It reads like a walk through San Francisco, when the fog softens the edges of everything you thought you knew about yourself. Annie in Retrospect is not only a love letter to the city, but to anyone standing in the in-between: between who they were, who they are, and who they are yet to become.
Kristina Voegele, a Bay Area transplant who moved from Florida to attend grad school at Mills College, wrote the novel during early motherhood, while grappling with the kind of identity loss many parents know well.
“Turning 40 really messed me up,” she admits. “And then I got over it. And now I love being in my 40s.” That arc—disorientation, grief, release—threads through the book like a second narrative.
Author Kristina Voegele with her book 'Annie in Retrospect'(Corinne Avganim)
Set in San Francisco’s past and present, Annie in Retrospect, which was released last fall, follows a woman on that same cusp, who unexpectedly slips back into her 25-year-old body armed with the knowledge, regrets, confidence, and heartbreak of midlife. It’s a premise that could easily lean towards sci-fi time travel. Instead, it lands as something tender and startlingly honest: a meditation on memory, identity, and the strange emotional whiplash of realizing you once lived inside a body and a place that felt endless.
In Annie in Retrospect, San Francisco isn’t just a backdrop, it’s a living character: North Beach bars; city adventures and late nights; the particular alchemy of fear and freedom that comes from being young, broke, and newly arrived.
The book doesn’t shy away from San Francisco’s constant state of becoming, either—tech booms, cultural erasures, the uneasy tension between idealism and capitalism. Voegele began writing the book in 2022, when the city was declared “over” in headlines and group chats. Like Carrie Bradshaw defending New York, she felt compelled to push back.
“Nobody talks sh*t about my boyfriend,” she jokes. The result is a portrait of San Francisco that acknowledges its scars without abandoning its soul.
That metaphor comes into sharp focus late in the novel, when Annie looks out at the skyline—Coit Tower glowing, cranes crowding the horizon—and sees her own life reflected back at her. The city’s rapid growth, sudden collapses, and uneven recoveries mirror the emotional terrain of midlife itself.
“So many cranes. So many new buildings. So much change and growth so fast. And then, out of nowhere, something unpredictable happens and suddenly you’re a ghost of your former self,” writes Voegele.
“But imperfect as it was, imperfect as it had always been, it was still hers. It still held her heart like nowhere else. And in that moment, she knew that in spite of the scars and dark days, they both still had so many beautiful nights ahead of them.”
(Courtesy of SparkPress)
The city endures. So do we.
What makes Annie in Retrospect especially resonant is its generosity toward aging. This is not a story about reclaiming youth for the sake of vanity. It’s about perspective, about realizing how much energy we once spent worrying—about our bodies, our timelines, our choices—and how little of that worry deserved our brain space.
“Most people don’t actually want to be in their 20s again,” Voegele says. “They just wish they’d worried less, taken more risks, had more fun.”
The novel is also filled with moments of friendship, formative love, and the reckless optimism of nights that feel infinite. It captures the way our early 20s can feel both intoxicating and unbearably anxious, how every choice seems permanent, every misstep catastrophic. And it honors the friendships that, for a brief and incandescent window, become our entire world.
In the end, Annie in Retrospect doesn’t offer easy answers. Instead, it gives us something more useful: grace. Grace for the younger selves who didn’t know what they couldn’t yet know. Grace for the people we are now, folding laundry, chasing children, or wondering quietly if this is really it. Grace for the cities that broke us open, raised us, and made us.
If San Francisco has ever held your heart—if you loved it fiercely, defensively, imperfectly—this book will feel like coming home. And if you’ve ever looked in the mirror and felt surprised by who’s looking back, Annie in Retrospect will remind you that every version of you is still here, still worthy, and still capable of many beautiful nights ahead.
// ‘Annie in Retrospect’ is available at https://www.kristinavoegele.com/books and simonandschuster.com; download the first chapter of the next book in the series, ‘Leena Gets a Rewrite’ for free.
