Still Me was published by Michael Joseph (Penguin) in 2018, completing the Louisa Clark trilogy. Having survived grief and found her footing in After You, Lou now takes the leap Will always wanted for her: she moves to New York to work as assistant to Agnes Gopnik, the young Polish wife of a wealthy Upper East Side financier.
The novel operates as fish-out-of-water comedy (Lou’s eccentric wardrobe, her English directness, her inability to navigate Upper East Side social codes) and as a study of class translated into an American context. Agnes is both employer and potential friend — trapped in a gilded cage by a prenuptial agreement and the social expectations of a world that accepts her money but not her origins. Lou’s empathy for Agnes’s situation (a woman whose life looks enviable but feels imprisoning) connects to her own history with Will — another person whose privilege was also a prison.
The long-distance relationship with Sam (the paramedic from After You) strains under the pressure of separation, and the novel’s romantic tension comes from Lou’s attraction to a different world rather than a different person — the question of whether she can have ambition without losing love, whether growth requires leaving behind the people and places that made you.
The title answers the trilogy’s central question: after everything — grief, recovery, reinvention — Lou remains herself. Identity survives transformation.
Collecting Still Me
First edition (Michael Joseph / Penguin, London, 2018): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First UK edition in dust jacket: $8–$15
- Signed first edition: $20–$40
- Complete Louisa Clark trilogy (firsts): $40–$100