The New Me

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I think Bukowski’s really funny on process. “So you want to be a writer” and “air and light and time and space” are really great diss poems. And I also really love Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, particularly the part about the cobbler’s elves. Do you know this book? While Butlers writing may not be as sharp as “The New Me” and her very loose plot line remains annoyingly inconclusive, there’s no denying that her refreshing and often ugly portrayal of the modern woman, makes for one hell of a compulsive and confronting read. Butler grew up in Illinois, and describes a childhood in which she had plenty of access to books, museums and the arts; she has been, she says, fortunate in her life. But at the same time, she wasn’t a good student, no good at “sitting in the classroom for 45 minutes and listening to somebody drone on about calculus without telling you why it’s interesting. You just have to memorise this stuff so that you can take standardised tests that can help the school get funding.” The exception was art classes, and so it was natural to go to art school. But there, literature – and specifically, modernism in the shape of Woolf, Joyce and Faulkner – changed things. “It was just a total hypnosis. A total trance. And so that kind of did it for me. And I switched over to the writing department just so I could take more literature classes, because all I wanted to do was read.”

In 2017, at a party for the literary magazine Granta, a man from Knopf asked Halle Butler what she does. “A lot of people seemed to think I was someone’s drunk date or something,” Butler recalls, so she leaned into it, telling him she was a secretary. This wasn’t explicitly false — for a long time, Butler had been making a paltry living doing clerical work through a temp agency. But it was a blatant lie of omission. Halle Butler was one of the writers being honored by the magazine’s Best of Young American Novelists issue, alongside luminaries such as Ben Lerner, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Yaa Gyasi. Maybe the darkest horse in the herd, Butler had neither a literary reputation nor connections; Granta’s editors found her 2015 debut Jillian, a manic tragicomedy about two self-destructive office administrators, in their slush pile. The point of view consists primarily of first-person, present tense chapters from Millie’s perspective, but Butler intersperses a few close third-person, past-tense chapters from the perspectives of those around her. This fluctuating structure creates an effect that is layered and dynamic, deliberately distancing and cinematic at some points and almost claustrophobically intimate at others. This novel is certainly a reminder of the many ways that work is hell. It made me even more grateful to be working from home. Most of the coworkers I've had over the years have been perfectly nice and I've only yearned to murder a handful. Nonetheless, it's much less exhausting not to have to make conversation with colleagues and unwillingly learn about their daily habits, not to mention them learning about yours. I agree with Rosa Diaz from Brooklyn Nine-Nine that this is unnecessary. In Jillian, Megan becomes increasingly fixated on how much she hates her fellow admin, who is totally oblivious to this. Butler's narrative is as sharp and acidic throughout as it was in The New Me:It’s beyond me how books like this get published to begin with. Butler’s first effort is amateurish, uninsightful and unoriginal garbage through and through. Millie (geddit – cos she’s a stand in for millennials!), like all the characters, is unpleasant and pathetic. She ping-pongs around from hating her job to desperately wanting a full time position to hating everything and everyone. The writing is great. It's sparse and particular. It's funny and a little grotesque in a delicious way. I zoomed through it, but was let down by the end, or non-ending. With this book, these concerns were pretty internal. I often have this sense that there’s something wrong—I’m sad or I feel vaguely guilty about something, something’s just off. So I come up with a rational solution, for example, to eat well or to read a certain book that might stimulate me, because I can remember feeling good, and I associate those feelings with health and interesting thinking. But it can be hard to do the rational thing, because that takes a little will and a little energy—pizza and TV take no energy. So I say, Okay, I’ll do it tomorrow. But I don’t. And then I start to feel like I’m procrastinating, and then I feel guilty about that, which drains more energy, and as these feelings start to snowball, they become more ornate, they become related to my opinions of myself on an almost moral level, thinking that I’m bad, and the whole thing gets out of hand. It’s very baroque and emotional. Indecision and anguish over nothing. I think these feelings are pretty eternal—promising to be better, promising to be more moral, and then the difficulty of following through. Askewering of the 21st-century American dream of self-betterment. Butler has already proven herself a master of writing about work and its discontents.”— The Millions Once again, oozing with deliciously dark humour and witty observations, Jillian is yet another tantalising, though at times, slightly anxiety inducing read.

Nobody's perfect; we all have darkness we keep hidden from the world - our private envies, our delusions, our prejudices, our perversions, our addictions, the histories we rewrite. Things considered improper, unprofessional for modern day-to-day life. If those came to light, perhaps there'd be a more valid reason for hatred. The New Me] brilliantly captures the anxiety of the era . . . It’s depressing and hilarious, cynical and side-splitting. Butler’s observations of character, dialogue, and social class are barbed and relatable.”— Newcity LitIt's like, oh-kay, this is the future. Guess I'd better get used to the idea of slowly going crazy and having a baby and going to some sort of freaky church in the suburbs." Stalked by this dread, Butler decided that she had to write a novel before she was 25, so she saved a little money, quit her job as an administrator in a doctor’s office, and spent the last month of her 24th year writing the first draft of Jillian. A little baffled, I clarify that she wrote a novel in a month to prove to herself that she should pursue a writing career, and she corrects me: “No, I wasn’t thinking of it as a career.” I should have known. If critical acclaim translated to financial success, Jillian’s publication might have liberated Butler from bouncing between office jobs, but it didn’t. Instead, the novel gave her exactly what she sought: affirmation that she was a writer. Whilst working in a succession of menial jobs, Halle Butler co-wrote two independent films, Crimes against Humanity (2014) and Neighborhood Food Drive (2017). [2] She released her first novel Jillian in 2015. The plot concerns the obsession of 24-year-old Megan with her 35-year-old co-worker Jillian. [4] [5] Butler published her second novel The New Me in 2019. It follows a temporary worker called Millie as she goes from job to job. Writing in The Guardian Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett called it "depressing" and "bleakly funny". [6] Writing for The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino described it as a "definitive work of millennial literature". [7] Published works [ edit ] First of all, thank you for writing such a beautiful, enraged treatise on living alone in an apartment in Chicago in the winter with one quasi friend and a terrible job. Where did this book begin for you?