Fern is sitting on a bench in the neighborhood park, watching two girls dare each other ever higher on the swings. She has one daughter, Maisy, who’s a senior in high school, too busy for her parents, and about to leave the nest altogether. Her sons, Owen and Jackson, are twenty-one and twenty, respectively. Both are away at school. One calls her regularly to check in, the other texts when he’s short on money.
She doesn’t begrudge her independent kids. She and Mack raised them that way. They told them to go take on the world, and to know their parents were around if they ever got too far over their skis. It’s that “go get ’em” spirit that brought her to the park today. She needs to remind herself that she’s succeeded in the midst of more trying times than what she’s going through now.
They’d had three kids quickly. One with off-the-charts ADHD, a second who insisted on doing everything himself, and a third who demanded she never be left behind, ever. When writing, Fern described their household as chaotic, competitive, and loud. Later, Mack would read the words and gently add, “And wonderful.”
He was right. It had been wonderful.
But also unpredictable and grueling. So here she sits at the park, not so much watching the girls swing, but rather stealing glances at their mothers as they dig through their bags for water bottles and hand sanitizer while also calling “two-minute warning” at least ten times before dragging the whining girls away from their fun.
Fern gives the women a sympathetic “been there” look while secretly delighting that those days are done for her.
At least until the grandkids arrive.
For now, she has some thinking to do. There’s an offer on the table to option the book. There’d been a few interested parties, and the screen rights agent had been hoping for a bidding war. It didn’t materialize. “More of a quibble,” her literary agent, Holly, told her. “But we’re pleased with the terms. Definitely worth considering.”
Which is what Fern tells herself she’s doing now. Considering.
Really, though, she knows she’s stewing. The engagement party happened nearly three weeks ago, and Emma still isn’t responding to her texts or calls.
“Give her time,” Carolina advised.
Andi promised, “She’ll cool down.”
Maybe they’re right. But the more time passes, the more Fern loses track of Emma’s primary grievance. Missing a toast is unfortunate, but hardly a betrayal. A betrayal is asking Fern to give up on her dream of seeing one of her books brought to life on-screen.
“You have to admit, you didn’t warn us about everything you planned to include in Smart Girls Say Yes.” Andi, who is still speaking to Fern—though just barely, with everything happening in her own life—called last night. “You’re talented and I love you, but I wish you would have asked my permission to write about some of that stuff. My law school relationship, for example. I was in therapy for years on account of him, and now you want to put it all in a movie?”
Fern hadn’t referred to her friends by their full names in the book, but within their network of friends and acquaintances, it wasn’t difficult to put faces to the real women behind the caricatures.
“It’s bad enough that one of my colleagues still asks if I really threw up all over the inside of a new BMW.”
Fern couldn’t help but laugh.
“It’s not funny!” Andi’s voice pitched into dog whistle, then dropped as she, too, began to giggle. “Okay, maybe it is. That poor guy. He had to have the interior detailed three times to get the smell out.”
“Oh, believe me, I know.” Fern had included the story in a chapter titled, “Buy Me a Drink BINGO.” His name was Matthew and he was old money, one of the many liveried Brooks Brothers, East Coast men who’d gone west to claim their stake of the dot-com boom. Their type, which the friends nicknamed the Brooks Bros, were almost too easy to spot.
They paid for valet parking and slipped the tickets into their money clips.
Their belts were new leather, never frayed at the notches.
They rarely had roommates or, if they did, one of them owned the condo they shared.
Fern and friends practically made a game of targeting them. Okay, not practically. Carolina really did make BINGO cards one night and they sat at a table at the City Tavern marking off squares. Fern had written about it, and now thanks to the SmartGirls on TikTok, Gen Zers were playing the game again for real.
“The nineties are hot right now.” Maisy, their in-house social media expert, deigned to sit down one evening and explain this SmartGirls phenomenon to her Luddite mother. “The trend is boyfriend jeans, crop tops, SJP, flannel, plaid—a general ‘end of the world’ vibe counterbalanced by ‘in your face’ fun.”
“SJP as in Sarah Jessica Parker?”
“Right, but the original Sex and the City version, not including the movies. And definitely not And Just Like That SJP. That version is too much.”
Sarah Jessica Parker had versions? “Since when can a person be in and out at the same time? It makes no sense.”
“Don’t blame me, Mom. You’re a child of the eighties. You practically invented the commoditization of personality.”
“I didn’t invent—” Fern stopped herself. She was a stranger in a strange land, and she didn’t intend to go to war with her daughter over Sarah Jessica Parker. “Never mind. Do these SmartGirls say how they found out about my book?”
“Goodwill,” said Maisy. “Thrifting is also hot these days, but not nearly as hot as it was two years ago.”
This, at least, Fern knew, as she’d spent a full year driving Maisy and her friends to every thrift store in the East Bay. She still couldn’t imagine specifically why her book attracted the attention of these two young comedians.
“I don’t know, Mom. You did some weird stuff. The wedding dresses?”
In one of the essays, Fern, Andi, Carolina, and Emma hold a tea party while wearing wedding dresses, a celebration of sorts for Emma, who’d just ended her engagement.
The SmartGirls spoof of that day was the first video Fern saw—the two comedians, billowing in ridiculous amounts of white tulle, burning effigies of past loves, and maintaining stuffy conversation with a life-size cardboard cutout of Princess Diana. “Charles is ever the dull cad, isn’t he? It’s a wonder Camilla doesn’t string him up by those satellites he passes for ears.”
The reenactment was hardly exact. Princess Diana wasn’t at the original party. But the comedic brilliance lay in the fact that these women had taken a moment from Fern’s book, blown it ridiculously out of proportion, and still managed to drive home the whole point of that day.
“Like I’ve always told you, Maisy. Don’t get married just to wear the dress. Other options can be cheaper and a lot more fun.”
“Whatever.” Maisy raised her hands, surrendering the point. “You asked about the SmartGirls, so I told you.”
“Thank you.”
Now Fern sits on the same park bench where she used to watch her children hold pine cone fights, grappling with the two versions of her own self. She is a writer who may have an opportunity to see one of her books brought to life. But she’s also a loyal friend to the women on its pages, and they’re not prepared to give her their blessing.
She wonders what Faust would do.
It is possible she’s overblowing this dilemma. A tiny fraction of the books optioned make it into development, and a tinier fraction still make it all the way to the screen. The odds are infinitely higher that the Smart Girls Say Yes project will get shoved in a drawer and forgotten. Nothing is guaranteed except for a paycheck that, who is she kidding, could go a long way in paying her three children’s college bills. Owen and Jackson are at public state schools, but Maisy has her heart set on leaving home and heading east. That means private school tuition plus plane fare.
But here’s what really makes the hair on Fern’s arms puff: if she says yes, she’ll finally be able to say that one of her books had been optioned for screen.
During the pandemic, she’d sat on Twitter watching one author after another announce screen deals, every one of them scream-tweeting, Pinch me! I can’t believe it. Fern couldn’t believe it, either. What did their work offer that hers didn’t? An article titled “Lockdown Ushers in a Gold Rush for Authors and Producers” detailed the inordinate number of books that had been sold for rights in 2020. Apparently, producers had nothing but time to read and then buy up their favorites. Only, none of them must have read Fern’s stuff.
She pinches herself on the thigh. Stop it. No more beating herself up over things beyond her control. Anyway, the correct way to look at her current situation is to think of it as a multitude of blessings. She had a career while also raising a family. She’s happily married and maintains a group of close friends. And yet none of that justifies giving up on her dreams.
There’s one other thing, too. The producer who wants the rights to Smart Girls Say Yes is a Lady Boss named Dakota Winters, a woman who made a name for herself as a teen star on the Disney Channel and who shockingly didn’t go on to blow her millions on drugs and rehab. Fern never watched her show Double-Twos, but she’s been told that for Millennials it’s what The Facts of Life was for Gen X. A touchstone for millions of women.
After making a name for herself in television, Dakota went on to earn her business degree, and has since produced a string of well-respected, top-earning limited-run series for Netflix and Hulu. In other words, she’s the personification of a smart girl, a woman who doesn’t wait for opportunity, but makes it. When Dakota Winters says yes, she means it.
“I am a certified mess,” Fern says aloud. The pigeon picking Cheerios from among the wood chips looks at her and nods.
All this navel-gazing and self-doubt...she doesn’t understand what’s gotten into her. If anything, the defining characteristic of Fern’s life has been her decisiveness. Don’t stand in the paint store diddling over the colors; pick one that’s close enough and put it on the wall. She once redecorated the living room while Mack was out of town for a week. She wandered by a shop window, saw a furniture set she liked on sale, hired a truck, got the old junk out, and put the new pieces in.
Mack barely batted an eye. “Is this your way of telling me I’m on the road too much?”
“Maybe. And it’s easier to clean baby barf off leather than velour.”
Had Fern tried to talk him into buying new furniture while he was home, it would have taken forever—comparing prices and hunting for coupons and debating how to maximize the credit card points on a purchase of that size. By the time Mack was ready to buy, Fern would’ve been spinning in frustration and CDC agents in biohazard suits would be hauling their old couches away for study.
And, dammit, isn’t Fern the woman who wrote a whole book about stepping up, saying yes, and taking control of your life?
“Why, yes, I am.”
The pigeon drops the Cheerios and walks away.
She picks up her phone and dials Holly.