The New Me

Description

“[A] definitive work of millennial literature . . . wretchedly riveting.” —Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

“Girls + Office Space + My Year of Rest and Relaxation + anxious sweating = The New Me.” —Entertainment Weekly

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.

Thirty-year-old Millie just can’t pull it together. She spends her days working a thankless temp job and her nights alone in her apartment, fixating on all the ways she might change her situation–her job, her attitude, her appearance, her life. Then she watches TV until she falls asleep, and the cycle begins again.

When the possibility of a full-time job offer arises, it seems to bring the better life she’s envisioning within reach. But with it also comes the paralyzing realization, lurking just beneath the surface, of how hollow that vision has become. 

“Wretchedly riveting” (The New Yorker) and “masterfully cringe-inducing” (Chicago Tribune), The New Me is the must-read new novel by National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and Granta Best Young American novelist Halle Butler.

Named a Best Book of the Decade by Vox, and a Best Book of 2019 by Vanity Fair, Vulture, Chicago Tribune, Mashable, Bustle, and NPR“Ingenious . . . masterfully cringe-inducing and unsparingly critical . . . The New Me continues the author’s interrogation of the disappointments of the workplace and the diminished rewards of the so-called American dream…[and] explores self-improvement at its absolute, impractical, soul-crushing worst…[Butler’s] wit and insight keep the pages turning.” —Chicago Tribune

“Scathingly funny.” —Entertainment Weekly 

“Office Space meets millennial burnout in this inspired comic novel . . . A must-read.” —Esquire

“[Millie’s] rants would make Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man beam.” —Stephanie Danler, The New York Times Book Review

“Made me laugh and cry enough times to feel completely reborn.” —Nikki Shaner-Bradford, The Paris Review

“Really entertaining, I laughed out loud several times . . . I read it in a day.” —David Sedaris

“If you loved My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, don’t miss this . . . Sardonic and grimly relatable.” —Bustle 

“[A] surly send-up of the makeover-industrial complex.” —Vulture, “The Best Books of 2019 (So Far)” 

“Darkly funny.” —Vanity Fair, “The Best Books of 2019, So Far” 

“A sharp and candid satire of the American workplace . . . No matter which generation you’re in, this dark, psychological comedy is a must-read.” —Today.com (The TODAY Show)

“A brilliant excoriation of the marketers telling us that life offers an unending parade of do-overs. Butler nails the unspoken hierarchies of contemporary office life in this wry and utterly terrifying work.” —Vulture 
 
“Few authors capture the acidic angst of downtrodden millennials like Butler, whose heroines, trapped in precarious and soulless work, take comfort in consumption, in cynicism, in ill-fated self-improvement.” —Huffington Post

“Anyone who has ever felt like their life is going nowhere—and to make it worse, going nowhere in an achingly slow manner—will recognize themselves in Halle Butler’s new novel.” —Nylon

“Wake up, look in the mirror, swear it will all be different today. Sound familiar? Here’s that feeling in novel form.” —Elle

“Deftly shifts . . . between hope and anxiety.” —The Wall Street Journal, “The 10 Books You’ll Want to Read This Spring”

“[A] 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)” 

“[An] instant classic . . . pleasingly cruel [and] horribly funny.” —New Statesman America

“A skewering 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 

“Millie is just the kind of misanthropic, hopeful/doomed thirty-year-old we’ve all known, and/or been, and/or loved, and/or hated. Butler is an essential contemporary voice.” —LitHub

“The kind of humor found in The New Me is so sharp it cuts.” —Popsugar

“Butler’s curmudgeonly, black-humored depiction of what now passes for work, for friendship, for a life will appeal to fans of Ottessa Moshfegh.” —Newsday 

“So precise and cutting you might find yourself laughing, or shivering, with recognition.” —Vulture, “6 New Paperbacks You Should Read Right Now” 

“Darkly comic [and] highly readable . . . Butler presents a vivid portrait of her pitiful yet pitiless protagonist. It’s hard to know what Millie needs most: medication, a hug or a restraining order.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“A sharp, darkly comedic examination of capitalism, millennial life, and how to escape it all.” —Bitch Media

“Quick-paced . . . laugh-out-loud angst.” —amNewYork

“Butler’s incisive prose cuts sharp. Millie is, like us all, nominally an adult in a world that finds little dignity in adulthood.” —Chicago Review of Books

“[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 Lit

“[The New Me] dives deep into the idea of millennial burnout. . . Many readers will identify with Butler’s psychologically astute yet somewhat hopeless inner monologue.” —Mind Body Green

“A sharp and observant writer, who takes to task the tragicomedy of modern capitalism . . . Butler has created a disquieting heroine with an indelible voice.” —Publishers Weekly

“A bouncy, profane, highly addictive novel about work, female friendship, and other alienations. Halle Butler’s insane talent shimmers on every page of this deadpan misanthrope’s ode. A must-read!” —Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Gold Fame Citrus and Battleborn

“The New Me renders contemporary American life in such vivid, stinging color that certain sentences are liable to give the reader a paper cut. But you’ll want to keep on reading anyway. Halle Butler is terrific, and I loved this book.” —Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble

“A dark comedy of female rage. Halle Butler is a first-rate satirist of the horror show being sold to us as Modern Femininity. She is Thomas Bernhard in a bad mood, showing us the futility of betterment in an increasingly paranoid era of self-improvement. Hilarious.” —Catherine Lacey, author of Nobody Is Ever Missing and The Answers
 
“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

“Halle Butler has a way of looking at our twenty-first-century neoliberalist condition that simultaneously exposes its brutality and renders that same brutality absurd, hilarious, fizzy with humor.  She’s an incisive, curmudgeonly bard of the uniquely precarious times we live in, and it is crucial that you read her immediately.” —Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like MineHalle Butler is the author of Jillian. She has been named a National Book Award Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and a Granta Best Young American Novelist.There’s a nightmare familiarity every morning when I wake. The quality of the light, sort of grayish-dim, the stiff feeling of my body, the smell, part dirty clothing, part cooking oil, part garbage, part incense. I’m reminded of how afraid I am to die, and how every morning is just one more used-up day.

I lie in bed for twenty minutes, feeling this, then make myself coffee and get dressed, no shower. Soon enough, I’m on the train again, and the feeling has somewhat faded. It’s been replaced with hostility.

I walk past Karen’s desk, and I smile and wave and say hello, unable to differentiate this greeting from all of the other greetings from the past weeks.

There’s a lot of repetition in my life. No real routine or narrative, just a lot of repetition, and before I know it, I’m sitting in the break room drinking a cup of coffee (it doesn’t taste good) and staring at my phone again, scrolling, waiting for the motivation to get up and go to my desk.

I think I’m drawn to temp work for the slight atmospheric changes. The new offices and coworkers provide a nice illusion of variety. Like how people switch out their cats’ wet food from Chicken and Liver to Sea Bass, but in the end, it’s all just flavored anus.

Two of the designers are rehashing what I imagine is an old conversation. The taller of the two is talking about toxic friendships and friend breakups, when to ease out and when to draw the line. The shorter one nods and gives a choral “Yeah” from time to time.

They’re complaining about how they don’t have any time, so busy, too busy for bullshit. “I don’t know, she’s having major troubles right now, and she feels like her mom isn’t respecting her choices or her boundaries, and her mom keeps meddling, and I’m sympathetic of course, but I’m just so sick of hearing about it, but obviously I can’t tell her that directly, because that’s excessively harsh, and I don’t want to be an asshole.”

Another “Yeah” followed by a “totally know what you mean.”

“I’m in a place in my life where I want to be around people who have their shit together and people who are going to help me grow. I’m at my limit, and honestly if you can’t stand up to your own mother, you probably aren’t bringing that much to the table for me anyway.”

The choral girl laughs and says, “Right?”

I note this woman’s shape-shifting performance. How by saying a thing, she becomes it. As she complains about how boring it is to hear her friend complain about her mother, as she goes into detail, masterfully reenacting specific boring conversations (both between her and her friend, and her friend and her friend’s mother), she is essentially becoming them both, becoming the boredom she claims to want to remove from her life and mind, but which have complete control of her, and she doesn’t notice that by saying “I don’t like this” over and over she is just drawing herself closer to it, essentially becoming her friend and subjecting us all to what she claims to hate.US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.6000 × 5.0000 × 7.7000 in
Imprint	Penguin Books
ISBN-13	09780143133605
ISBN-10	0143133608
Author	Halle Butler
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC044000, FIC060000
Subjects	humorous books, irony, humor books, satire, FIC060000, fiction books, books fiction, women gifts, realistic fiction books, satire fiction, edgy, black humor, psychological fiction, alcoholics anonymous gifts, christian novels for women, ironic, corporate jobs, late capitalism, downward spiral, halle butler, gifts for women, women, bureaucracy, comedy, fiction, humor, FIC044000, novels, chicago, women's fiction, Literature, funny books, literary fiction, americana, contemporary fiction, dark humor, reinvention, funny gifts, gifts for her, 21st century