The Life List

Overview

The Life List is the debut novel of American writer Lori Nelson Spielman. First published in July 2013 by Bantam, it is generally described as contemporary women’s fiction, while also drawing on the conventions of family, romantic, and personal-growth novels. Its central device is a list of youthful ambitions, revived by a mother’s will after her death. Through that premise, the novel links bereavement and inheritance to a broader question: how can an adult distinguish a genuinely desired life from one that merely looks successful and safe?

Brett Bohlinger is thirty-four and appears to have settled comfortably into adulthood. She has a prestigious job at her family’s cosmetics company, a spacious home in Chicago, and a handsome boyfriend. When her beloved mother, Elizabeth, dies, Brett expects to inherit what she needs to advance in the business. Instead, she learns that the inheritance comes with a condition: she must complete the life list she wrote as a fourteen-year-old. The forgotten list reflects a much younger person’s picture of the future, including ambitions such as going to Paris, performing on a large stage, having a child, and falling in love. Some of these wishes feel remote or even alien to the woman Brett has become.

The requirement sends Brett into experiences that unsettle her orderly routine. As she works through the goals, she must contend with grief while reconsidering her career, romantic life, family relationships, and long-shelved hopes. The list gives the plot a series of concrete challenges, but the deeper question is not simply whether Brett can finish every item and receive the inheritance. It is whether the process can help her understand her mother’s decision and decide for herself what fulfillment means. The novel allows the old ambitions to prompt change without treating them as a flawless blueprint: Brett has to encounter the person she once was, and then make choices as the person she is now.

Themes and origins

The book’s central concerns include self-discovery, grief, maternal love, family ties, and the gap between outward achievement and inward contentment. Its list-based structure makes personal change visible: each goal asks Brett to enter unfamiliar territory, while the accumulating experiences challenge assumptions she has accepted about work, love, and security. The story’s emotional premise is that a parent’s care can continue to shape a child’s life after death, but it also leaves room for the daughter to take ownership of the choices that follow. Rather than simply celebrating nostalgia, the novel asks readers to consider which old dreams still matter and which have changed with time.

Spielman has described a personal discovery as the inspiration for the story. She came across an old cedar box containing, among other keepsakes, her grandmother’s rosary, her first bankbook, and a folded, yellowed sheet of notebook paper. On it was a list of twenty-seven life goals she had written in her flowery handwriting at fourteen. Thinking about the goals she had fulfilled, the ones she had not, and how different her life might have been had she achieved every one of them, she began to imagine the novel. That origin gives the fictional list a reflective dimension: it is both a plot mechanism and a way of considering how a person’s sense of possibility changes over a lifetime.

Reception and legacy

The Life List became an international bestseller, with publisher and biographical accounts describing extensive translation and international distribution. Chinese-language coverage reports that sales had passed one million copies by mid-2015, while available accounts differ somewhat on the exact number of territories covered by translation or rights sales. The book’s accessible premise and emotionally reassuring approach helped it circulate well beyond its initial publication. It was later adapted as a Netflix original film, renewing attention to the story for a screen audience. Its continuing profile rests chiefly on that global readership, its adaptation, and the enduring appeal of its central idea: that revisiting an old dream can be a starting point for asking what kind of life one wants to lead now.