The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Ko, Lisa. Memory Piece. Riverhead Books, 2024.

Lisa Ko's novel Memory Piece is set in the suburbs of New Jersey and in New York City. The novel spans from the early 1980s through the 1990s and from the early 2000s to the 2040s. The storyline employs past and present tenses. Ko toys with conventional notions of plot structure and narrative form and writes Memory Piece from the first-person and third-person points of view. For the sake of clarity, the following summary uses the present tense and a linear mode of explanation.

In 1983, Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng befriend one another at their family friend's summer barbecue. Giselle and Jackie know one another from Chinese school. They are meeting Ellen, who lives in Queens, New York, for the first time. The girls spend the barbecue making prank calls and circulating the guests together.

Throughout the years following, Giselle and Jackie start to spend more time together. After finishing Chinese school, they stay in contact by sometimes meeting up at the mall or making novice home films together at Jackie's house. They try to stay in touch with Ellen, too. Occasionally, the friends talk on the phone or write letters to one another. Ellen shows up in New Jersey for an impromptu visit every now and then.

In middle and high school, Giselle develops a love for writing and the visual arts. She keeps regular notebooks describing or depicting her every day activities. She decides that she will become an artist one day, although she knows her family expects her to pursue a more traditional career path. Meanwhile, Jackie spends most of her time on the computer that her dad built for her. She prefers being online to spending time with friends because she can be anyone she wants to be in the virtual realm.

By the 1990s, Giselle, Jackie, and Ellen are all living in New York. Giselle starts working odd, temporary jobs so she can pay her rent and do her artwork. She develops a series of performance pieces including Mall Piece, Blood Piece, and Memory Piece. Meanwhile, she dates a famous artist named Holger Salles, whose presence eventually wears on Giselle and inhibits her work. Meanwhile, Jackie is living by herself and working at a startup called Wonder. When she is not at Wonder, she is developing her online diary website, Lene. She retreats from her friendships and devotes all of her energy to cultivating Lene. Eventually, Giselle and Jackie reconnect. Later, they start talking to Ellen, too. Ellen is living in a squat in the East Village that she and her friends have named Sola. Over time, they turn Sola into a co-op.

When Jackie gets evicted, she moves into Sola with Ellen. She rediscovers the importance of community and friendship, and she and Ellen start sleeping together. Giselle at times talks to Jackie and Ellen during this era. However, she often finds it difficult to get in touch with her friends. After she completes Blood Piece and is awarded the Krauss Fellowship, she decides that she has had enough of the New York art scene. She devotes the proceeds from her award to her mother and stages Disappearance Piece. She leaves the city and moves to the desert.

Jackie and Ellen's relationship grows complicated, and Jackie decides she needs to change her life. She sells Lene and launches out on her own.

Ellen stays at Sola for several more decades. New York changes in the meantime. The lower and middle classes either move to the suburbs or give up their houses and set up encampments around the city. Ellen refuses to leave Sola because she and her friends own the building. The building is her home. Eventually, after she realizes that her life in Manhattan is in danger, she joins her friends Reem and Sunny in the Bronx.

Ellen struggles to adjust to life in the Bronx. She feels disconnected and estranged from who she once was. Then, she receives a message one day from Jackie inviting her to join her and Giselle in the desert. She and Giselle have made a life together and are working on a new collaborative project. They think Ellen might be able to help with the project.