of the same story, a woman who kept moving so nothing could ever sour, and try to untangle whose timeline is ahead of whose, which turns out to be genuinely hard to hold in your head. Plus a defense of romance as a genre that does more with personal growth than it gets credit for.
Then it gets personal. Coming up on eight years married, they ask whether they’d date each other’s seven-years-ago selves. Neither answer is yes.
Also: a pronunciation crisis over the male lead’s name, two pigeons with an unprintable one, and the discovery that the book’s cover matches this podcast’s colors.
Cry count and ratings at the end.