Not Safe For Work: Author of the viral essay 'My boyfriend, a writer, broke up with me because I am a writer'

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Brilliantly deadpan and spiky in all the right ways. An accurate, darkly funny but also brutal portrayal of everyday workplace and world power dynamics. I couldn't put it down Emily Itami, Costa-shortlisted author of Fault Lines I remember being 23, anxiously navigating halls where executives didn’t look me in the eye, holding the muted phone to my ear, thinking: if I have the opportunity to speak, I hope I make the most of it. I’m trying my best. Since the protagonist was unnamed, it was easy to put myself in her shoes despite not having anything in common with her. The ending also more or less leaves things up to the reader’s interpretation. I thought this was an interesting way of showing that these things can happen to any woman.

Read the synopsis? You basically read the book. With the exception of one reveal the book adds literally nothing to that synopsis. Even that last line is how the book ends. You never find out her decision. Such a waste of time. Do yourself a favor and read The Change and I’m Glad My Mom Died instead. They make a lot of the same points / prompt the same discussions and they’re actually well done. Her heroine is warm and someone to fight for, even when she’s making bad choices, while the specifically Jewish mother-daughter dynamic (so much guilt) sits just the right side of stereotypical. Light and gossipy in tone, if it’s a beach read it’s also one that will make you think. Here is what has changed in Hollywood since #MeToo: not much. If the bar for tolerable behaviour was on the floor before – no, make that underground – then now, it’s hovering just above floor level. It is widely understood that you are not to grope or make sexual advances on your employees, and that if you do so, you may face consequences. Throwing items in the office, and particularly in the direction of your employees, is now off limits. People previously unaware of the terms “implicit bias” and “microaggressions” have now attended training sessions about them and know that they are bad. They believe themselves to be free of them. I found the protagonist here to be unbearable, the story difficult to care about, and the #metoo theme forced, as if the author wrote this book because she wanted to capitalize on the movement and threw together a copycat and clichéd way to make it happen. My friends lived in Brooklyn, but he wanted to live on the Upper West Side. We moved to the Upper West Side. My book was published. For ten days, he seemed glad to support me. It felt great. And then the dynamic changed. He told me I was taking his supportiveness for granted. He said he considered it his responsibility to take me down a peg. I considered parceling out the good news I shared. I tried to need less.

When whispers start to circle that your office might have 'a bit of a rape problem,' and your close friend confesses her own unsettling encounter, you know there is plenty to gain from staying silent, and all too much to lose through speaking out. Prior to this summer, though I had read quite a bit of her writing, I had never seen a Nora Ephron movie. No, that’s not quite right. I saw Julie & Julia in theaters. I know: what kind of person knows the essay panning the egg white omelet but not how Harry met Sally? I wandered Central Park while listening to Nora narrate I Remember Nothing. I watched When Harry Met Sally, then Sleepless in Seattle, then You’ve Got Mail. I watched her son Jacob Bernstein’s documentary, Everything is Copy. I reread Heartburn. I read Richard Cohen’s memoir of his friendship with Nora, She Made Me Laugh. I gaped at the chapter in which Cohen wrote that he personally would have preferred for Nora to keep the whole sordid business of Carl Bernstein’s affair a secret. I read the critic Leon Wieseltier’s Heartburn review , published in Vanity Fair under the pen name Tristan Vox, in which he accused her of child abuse. I left my job at the TV network to go to graduate school, during which time I wrote a novel about a Hollywood assistant and the slippery slope of complicity. When I wrote the novel, I didn’t know if I would return to working in Hollywood. I wrote it as if I wouldn’t, with all the emotional honesty I could muster. Not Safe for Work follows an assistant in a major Hollywood TV studio in the early 2010s, described as "an ambitious young woman striving to get ahead in a world where a glossy veneer of glamour masks a deeply toxic underbelly". Nora Ephron was the patron saint of militarized vulnerability. She refused shame. Take, for example, her Esquire essay about having small breasts. Society said: hate your body, but don’t talk about it. Nora said: you don’t get to have it both ways.

In a simple sense, NSFW comments on how insidious rape culture is and how it’s particularly perpetuated in the workplace, both consciously and unconsciously, by both men and women. The novel places a focus on the complicity of both men and women – but more interestingly, the complicity of women. It’s kind of expected that men will never say anything because they’re ‘protecting their own’ or don’t see it as a problem that affects them – so then is the women’s responsibility to do something because ‘women support women?’ What role do women play in this corrupt system when they turn a blind eye to accusations against their male family members or friends, when they shrug it off because ‘he’s never done anything to me’. But then again, how can women be tasked with fixing a broken, patriarchal system that they didn’t create in the first place? Shouldn’t men be the ones who step forward and use their position to create change? She has an idea of what she wants her life to be but she is just starting to learn that maybe none of that will make her happy. In addition to her work life we see her romantic life and in particular her regular interactions with her mother, who is paying for a lot of the things our narrator can't afford on her small salary, and who constantly demands her time and attention. Her mother in particular is a fascinating character, and a type we have seen often in the last decade, a woman who knows and understands the structures that men use to assault women, who knows how difficult it is to bring charges up at work or to the police, and a woman who will say "Oh Robert didn't do that," when the man involved is a friend. And she knows too well what men are capable of. Her mother is a veteran feminist campaigner, a lawyer who now practises corporate law but who once fought a public battle for the rights of women who had been assaulted or raped. At first, the high adrenaline work environment motivates her, yet as she climbs the ranks, she confronts the reality of creating change from the inside. Her points only get attention when echoed by male colleagues. She hears whispers of abuse and sexual misconduct. Her mother says to keep her head down until she’s the one in charge―a scenario that seems idealistic at best, morally questionable at worst. Glittering. A funny, spiky compulsive story about toxic workplaces, lean-in culture and #MeToo Evening Standard

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Osteen said: “There’s not so much as a beat out of place in Isabel Kaplan’s prose, with a wit to match. She makes it easy to champion her work, which is engaging, insightful, wry and frankly brilliant. What an honour to have found a home at Penguin Michael Joseph, with a team whose vision is sharp and support boundless.” With her sun-bleached Hollywood setting, Kaplan transports us to another world - one which is achingly familiar. A novel which makes us examine our own complicity, while also weaving in threads of tenderness, drive and office-based humour which at times feels delightfully absurd . . . I inhaled this book - and came up for air still reeling Katie Hale, author of My Name is Monster The compulsively readable novel about a young woman trying to succeed in Hollywood without selling her soul - perfect for fans of Sweetbitter , My Dark Vanessa and Exciting Times For fans of The Morning Show and My Dark Vanessa , a compulsively readable debut novel about a young woman trying to succeed in Hollywood without selling her soul