"You Can’t Stay Here Forever"

Katherine Lin is an attorney and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area and a graduate of Northwestern University and Stanford Law School.

She applied the Page 69 Test to You Can’t Stay Here Forever, her debut novel, and reported the following:

Page 69 of You Can’t Stay Here Forever finds my protagonist, Ellie Huang, at work at her San Francisco law firm not long after her husband has died, reeling from not just grief, but also the revelation that her colleague was her late husband’s longtime mistress. (I promise this isn’t a spoiler!) She’s sitting at her desk when she reads an email from Cat, the other woman, announcing to the entire litigation team that she will be begin working from home full-time.

She’d sent this email only a few hours after I’d told HR I was cutting my leave short and heading back to the firm. Our firm had never required much face time if you satisfied your billable-hours minimum, but it was still odd for someone to work fully from home. I imagined her lying to her case teams about why she couldn’t come into the office anymore. I thought of a few of the more aggressive partners pushing back, and Cat lying even more.

With her late husband’s brazen infidelity top of mind, a few days later, Ellie gets an email from the law firm at which her late husband, Ian, was a partner before his death:

It seemed that Ian had signed up for life insurance—something he’d mentioned to me in passing but that I hadn’t remembered until now—and that I was the sole beneficiary. The email was a few paragraphs long and explained how the firm calculated a new partner’s worth, the forecast they’d given to his future earnings. Attached to the email was a PDF that I had to fill out, sign, and then send back to them. After the paperwork is finalized, the money shall be transferred to the account by the insurance company in approximately four to six weeks, the email concluded.

These two emails on page 69–her co-worker’s years-long affair with her late husband coupled with his big life insurance payout–prime Ellie to run away to the South of France with her best friend just a few pages later. Ellie books a long stay at the obscenely luxurious Hotel Du Cap-Eden-Roc, a real life hotel that readers may recognize from the Cannes Film Festival, or more recently, Sofia Richie’s wedding.

I think the page 69 test gets the highest marks for You Can’t Stay Here Forever–it delivers a perfectly timed snapshot of Ellie’s state of mind in the first half of the novel, as well as sets up the trajectory for the second half. With her life blown up by tragedy, Ellie is at work, ready to make a break for it. I wish I could say that the problems she faces on page 69 are all that she’ll contend with in the book, but many more demons shall greet her abroad–in France, Ellie will realize that her husband’s death has caused a reckoning that sheds a blazing light in her life, forcing her to question everything she thought was true about herself.

Visit Katherine Lin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue