“I am a lawyer,” I nodded humbly, breath bated for the reaction I wanted—no, needed—to receive.
I said this to most people I met, as opposed to “I work in a law firm.” An innocuous difference at first, but one which belied a deep reliance on my job for my self-worth. I didn’t merely work for a firm; being a lawyer was at the heart of who I was.
I found myself unable to stop talking about work, with its intricate political webs and overinflated gossip, to friends and family. In fairness, I was spending sixteen hours a day in the office, and prioritized the company and client above all else. As a brown woman, I contorted my otherness as necessary, without even realizing. My career had overtaken my being until it had become all-consuming.
This feeling inspired the setting of my debut novel, Jaded. It follows a biracial, twenty-something lawyer named Jade whose career is on the rise, until something terrible happens to her on the firm’s watch. Suddenly, Jade has to pick apart and call into question the person she has molded herself to be for everyone else’s benefit. Along the way, she navigates the underbelly of the industry she once thought was glittering and finds that is skewed against her. Worse still, she comes to the rather horrifying realization that she has been complicit in her own erasure all along.
I always race through books that shed light on the shadows that linger in an industry, particularly when the author has had a past life working in the culture they depict, infusing the setting with life from the very first page. In these books below, the protagonists are all women, and some are women of color, who see and feel the grind of workplace discrimination with a precision that crawls under your skin and feel all too realistic.
Everything’s Fine by Cecelia Rabess
Getting romantically involved with a colleague is tricky in the best of circumstances. For Jess—a Black liberal—and Josh—a white conservative—the nuances of identity politics are explored against the backdrop of an investment bank. Despite having graduated from the same university, Josh fits into the corporate boys’ club seamlessly, even hailed as a rising star, whilst Jess receives an inexplicably chilly welcome. Whilst the novel contextualizes their differences within an entire relationship, Rabess also shines a light on the unspoken hostility and condescension Black women are subjected to in predominantly white workplaces, and the ways in which the poster boys of the industry are unable, or unwilling, to meaningfully engage with that experience.
Assembly by Natasha Brown
“Be the best. Work harder, work smarter. Exceed every expectation. But also, be invisible, imperceptible… Go unnoticed. Become the air.”
An unnamed Black British protagonist is a model minority success story: she has the prestigious education, a lucrative job in finance, a white, moneyed boyfriend. But faced with life-changing news, she picks apart her life with a cool objectivity that relays the emptiness of her ostensible success. As Brown scratches the surface, we see that the narrator’s behavior at work is scripted, she is expected to show gratitude for her career, dress and sound the part, be more industrious than the rest, hold no resentment, recruit other people of color and, ultimately, be complicit in her own oppression. In 100 pages, Assembly’s dissection of the exhaustion of constant othering is breathtaking in its efficiency.
Whisper Network by Chandler Baker
The reverberations of rewarding a workplace predator with power and promotion overflow for the four female narrators of this novel when their serial abuser boss is set to become CEO of their company. The way Baker weaves through the book the mundane woes of existing as women in a system built for men had me tabbing page after page. From the overwhelm of working motherhood, constant objectification, bad behavior that travels only in whispers, to the blowback after speaking up. It’s the chorus of voices that creates the sense of sisterhood, support and shared pain between the women and builds a looming shadow of pent-up rage, bubbling over.
Promising Young Women by Caroline O’Donoghue
Set in a trendy advertising agency, O’Donoghue captures the creeping control some workplaces wield over their junior female employees. As the protagonist Jane becomes increasingly embroiled in affair with her boss and entangled in his manipulation, the novel takes on an almost gothic turn, pointing to the fear and paranoia her workplace stirs up for her. If you’ve ever stared at an email with amazement at how a man has insidiously undermined your ability whilst stealing your credit, you’ll relate to Jane’s predicament. It touches on issues that so many industries still turn a blind eye to: workplace sexual assault, arbitrary success markers that pit women against each other, the promises of success fed to the junior ranks, and the exploitation of female labor.
Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter
A dystopian Silicon Valley comes to life as the protagonist Cassie peels back the curtains of the glossy world of tech. During her days in a ruthless start-up, Cassie is constantly accompanied by her black hole. Depending on her mood and how many drugs she has taken to keep up, it shrinks and enlarges, but always hovers next to her. Like many women perceived as successful, she has both a public-facing self that is high-functioning at work and complicit in the toxicity of her company, and a private self, characterized by the deep depression and shame that follow her everywhere she goes. Eventually, we feel Cassie’s hell of existing in an artificially glittering environment, burning out at a job that rewards immorality. Reading it feels cinematically apocalyptic, yet extremely close to home.
The New Me by Halle Butler
With sardonic and bleak humor, Halle Butler keeps a dreary office setting light. Like many literary antiheroines, Millie is very privileged but deeply dissatisfied. She turns to binge drinking and sharp observations to pass the day at her otherwise joyless temp job. Butler captures the claustrophobia of both Millie’s physical office – small and windowless – and the wider misery of monotonous working culture for millennials.
Kim Ji Young, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo, translated by Jamie Chang
Often credited with igniting South Korea’s #MeToo movement, Jiyoung is described as the “millennial everywoman” who, following relentless micro-aggressions, goes through a spell of disassociation where she embodies different women and tells their stories. When her husband eventually sends her to a psychiatrist, Jiyoung’s life is chronicled in a neutral voice that is so effective in making the reader feel the heaviness of daily misogyny. The sexism is laid bare when she details how corporations have a practice of favoring men to avoid the risk of paying for maternity leave, and questions whether women end up unwittingly raising the bar for incoming women by overworking themselves to the bone just to receive the same recognition as their male colleagues.
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