Just Emilia by Jennifer Oko
Review by Rachel Shaver
“‘If nobody believes you, nobody can forgive you, and you are having quite a bit of trouble forgiving yourself. So how do you move on?’
That was of course the rotting heart of the matter.”
In Jennifer Oko’s Just Emilia, three women find themselves trapped in an elevator. A suicidal teenager, a middle-aged mother on the brink of divorce, and an elderly woman desperate to repair her relationship with her daughter after years of strain.
When the elevator abruptly stalls, what begins as an inconvenience soon unravels into something far more significant. The three women, all with eerily similar names, begin to talk. First, only about where they were headed that day, then slowly shifting to the personal problems they’ve been carrying for years. And as the hours stretch, their coincidental encounter reveals itself as the life-altering experience it will soon become. Because Emilia, Em, and Millie are not strangers at all. They are all the same person, existing all at once for just these few hours. With nothing but time on their hands, long-buried truths rise to the surface, and each woman is forced to confront the events that brought them to this moment. One in particular has stitched itself into every aspect of the lives they live: the death of their mother, and the role they believe they played in the tragedy. But perhaps, it isn’t too late to change the future. Millie, late in her seventies, knows her chance has passed, her life already stained by her own regrets. And present-day Emilia is headed down the same path. But what about Em, still a teenager? They’ve come to her on the day she plans to kill herself, but what if they can change her mind? Just Emilia is a race against a fate that seems unrelenting, a fight against the stubborn roots of memory and guilt and the formative teenage years that threaten to solidify into something irreversible.
Through Oko’s imaginatively simple conceit, these characters morph from strangers into women united by the same invisible weight. Their predicament, though very literal, is also metaphorical. Because, outside of that elevator, each of them is smothered beneath their own shortsightedness, stuck in loops of guilt, shame, and regret, unable to move past the weight of their own memories. What they truly need is someone to remind them what they’re still living for, but what they find is there is only one person capable of such a feat. And that person is themselves.
Together, the three Emilia Fletchers take on the daunting task of looking back through the foggy lens of reality. Oko’s introspective writing is, at its heart, a meditation on the stories we tell ourselves about the past. It is a testament to the power of change, how a name, a memory, a story can twist with age until the facts of it become unrecognizable, but also how the truth still remains, and the key to acceptance is untangling the emotion from the facts.
There is a nimble precision required to write a novel set entirely within a small metal box, and Oko accepts this challenge. The prose balances philosophical weight with emotional intimacy and cuts it with a subtle humor that reaches across multiple generations. The dialogue rings with disorientation and rawness, as the characters edge closer to truths they’ve spent years avoiding. While the setting is static, the characters are certainly not. They move through time and memory. They are not just in the elevator. They are also in every place they’ve ever been, in the thoughts of everywhere they will go, all woven together in a way that overrides chronology, and sometimes even logic. And where better to set this story than in the symbolic quiet of an elevator, moving from one place to another and trapped somewhere between.
What’s more impressive is the way Oko plays with structure and time without relying on spectacle. Instead, the novel flows with simple, yet raw emotion. It challenges the belief that one mistake can unmake a life, and in the lingering grief, explores the question of whether forgiveness is even possible, especially when that forgiveness is of yourself. As the narrator comes to realize, “The trajectory of a life is nothing but a series of decisions and consequences... The problem is, when we feel overwhelmed the decision-making process itself gets corrupted, and like an overloaded computer, it begins to crash.”
Just Emilia is a novel about what it takes to confront the most painful parts of yourself. It reminds us of the inability to change the past, but more so of the strength we show by choosing to keep moving forward.
