Jenny Jackson Shares the 1st Line of New Book, ‘The Shampoo Effect’: EXCLUSIVE

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a good story starts with a good first line. In TODAY’s Cold Open, authors tease their buzzy upcoming release by revealing and explaining its first line, paragraph or page.

“Pineapple Street” author Jenny Jackson always knew how she was going to start her second book, “The Shampoo Effect.”

“That was always going to be the opening line,” she tells TODAY.com.

The book’s first words were borrowed directly from an incident in her sister-in-law’s life that she can’t stop laughing about.

In the first scene, Caroline Lash, a New Yorker who takes a writing residency in Massachusetts, steps on a doughnut and gets some help with clean-up from a stranger, whom she later learns is named Van. It’s an instant meet-cute.

She says something similar happened to her sister-in-law: “She is the nicest human in the world, and the stuff that happens to her, you wouldn’t believe.”

Once, she was running late to a job interview in Boston and “stomped” on a jelly doughnut, per Jackson’s retelling.

“She goes to the lobby of the job interview and realizes there is red jelly all over her pants,” she says.

She had to make a quick outfit change using a pashmina she happened to have in her bag.

“She takes off her pants, shoves them in a bag, wraps a pashmina around her waist like a skirt, and does the whole job interview wearing like a hippie pashmina skirt,” Jackson says through laughter.

“Every time I think about it, I get the giggles. I have been unable to stop laughing about this for so long. So when I thought about Boston jelly doughnuts, it had to be the opening scene for the book,” she continues.

Jackson says her sister-in-law doesn’t know about the scene yet. “I’m so excited to give it to her. She’s going to freak out.”

It was the rest of the book that was a challenge. “The Shampoo Effect,” chosen as Read With Jenna’s July 2026 pick, is a departure from the rarefied Brooklyn world that her bestselling debut “Pineapple Street” was set.

Jackson, who is also the editorial director of fiction at Knopf, says she “couldn’t get comfortable” with the idea that people associated her with the characters from “Pineapple Street,” which features an affluent Brooklyn family.

“I’m not a one percenter, and I didn’t grow up in New York. Part of writing ‘The Shampoo Effect’ for me was subconsciously a corrective to write about my hometown and where I’m from,” she says.

She wanted to write a book for people who already liked “Pineapple Street” and people who didn’t, which she calls a “terrible way” to go into a novel.

The book is set in a similar coastal Massachusetts town to where she grew up, Ipswich, and follows a childhood friend group now in their 30s.

She calls the book “a story of love and marriage, and that moment in your early 30s where you have your real coming of age.”

To create the friend group, she “borrowed bits and pieces from a zillion sort of characters” that she grew up with — beyond just her sister-in-law.

For example, she recalls a childhood friend whose father was a beer distributor and lived in a fancy house — which makes it into the book through the character of Bailey.

Her husband is the inspiration for Van. “He read the book, and he was lying in bed. He was like, ‘Really, honey?’ I’m like, ‘Sorry,’” she says.

The heart of the book is inspired by the “fascinating thing that happens” when your old friends start to take different life paths.

“One person settles down first, one person leans in professionally first, one person has a baby first. It’s easy to that as a judgment on yourself and your own decisions,” she says. “You innately want your friends to be on your same page. It keeps you in conversation with each other, and also sort of cosigns your life choices.”