Still Me

Lou in New York

Jojo Moyes sends Lou Clark to New York for the third entry in the trilogy, and the move is both the novel’s greatest asset and its most significant risk. New York provides fresh narrative energy — Lou as fish out of water, encountering wealth and ambition and cosmopolitan complexity in ways Stortfold could never supply — but it also pushes the series toward a glossier, more wish-fulfilment-oriented register.

Lou arrives as personal assistant and companion to Agnes Gopnik, the young second wife of a wealthy financier on the Upper East Side. The Gopnik household is a world of competing agendas, social performance, and quiet cruelties, and Moyes navigates it well enough, though with less of the social precision she brings to the British class dynamics of the earlier books.

The Love Triangle

The novel’s central tension involves Lou’s long-distance relationship with Sam Fielding and her unexpected connection with Josh Ryan, a charming American who represents a version of the bold future Will wanted for her. The triangle is handled with more sophistication than the genre typically manages — Moyes does not make one option obviously correct — but it also means the novel spends more time in romantic uncertainty than emotional depth.

Lou, Continued

What Still Me does well is maintain Lou Clark’s essential character across the series arc. She is still funny, still self-doubting, still capable of the unexpected gesture that reveals her fundamental decency. The continuity is reassuring even as the novel around her becomes somewhat more conventionally plotted.

The trilogy as a whole represents one of contemporary commercial fiction’s more honest engagements with grief, growth, and the complicated obligations of the living to the dead.

Our rating: 3.9/5 — A breezy, engaging conclusion to the trilogy that sacrifices some of the series’ emotional weight for New York glamour, but delivers on the promise of Lou Clark’s continued becoming.

Closing the Trilogy

Still Me, published in 2018, brings the Louisa Clark trilogy to its conclusion by doing what the previous books only gestured toward: it actually sends Lou into the bold, expanded life that Will Traynor’s final gift was meant to fund. The move to New York is both the natural culmination of the series arc and its most significant tonal gamble. The earlier novels drew their texture from the specific social world of Stortfold — the British class dynamics, the family pressures, the economic precarity Moyes observes so well. New York offers glamour and possibility, but it also pulls the series toward wish-fulfilment, and the wealthy Gopnik household Lou enters is closer to fantasy than to the grounded observation of the first two books.

What Holds the Series Together

What rescues Still Me from its glossier impulses is the continuity of Lou herself. Across three novels and a transatlantic relocation, she remains recognizably the same person — funny, self-doubting, prone to the unexpected gesture of decency that reveals her fundamental character. The love triangle between the long-distance Sam and the charming American Josh is handled with more sophistication than the genre usually allows; Moyes declines to make either choice obviously correct, which keeps the romantic tension genuine even as it occupies time the novel might have spent on emotional depth. Taken as a whole, the trilogy represents one of contemporary commercial fiction’s more honest engagements with grief, growth, and the complicated obligations the living carry toward the dead. Still Me is the breeziest of the three, and it trades some of the series’ emotional weight for forward momentum and New York shine, but it delivers on the promise the first book made: that Louisa Clark would, in the end, become someone — and that the becoming was always the real story.

A Wardrobe, a Self

Much of Still Me’s comedy and pathos comes from Lou’s collision with the Gopniks’ world of wealth and discretion, where her vivid charity-shop wardrobe and unguarded warmth read as liabilities. Moyes uses the personal-assistant role — intimate yet subordinate, trusted yet invisible — to examine how class shapes what a person is allowed to be, and how easily a sympathetic outsider can be drawn into keeping a powerful family’s secrets. Lou’s friendship with the elderly Margot De Witt, a sharp-tongued former fashion-world figure, gives the New York chapters their unexpected heart and offers Lou a model of a woman who lived entirely on her own terms. By the time the novel returns her to England and to the unresolved question of Sam, the trilogy’s real achievement is clear: across three books Lou has been remade not by either of the men who love her but by her own accumulating choices, and Still Me is the volume in which that self-authorship finally holds.

Moyes also uses New York’s social extremes — the doormen and the dog-walkers, the galas and the service entrances — to sharpen the trilogy’s running interest in invisible labour and the people who perform it. Lou’s gradual refusal to disappear into the role she was hired for, to be merely useful and unseen, becomes the quiet rebellion at the book’s core, and it pays off the long arc that began when a bus-stop girl in a small English town first agreed to care for a man who did not want to be cared for. By its end the series has quietly insisted that an ordinary life, fully chosen, is its own kind of triumph.