Contrary to the headlines, The Next Day is neither a divorce memoir nor a riposte. Melinda French Gates — who’s gone by a double-barrel since leaving her ex-husband, Bill Gates, in 2021 — has decided to write something of a memoir/self-help hybrid. The Next Day — following 2019’s clunkily titled The Moment Of Lift — is about “periods of transition” which she calls “formative”: leaving home for college, becoming a parent, losing a best friend and (yes) ending a marriage. It follows Gates’s memoir, Source Code — the first of three — exploring his origin story and published in February.
“The next day – when the graduation confetti has been swept up or the wedding favors have been handed out or the movers have departed, leaving you in a sea of cardboard boxes,” she writes, “is when a transition truly begins.”
Her divorce from the Microsoft founder is mentioned sparingly. French Gates doesn’t bring up Jeffrey Epstein, whose business dealings with her ex-husband played a key role in their unravelling. She nods only very briefly to his infidelities. Mostly, it seems, she thinks of him as co-parent: someone she used to love and with whom she’s built a wonderful family. She seems neither acrimonious nor nostalgic. You can’t help but feel, though, that she’s playing her cards close to her chest.
The Next Day’s central argument – that new chapters begin only after the euphoria of novelty has subsided – is hardly groundbreaking, and the self-help element feels almost an accessory to the story of French Gates’s extraordinary life. It’s there for her more than it is for us; perhaps her therapist (whom she talks about at length) suggested she write this as part of her “process”. No matter. Since her marriage to Gates in 1994, Microsoft’s former manager of Information Products has spent more than three decades as the world’s most famous philanthropist, supporting health programmes that have saved a grand total of 38 million lives.
Melinda French Gates writes eloquently about her family—but mentions her divorce only sparingly
Better known than most first ladies of the United States, she is also, as of 2021, one of the richest divorcées in history. People will buy The Next Day for that reason alone.
Melinda French was born in Dallas in August 1964: the daughter of a stay-at-home mother and a father who worked on the Apollo space mission. Intelligent and fiercely driven, she was raised as a Catholic and attended a school that was run by priests and nuns. Religion is still one of the most important things in her life today, and The Next Day is all the stronger for it. Her faith (read: her surrender to something greater than herself) makes a narrative about personal growth sound far more grounded than it might otherwise have been.
Like Source Code, The Next Day does a great job of humanising a remarkable woman. She hardly dwells on the transformative impact of The Gates Foundation, where she was co-chair for 24 years. (Others have done it for her.) She admits to identifying with the “seventh nastiest villain” in TV, Dynasty’s Alexis Colby (played by Joan Collins), when she was a young girl. “She was one of the first depictions I saw in popular culture of a mother who also had a career outside the home that involved making decisions and controlling resources,” she writes. “Even if Alexis’s antics didn’t always appeal to me, her ambition and drive did.”
She rattles through key celebrity figures like it’s a game of power-women bingo
Her best prose is reserved for the passages about family: both the one she grew up in and the one she has built. On her own experience as a parent, she writes eloquently about surrendering to the “good enough” philosophy and learning to let go of perfectionism. Other parts, however, feel buttoned up or over-rehearsed. Since leaving Bill, Melinda has busied herself with running Pivotal Ventures, the company she established in 2015 independently of the Gates Foundation to help fund childcare programmes and invest in women in tech. When writing about this, she keeps things surface-level.
The Next Day has been carefully calibrated around the visual metaphor of a butterfly (the final chapter is called “Emerge”), but it doesn’t feel like French Gates is flying as freely as she could. She talks early on about the importance of seeing “the bigger picture”, as her dad once did; but her book is almost more conspicuous by what it leaves out than by what it includes. I say almost, because the final chapter offers something of a surprise. French Gates rattles through key figures of the celebrity-industrial complex like it’s a game of power-woman bingo — Reese Witherspoon, Michelle Obama, Megan Rapinoe — all of whom lend an ear after her divorce and suggest affirmations as she navigates life as a newly single woman. She “discovers” poems “through” her good friend, Oprah. Gayle King, who flew to space alongside Katy Perry this week, offers a mind-altering redefinition of ageing as “just another word for living”. Well, yes.
You cannot help but wonder, where are her friends from school? She seemed so sensible up until then.
In January, Bill referred to the divorce as “the mistake I most regret”. I’ll bet. Some estimates suggest it could have cost him half his fortune (no prenup). The separation, French Gates told the Sunday Times last week, “was necessary” because she couldn’t “live her values out inside her most intimate relationship”. There’s a lot of wisdom here if one looks past the therapy-speak. But I won’t blame you if you don’t.
The Next Dayby Melinda French Gates is out now (Bluebird, £17.99)
