WHERE YOU ONCE BELONGED

In Graham’s novel, a media executive confronts her idealistic younger self with the help of her college friends.

Everleigh “Ev” Page has made plenty of compromises to get where she is. As the executive producer of Breaking, a long-running news magazine show, she’s been forced to adapt to the changing media landscape. When her boss tells her she needs to shrink her workforce, fire talented reporters, or kill a story, she complies. When her workaholic schedule keeps her from fully integrating into her boyfriend Sean’s extended family, she takes the hit to her personal life. These are the sacrifices it takes to become president of the news division—a position that no woman has ever held…yet. Strange things begin to happen, however, when Ev returns to upstate New York for a college reunion—or “Recommitment,” to use the terminology of Foster House, the Suffragette-themed sorority she shared with 11 other girls during her studies. Recommitment is shrouded in secrecy, due in part to Dr. Long, the house’s potion-mixing Indigenous landlord, and Ev isn’t thrilled to be taking part. Returning to Foster House means facing her long-estranged former sisters as well as, metaphorically speaking, “Leigh,” the 19-year-old crusading student journalist she used to be—but Ev has no idea how literal that reunion is about to become. Graham, a writer for Dateline, clearly knows the world of television news—the network offices feel just as authentically lived-in as the ancient banisters and wallpaper of Foster House. Here, she describes Ev’s workplace with typical precise prose: “It’s saved from total corporate blandness by the wainscoting she had put in with the decorating money that came with her promotion to EP. She actually went a little over budget and had to pay some out of her own pocket but it was worth it.” The reunion material manages to weave a bit of the unexpected—even the supernatural—into the familiar narrative of a woman selling her soul to join the corporate boys’ club.

A deftly rendered novel about reconnecting with one’s true self.