Rebecca Serle did not plan to write In Five Years. A psychic did it for her.
At 24, Serle sat across from a medium who delivered a prophecy about her love life: who her future husband would be, what his name was, how they would meet, and when. The timing was off by a single day. Everything else was accurate. Except the man was not her husband.
"I ended up meeting him, and thank god it didn't work out because I ended up meeting my husband who was my genuine true soulmate," Serle tells Ponton. The prophecy was correct in every detail but wrong about what those details would mean. That gap became the premise of In Five Years: you can see what is coming and still have no idea what it will feel like when you get there.
The novel, which turned six years old the day of this recording, follows Dannie Kohan, a corporate lawyer in New York with an airtight five-year plan. On the night of her engagement, she falls asleep and wakes up five years in the future, in an apartment she has never seen, with a man she does not know. An hour later, she wakes up in her real life. Four and a half years pass. Then the man from the vision walks into her life.
Prophecy as thesis
Serle wrote the book while living in New York, single, with friends who functioned as family. She was thinking about the medium's reading, about how certainty can be both real and misleading. "The idea being that even if we can see what's coming, we can't see what it will mean," she says. "That was the thesis."
The prophecy had given her the structure of a life, but not the life itself. She met the man the psychic described, under the circumstances the psychic named, at the moment the psychic predicted. It was him, and also it was not him. The real husband came later, met online, though they had been set up seven years earlier and never followed through. "He always jokes with me, 'We could have had those seven years, but you stood me up,'" Serle says. "And I say, 'Isn't it amazing and beautiful to know that what's meant to be becomes, no matter how long it takes?'"
That line could be the book's epigraph. In Five Years is not about controlling the future. It is about the difference between seeing the future and understanding it.
The friendship no one saw coming
Ponton describes finishing the book on a six-hour bus ride to the Kelly Slater wave pool, surrounded by surfers who did not care that she was crying. She stared at a wall for thirty minutes after the last page. Most readers do.
The book markets itself as a time-travel romance. It is actually a friendship eulogy. Dannie's best friend Bella, spontaneous and warm in ways Dannie is not, becomes the emotional center. Ponton saw herself in Bella, the version of herself at eighteen who flew to Paris on a whim. "I saw that sense of friendship with Dannie," she says. "No matter where in the world, Dannie will always be there for you. I was just jealous."
Serle pulls that dynamic from three close friendships, not one. "The relationship between Dannie and Bella is based off of three very close friends of mine," she says. "I pulled a little bit from each relationship." The book came out in March 2020, the last novel Serle wrote before leaving New York for Los Angeles. By the time it published, she was gone. "It's such a New York book," she says. "I feel nostalgic for it even when I'm here."
That aspirational friendship, the kind where someone drops everything to be there, becomes harder to sustain once people marry or have children. Serle is frank about this. "Inevitably some sacrifices have to be made for the differing lives that you start to lead. Some people get married or some people don't, and it becomes more and more challenging to prioritize each other." The fantasy is not that the friendship lasts forever. The fantasy is that it lasts in the form it started.
The hour that changes meaning
Readers fixate on one plot turn: Dannie and the man from the vision, Aaron, sleep together in the apartment Bella left to Dannie after her death. Then Aaron leaves. Ponton was baffled. "I felt like it went from them grieving to them being together and then to him leaving," she says. "I was like, what just happened and why did they hook up?"
Serle has heard this for six years. "In the first hour, she's so overcome by this feeling of what it feels like to be in that environment, and she thinks it's love because it feels so intense. When she gets to that hour, she realizes that feeling is actually grief." They are not drawn together by love. They are drawn together by the person they both lost. "It made perfect sense to me that they wouldn't ultimately end up together because it's not about that."
The scene is not a romance. It is an attempt to bring Bella back by repeating the conditions of the prophecy. It fails because grief is not love, even when it feels the same.
Serle writes infidelity into most of her books. Readers do not love this. She does not care. "Happy marriages don't make interesting novels," she tells her husband. "Nobody wants to read about a happy marriage. Where is the conflict?" The line is funny because it is true and because Serle knows it will not make her popular. She writes it anyway.
Once and Again, or how to ruin a time-travel gift
Serle's new novel, Once and Again, published the day of this conversation, returns to the same territory: what happens when you can change the past? Three generations of women, Lauren, Marcella, and Sylvia, are each born with a silver ticket that lets them undo one thing. The book takes place in Malibu, saturated with surf culture. Stone, the love interest, is opening his own wave pool. Ponton had just returned from Kelly Slater's. "Who's small?" Serle jokes.
The book is not about romance. It is about mothers and daughters, about the choices women make when they can rewrite their lives, and about whether rewriting changes anything. "Wherever you go, there you are," Serle says. "We take ourselves and our circumstances and our set of issues with us because they're ours to face no matter where we are in the world."
Ponton describes her life as a series of location experiments: Hawaii, Los Angeles, New York, places where she thought she could be a different version of herself. Serle counters that Los Angeles is not one thing. She hated it in college, found it materialistic and transactional. She loves it now. "LA is many different things, and it's reflective of the era that you are in. You could return to a totally different Los Angeles if at any point you decided that you wanted to."
The same logic applies to the silver ticket. You can undo the past, but you cannot undo yourself.
The do-over she would not take
Serle would not use the ticket. She knows this is a privileged answer. Her parents are alive, her daughter is healthy, her marriage is solid. "God forbid if something tragic happened, of course anybody in a story of total tragedy would use it," she says. But barring catastrophe, no. "All of it has really brought me to where I am now, and I'd be afraid."
Ponton agrees. She wishes she could change parts of her childhood, the treatment she received, but that treatment gave her boundaries. At seventeen, she went from being treated like a kid to being treated like a thirty-year-old in six months. "That was immensely hard for my mental health and honestly very jarring, but I wouldn't be who I am today."
Time is the one resource no one gets more of. Serle quotes her grandmother: "No one gets out of here alive." The whole structure of life is set up in opposition to that fact. We do not want to think about it. Serle writes about it anyway. "As a writer, I am interested in delving into the uncomfortable corners. I like to write about what it is that I'm wrestling with."
She will not write a sequel to In Five Years. The last chapter came out whole. Nothing changed in edits, not a single word. "It felt very finite, and it still does to me." Readers ask what happens after the final page. Serle does not have an answer, or rather, she has an opinion, but so does everyone else. "Once a book is published, it belongs to you as much as it belongs to me. Everything that I've had to say concretely, I've said already."
The psychic was right about the details and wrong about the life. Serle wrote a novel about that gap and will not close it.