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A Letter from Natalie Messier
Dear Reader,
Writing this letter to introduce you to my debut novel, Every Version of You, is the culmination of two decades of dreaming. Dreaming, and a lot of hard work. Years of doubt and fear and missteps. Years of failing. But more importantly, years of trying.
There is maybe nothing that sums up my protagonist, Joey Vasquez, more than “failing, but more importantly, trying.”
When we meet Joey, she’s thirty-two, living a life that looks great on paper but makes for a lackluster reality. She’s confronted by a blast from her past, reminded of her biggest mistakes, and faced with a glimpse of the dream life that has slipped from her grasp. She’s convinced this night couldn’t get any worse—and then she dies.
What ensues is what I like to call a literal second-chance romance. She gets a second chance at love, and also life, after she’s transported back in time, into her eighteen-year-old body. She tries to right her wrongs, to heal wounds she let fester in her first life, and to make this second life a little bit easier for herself and her loved ones.
Remember the part where I said she fails? But she tries! And in the trying, she gains insight into her friends, her family, and most importantly, herself. She learns what really matters to her. What she wants her life to look like. What, and who, she values being a part of it.
One of the most gratifying parts of writing this novel and sharing it with the world has been getting to talk to friends and readers about their own lives and regrets. When they’d go back to, if they could. What they would do differently, if anything. All those things, a roundabout way of answering the question: What do you value?
These are questions I asked myself constantly when I was writing: What would I do differently? What matters to me, in retrospect? And since, unlike Joey, I haven’t died, what matters to me, moving forward? The answers I came to are, naturally, a lot of the answers Joey comes to, so I won’t spoil them for you.
I hope, if nothing else, you come away from the novel with more insight into these answers for yourself. What matters to you? What do you value? What kind of life do you want to live?
Every Version of You is a second-chance romance, but it’s also a second-chance coming-of-age story. It’s about a woman who tries, for the first time, to live life for herself. Writing Joey’s story has changed my life, and I am so excited to share it with you. I hope it encourages you to live the life you dream of living, today.
xo,
Natalie
About the Book
Every Version of You
A Novel
For fans of The Love of My Afterlife and The Seven Year Slip, Reese’s Book Club LitUp Fellow Natalie Messier’s heartfelt contemporary romance debut follows a woman who gets a second chance at a formative time in her adult life—this time to win the “one that got away.”
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Natalie Messier
Natalie Messier is a Reese’s Book Club LitUp Fellow and Los Angeles-based screenwriter. She has worked as a writers’ assistant for the series Severance and Chicago Fire, and her scripts have received recognition from NBC, Disney, Paramount, Final Draft, The Blacklist, NHMC, and the Austin Film Festival. Originally from south Texas, she is a proud Mexican-American. When she’s not writing, she can be found searching for LA’s best matcha lattes, reading romance novels, and cuddling with her two cats.
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