The Girl I Was

The Girl I Was is a novel by the American writer Jeneva Rose, published in 2021. It is a time-travel comedy that takes the common wish to go back and do things differently and gives it to somebody who is not prepared for the answer.

Alexis Spencer has spent years explaining her circumstances with inspirational quotations. She owes money, has lost touch with her friends, and has just been dismissed and left in the space of an afternoon, which is more than any of the quotations can cover. Her response is to drink what is left of a bottle she has kept since college.

She wakes up in her own college town, in the wrong city and the wrong year, and discovers that the thing she has been blaming for years is standing in front of her: her eighteen-year-old self, who goes by Lexi and who has no intention of taking advice. The novel follows the two of them as they try to live in one decade at once, and Alexis finds that getting along with her younger self is harder than adjusting to the early 2000s.