The Life List

The Life List is both a written inventory of childhood aspirations and the mechanism that sets Brett Bohlinger’s inheritance challenge in motion. Left by Elizabeth Bohlinger for her daughter, it asks Brett to pursue goals she once cared about but has since left behind. As numbered pink envelopes make those goals arrive one at a time, the list shifts from a condition attached to money into a question of identity: whether Brett will keep going even when completion no longer promises an inheritance.

Definition and Origins

The list belongs to Elizabeth Bohlinger’s legacy to Brett, who must complete its goals to inherit. It is not simply a set of instructions imposed from outside: its force comes from the difference between the girl who wrote or wanted those ambitions and the adult Brett has become. The challenge makes that gap consequential, requiring Brett to encounter her earlier desires in the midst of a changed life.

The fictional list also grew out of an experience from the novel’s author, Lori Nelson Spielman. Spielman found a childhood life list in an old cedar box more than thirty years after writing it. She had achieved some ambitions, including making her high-school cheerleading squad, graduating from college, learning to ski, travelling to Europe, having a good marriage, and owning a cat. Others remained unrealized: living on a lake, designing her own home, having two children, and owning a horse and a dog. Looking at the difference between that younger list-maker and her later life led Spielman to imagine a story in which someone dies and leaves a life list for a loved one to complete. The author’s list inspired the premise; it is distinct from Elizabeth’s fictional list and Brett’s assigned goals.

Envelopes and the Challenge

The pink envelopes give the list a material, staged presence. After a judge’s decision, Brett expects the first goal to arrive. At Brad Midar’s kitchen table, however, she notices two envelopes beneath a bowl of strawberries: one for goal number one and another for goal number seventeen, FALL IN LOVE. The sight quickens her pulse. Although Brad offers her both, Brett asks to open only the first that day, delaying the encounter with the goal that has made her uneasy.

The numbered sequence turns the list into a recurring exchange between Brett and Brad. Later, while Brad holds Brett’s daughter, Austin Elizabeth, he brings out the envelope for goal seventeen. He congratulates Brett on being on track with two months remaining before the September deadline, and points toward the horse and house as further ambitions to pursue. Brett answers briefly and passes the envelope to him. Brad notices that she has resisted opening this particular goal before; his attention to that hesitation makes the envelope more than a routine installment. It exposes a question Brett has been trying not to face.

Love, Time, and the Inheritance

The deadline gives the last goal an urgency the earlier envelopes do not necessarily carry. With one month left, Brett calls falling in love the hardest goal still outstanding. Brad suggests that her love for Austin might count as the kind of overwhelming devotion Elizabeth described. His suggestion offers a possible way to complete the list without waiting for another relationship to develop. Brett recognizes the practical stakes: accepting that interpretation could bring goal seventeen within reach, secure the inheritance, and protect her and Austin’s future.

But the possibility also reveals how the list can be misunderstood when treated only as a route to money. Brett does not settle the question by redefining her love for Austin as a completed goal. Instead, she tells Brad that she will finish the list regardless of how long it takes. The inheritance is no longer her reason for continuing. She does not want to disappoint Elizabeth—or the girl she once knew. Her decision changes the list’s meaning: a deadline that had measured eligibility for an inheritance becomes secondary to a promise of her own.

Design and Significance

Spielman’s account of the book’s development helps explain why the list takes the form of direct goals rather than cryptic clues. She first considered riddles from a dying mother, then rejected them as an implausible way for a mother to communicate what she wanted her daughter to accomplish. She also wanted Elizabeth’s intentions to arise from love, not from a controlling desire to direct Brett’s life. The list gives Elizabeth a clear means of setting the challenge while leaving Brett to discover what its goals mean in practice.

The design also avoids making completion easy or conventional. Spielman was concerned that the story might become predictable if Brett simply acquired a husband, a baby, a dog, and a horse in an expected sequence. Instead, she wanted some goals to lead indirectly to others, through coincidence and unexpected connections. The envelopes formalize the assignment, but their contents do not dictate a simple route through it. Goal seventeen is especially revealing: its wording seems straightforward, yet Brett’s hesitation and Brad’s proposed interpretation show that completing a goal can require deciding what counts as fulfillment.

The book’s discussion questions extend this tension beyond Brett, asking readers whether childhood aspirations remain valid in adulthood and whether recovering them can restore something a person has lost. The list therefore works at once as an inheritance condition, a structure for Brett’s choices, and a prompt to consider the distance between youthful ambition and adult life. Its decisive change comes not when a goal is conveniently declared complete, but when Brett chooses to continue without making millions the measure of success.