The short chapters of The New Me are a mix of first-person narration by Millie, who’s thirty and working as a temp in Chicago, and third-person narration about various people whose lives intersect with hers—her supervisor at work, other women at the office, her downstairs neighbor. Nearly all the characters are female: there’s some conversation about Millie’s ex-boyfriend; there’s a dude at the party; there’s the downstairs neighbor’s male significant other; there’s Millie’s landlord: but basically all the interiority in the story is women’s interiority (I think a brief paragraph focused on Millie’s landlord might be the one exception). One of the cover blurbs, from Catherine Lacey, describes Halle Butler as “a first-rate satirist of the horror show being sold to us as Modern Femininity,” and yeah, that: the inside of these women’s minds, even the ones who seem to have their shit together in a way that Millie doesn’t, is a pretty awful place to be.
So yeah, Millie: as mentioned, she definitely does not have her shit together. It’s been a year since she and her boyfriend of four years broke up; she lives alone (with financial help from her parents) in an apartment she only sporadically cleans; she works a mindless/thankless temp job in the back offices of a design showroom; she doesn’t really do much other than work and smoke and watch Forensic Files—sometimes she drinks with her sort-of friend, Sarah, but they time they spend together doesn’t seem particularly rewarding or fulfilling to either of them, with both of them complaining about their lives/waiting for the next gap in the conversation to say what they want to say, not actually connecting at all. But Millie has all these ideas about how things could be different if she ends up getting hired on permanently: maybe with more money she’ll be more stable and she’ll also be a nicer person. Maybe she’ll be less judgmental; maybe she’ll go to yoga classes. But other characters in the book who do have more stability don’t necessarily seem totally fulfilled: a girl at work who just got a puppy is frustrated by her friends, too; Millie’s downstairs neighbor with the clean apartment wishes her partner wouldn’t talk about work all the time/struggles to listen to him; Millie’s supervisor isn’t taken seriously by her bosses. Everyone’s stuck in their own heads, though Millie’s particular combination of self-loathing and judgmental-ness is the most extreme.
This was a fast read that was simultaneously satisfying and really uncomfortable: the messiness of Millie and her life are so vivid; her anxiety and dread are described so well as to feel kind of contagious. When I first read Jia Tolentino’s piece about this book in the New Yorker, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to read the book or not, and while I’m glad I did, I’m also glad I’m done with it.
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