Best-selling romance writer Emily Giffin calls Marin author Laura Marie Meyers’ “The MASH Up” an “irresistible, page-turning treat from first laugh to last swoon.” It’s high praise for Meyers’ debut as a fiction writer. That, and more raves for the book, are not surprising, given Meyers has been a successful journalist focusing on hot topics and celebrity interviews.
“With this book, I really wanted people to remember a younger version of themselves,” says Meyers, who based her novel on the fortune-telling game she remembers fondly.
Played mostly by teen girls at sleepover parties and after school, “M-A-S-H” stands for Mansion, Apartment, Shack, and House. Meyers says, “You would list out options for who you might end up with, where you might live, what kind of job you’ll have, what car you’ll have, and then you choose a number and cross things off — and decide your life.”
In turning to her first love, fiction, Meyers describes what might happen if one of those games came true in “The MASH Up” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, July 2026, $20). Her main character Ruby has a funky mansion and dream job running a disco roller rink — and could end up with what might be the perfect guy.
“We all change based on life and experiences, but I do think that there’s this core piece that actually doesn’t change so much. And I wanted people to think about that version of themselves that was 13 and the pieces of them that are still the same: what they’ve held on to and what really matters in that throughline of our lives,” Meyers says.
Meyers, who pictured many different lives for herself, calls the one she landed in “the one that is truest to that pure part of me that I was talking about back then.”
She adds, “I do think I could have been happy doing other things, but I think in my core, this is the life that makes a lot of sense.”
In the 15 years since she earned a master’s degree in creative writing and publishing from DePaul University in Chicago, she has had plenty of time to consider what she wanted to write about. She says, “I’ve had the same friends for a really long time, for a lot of my life. And we’re still laughing about those years when we played MASH, when we had sleepovers; I was thinking about those years and we were coming up on our 20th high school reunion.”
She adds, “I was thinking a lot about who we thought we’d become when we were young and playing MASH, calling out these jobs… and then who we actually became, and how for some people that gap is wide.”
A fan who loves “The Wizard of Oz” and other movies where the primary character falls into another world, Meyers employs a similar device in her fast-paced romance, which takes place in Chicago, where she herself started to carefully think about what was important to her. She says, “I wanted to set it in this fictionalized version of my hometown because that’s where those nostalgic, young, idealistic feelings are the most resonant.”
Her next book, which she sold in a two-book deal with “The MASH Up,” also will be set in Chicago, but the Bay Area beckons. The transplant finds the region inspiring: “Something I really love about the Bay Area is that you can travel for 10 minutes and feel like you’re in a totally different place,” she says, noting that she can drive seven minutes away from her house and be in Tiburon, feeling like she’s on vacation on the water, and then go seven minutes another direction and be in the middle of the redwoods in Mill Valley.
The Bay Area makes a perfect setting for her next work in progress, which promises more enjoyable romance with a twist. Meyers says, “I think there’s something really special about a place that lets you exist in all these different worlds that are really close together. I really want to bring some of these cool places, these little pockets in the Bay Area to life.”
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