The Other Me

It’s always fun to discover new authors and books. Today I’m delighted to welcome debut novelist Sarah Zachrich Jeng here to talk about her release, THE OTHER ME (Berkley Hardcover; on sale today, August 10, 2021), It’s the story of a woman who gets a do-over she never asked for as the author explores the path we didn’t travel and the choices we didn’t make.

Best described as Russian Doll meets Dark Matter, THE OTHER ME explores alternate reality at its most dark and twisted, touching on themes of toxic masculinity, free will, and identity.

Chicago artist Kelly steps through a door at a gallery opening on her 29^th birthday and emerges in her Michigan hometown. Suddenly, she’s got 12 years of wrong memories and is married to a man she barely knew in her old life. 

Kelly is shaken and confused, but she plays along with this new life she seems to have been living. At first, Eric seems like the perfect husband―her devoted high school sweetheart―but she can’t shake the feeling that he’s somehow behind the switch. The more Kelly tries to prove that her old life in Chicago was real, the more she fears she may be losing her mind.

Join me in giving a warm welcome to Sarah as she stops by to tell us a bit about her book, but be warned there are a few spoilers along the way.

Tell us about THE OTHER ME! What compelled you to write this novel?

Sarah:

One of THE OTHER ME’s early readers called it “sci-fi without science” and I think that’s a great description. There’s a tech-related explanation for how Kelly, my main character, suddenly finds herself living a different life. However, the actual reason behind it is character driven, which tracks with the “soft” science fiction that has always resonated the most with me. I also really like stories that upset reality for their characters and audience (I’m a big David Lynch fan). So, my goal with THE OTHER ME was to write a book that would mess with people’s heads, but also have plenty of emotion and a satisfying character arc.

In THE OTHER ME, Kelly steps through a door on her 29^th birthday and finds herself living a totally different life than the one she had built for herself. How did you come up with this idea?

Sarah:

***HERE THERE BE SPOILERS***

I wanted to look at a wish-fulfillment time-travel narrative (guy wants girl, guy loses girl, guy goes back in time and gets girl) from the other perspective. What would that look like for the girl? How does her life change, and is she even aware of what she’s lost? (Obviously she is, or there’s no story.) The more I explored that, the creepier it started to feel. Eric takes over Kelly’s life and steers it in a whole different direction, without asking her how she feels about it. I wanted to take that to a conclusion that felt both logical and emotionally resonant.

Your book touches on themes of fate and choice, as Kelly examines the life she normally leads compared with the one she finds herself living – but Kelly is also reminded that she has chosen the people who are present in her life. Do you think our choices define who we are? And do you think that we leave some people behind for a reason?

Sarah:

I think our choices absolutely define who we are. Not completely, since we don’t have control over all aspects of our lives, but our daily habits can either amplify or suppress core traits and encourage the development of new ones. Even if someone winds up living a lifestyle that seems at odds with how they see themselves, they’re still going through those motions every day so that becomes, to some extent, who they are. That’s part of what freaks Kelly out so much about suddenly morphing into a suburban work-from-home housewife—she’s afraid that at some point, that will be all that’s left of her.

Our big relationships, whatever their nature, all leave their stories inside us. More than once, my life has completely changed direction because I became close with someone, and I think that’s true for a lot of people. We’re different from who we would be if we’d never met that person and had those experiences with them. Sometimes those relationships end, for whatever reason, but their traces remain.  I’m not a big believer in the sentiment that everything happens for a reason, but I think we can take value and wisdom from negative experiences as well as positive ones.

The novel’s protagonist, Kelly, is an artist. What do you have in common? What are your hobbies?

Sarah:

I’m a former rock musician so I’m well acquainted with the difficulty (my parents called it “impossibility”) of making a living doing something artistic. You have to fit your creative work into whatever space is left between sleeping, eating, and the job that pays your bills. I tried to get some of that into the parts of the book that deal with Kelly’s career as an artist. It’s a balancing act for her, and that’s the case with my writing as well. I still have a day job, family responsibilities, and all the other life stuff that hasn’t gone away with a publishing contract. So writing and reading are still my main “hobbies” even though they’re now my side hustle as well.

What was the most challenging part of writing this novel?

Sarah:

***SPOILER ALERT***

Getting the time loops right! Not only did I need to decide how many to have and what the pivotal events of each do-over would be, but I also had to keep track of what each character knew or remembered at any given point in the story and how events in one timeline might affect either that timeline or a different one. I made a lot of diagrams and lists.

What kind of research was required to write THE OTHER ME?

Sarah:

I researched the art world and women artists through both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to get an idea of what qualifications and training they would need and what a woman artist just starting her career would be up against.

I had some background knowledge of startup culture, but things are always changing, so I read up on that. Much of what made it into the book is exaggerated, but some, unfortunately, is not.

***SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS***

I did a lot of reading on the capabilities of artificial intelligence, as well as the physics of time travel and what human time travel might look like. The final book doesn’t end up using much of that science, since the form of time travel that takes place in THE OTHER ME—the ability for someone to send their current consciousness back to their younger body in order to live parts of their life over again—is not physically possible, as far as we know. But I was less interested in completely accurate science than exploring themes of identity and fate, so I hope any physicists or AI experts among my readers will forgive me.

I did end up including one (originally unintentional) Easter egg. I had decided on “gnii” as the name of both the time-travel app and the company that produced it in an early draft. Then, when I was doing more science research, I came across a paper cited by several armchair time-travel experts called “The Jinn of the Time Machine,” by physicists Andrei Lossev and Igor Novikov. The paper theorized the existence of objects—or information—that could pass backward in time without causing a paradox. Lossev and Novikov referred to these items as Jinn or Genii, which felt really serendipitous.

If THE OTHER ME became a movie, who would you cast as its main characters?

Sarah:

I’m hopelessly behind when it comes to keeping up with actors! Here’s one dreamcast:

Kelly - Lizzy Caplan

Eric - Tyler Hoechlin

Linnea - Kylie Bunbury

Peter - Domnhall Gleeson

Adam - Allen Leech

And I’d die happy if Kathryn Hahn were to play Kelly’s mom or an aged-down Doris (the nosy neighbor)!

What do you hope readers will take away from THE OTHER ME?

Sarah:

Obviously, I hope they’ll be entertained, and taken down a fun rabbit hole thinking about what they’d do in a similar situation to Kelly’s. But I’d also be happy to elicit some thoughts about how women are often expected to prioritize romantic relationships and family life over our own ambitions and desires, and also how often men vs. women are considered to be the protagonists in both real life and made-up stories.

What are you working on next?

Sarah:

I’m writing another speculative suspense novel. It’s about two very different women who were close friends in college but have become estranged, and what happens when their lives intersect again.

Sarah, thanks for stopping by and sharing this insight into this fascinating story.

Meet the Author: Sarah Zachrich Jeng

Photo by Megan Brown

Sarah Zachrich Jeng grew up in Michigan and always had a flair for the morbid and mysterious (for her dad’s thirty-fifth birthday, she wrote a story entitled “The Man Who Died at 35”).

She had a brief career as an aspiring rock star before she came to her senses and went back to school to become a web developer.

Sarah lives in Florida with her family and two extremely hyper rescue dogs. The Other Me is her first novel.

Thanks everyone for stopping by today. What are your thoughts on stepping through a door and going back into time to a different life?