The New Me

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I’m doing well,’ I say, not wanting to stop, feeling myself almost try to walk past her, but her stepping in the way of my path, me pivoting, slowing, reluctant. Her central characters, Millie in The New Me and Megan, the pissed-off administrator who sits alongside the hellish Jillian, have the same problem. Every day, they show up for work and go through whatever motions are required of them; every night, they return to their apartments, eat some hastily assembled food, drink beer and watch TV. Millie is especially solitary, her boyfriend having departed and her one friend providing little in the way of support; and Megan appears to be heading in a similar direction, exasperating her boyfriend with her determinedly downbeat attitude and venturing out to parties only to antagonise the acquaintances who seem happier with their lots. Butler is, the novelist Catherine Lacey wrote, “ Thomas Bernhard in a bad mood”. A] definitive work of millennial literature...wretchedly riveting." (Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker )

A] definitive work of millennial literature . . . wretchedly riveting.” —Jia Tolentino, The New YorkerA] gut-punch . . . Butler does a great job capturing a certain kind of ennui with pitch perfect tone and dark humor.”— Brightest Young Things, “The Best Books of 2019 (So Far)” 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.

She makes a face close enough to a nod and doesn’t verbally object, so I get my laptop. I wanted her to say yes. I wanted her to want to help me with this. This should be fun. I would be more than willing to help her cultivate a more professional appearance, if that’s what she wanted. Working on a project or a problem is something friends do together, to help them bond. Jillian captured the complexities of anger and jealousy, disgruntlement and disgust so pristinely, you can’t help but be rapt, laughing along as Butler described social situations and conflicts so familiar can’t help but feel seen. At times, it’s cringe-inducing, at other times, you can’t help but hug the book and cry. She’s that good.A bleak and brutal book that exposes a nearly unbearable futility to life in the workforce, not to mention life outside it. Butler’s vision is funny and raw and dark—a cautionary tale, hilarious and intimate, against growing up and making do.”—Ben Marcus, author of The Flame Alphabet HB: I think structure is important. When you have structure for your day, you don’t have to worry about what you’re going to do. You can just do what you’re doing. But, of course, it depends on what you’re doing. When I was temping, I would have this really creepy feeling every morning where I was really aware of my mortality — like, “okie dokie, here we go again until I die!” That was awful. But when I think about my best, happiest times, many of them involve the routine of morning coffee, reading at night, making dinner, spending a few hours on a project, those kinds of routines. Michael J Seidlinger: The New Me is such a well-rendered novel, I can’t help but open with craft question: Did you go into the novel with a clear idea or was it vague, growing into it over time? At an early age, Butler understood institutions and authority figures to be a threat to her individuality. In third grade, a teacher scolded her for reading out loud with “too much color” in her voice, from which Butler intuited that the purpose of school was to “learn how to defer and complete the worksheet.” She refused to do this, and her high-school GPA bottomed out at 1.9. After graduating, Butler enrolled at an art school in Cleveland to study drawing and printmaking, but that didn’t work, either. She dropped out and later transferred to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago — a less rigid institution — from which she graduated with a creative-writing degree in that dreaded Year of Our Lord, 2008. MJS: Real talk: The very existence of temp agencies is insane right? It’s become so convoluted that we need agencies to promote the very existence of a job opportunity.

I think it's safe to say that at some point in any adults life that you are going to work with someone that irritates your every last nerve. I know that I have and that is precisely why I wanted to read this book. Thankfully, having worked in customer service my entire life I am able to bullshit with the best of them with a smile on my face but poor Megan really struggles with lashing out at people and, well, being an asshole which she admits she is frequently throughout the story. As I write this I kind of think maybe it is mostly the last one. The character made me think how in our protestant work-ethic American society we expect people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps without giving them any real resources to do that. And then judge them, or worse despise them, when they can't. And so that is what we as readers of this novel expect and so desperately want Jillian to do so, but she can't! How can she! She has nothing and no one to help her do it. No matter, I will keep reading Butler's work with a sly grin on my face because she and I share the same dark humor but this definitely won't work for everyone. If young people bitching and moaning turns you off, steer clear, but if you can see the dark humor between the lines you'll appreciate what she's trying to do here. 3.5 stars! 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.”Girls+ Office Space+ My Year of Rest and Relaxation+ anxious sweating = The New Me.” — Entertainment Weekly She’s a perfectly miserable temp at Lisa Hopper, a mass-market furniture showroom run by overconfident 20-somethings. Her life isn’t in disarray or free fall; it’s simply a void — of friends, of love, of a career, of willpower. The novel is a graph of Millie’s lifewide bradycardia; the needle barely moves even as she hatches plots to turn her fortunes around. “I should get some exercise, I should unclench my muscles, I should get a hobby,” she thinks. “I should figure out why no one wants to be around me … I should get a cat or a plant or some nice lotion or some Whitestrips, start using a laundry service, start taking myself both more and less seriously.” None of that happens.

A biting satire of the false promise of reinvention, by a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and Granta Best Young American Novelist I'm still trying to make the dream possible: still might finish my cleaning project, still might sign up for that yoga class, still might, still might. I step into the shower and almost faint, an image of taking the day by the throat and bashing its head against the wall floating in my mind. The first draft is typing casually, almost in a conversational way, responding to a series of ideas, seeing where that leads, paying attention to what feels natural, what’s funny, what’s sad, what’s stimulating, what passes the time. And then there’s editing, which is more like interactive reading, starting at the top, stopping when you need to make a change, then going to the top again, until you can read it through without anything standing out. It’s pretty simple. Sometimes it feels forced, but that’s no big deal. But on the other hand, I’m in a situation where I’m really supposed to be myself — at a party, or at a reading, or when I’m meeting someone new in a non-professional context — I catch myself doing a performance of myself based on what self-characteristics I value, and what behaviors have amused or impressed people before, basically “who I would like to be,” and when I catch myself doing that, it feels super weird. It’s me, but it’s also not. It is and isn’t conscious, is and isn’t in my control.Very few people have ever asked me about my process. I guess it’s a balance of trying to stay relaxed and attentive, right? Sarah talking about her fabled student loans again while I pulled the trigger on some new dresses for my new lifestyle. Yeah, I was thinking that if I’m going to be committing to a new job that I’m not really that hot on, I should at least enjoy some of the perks.’ In alternating chapters, there are breaks from Millie’s first-person narration where we enter the close third person of Millie’s supervisor, her coworkers, neighbors, et cetera. It creates this grotesque ecosystem of despair and sadness. These outside perspectives also offer insight into how others view Millie, which I think is brilliant. No spoilers - not necessary to spill the beans on how things wrap up .....or give detail specifics ....( friends, job, boss, other work colleagues, etc.)...