Sarah list facts about their mutual friend who now lives in LA. He's bored. She's boring. And I feel bored, and then feel annoyed, and I wonder why no one ever wants to talk to me. I'm a great conversationalist, it just takes me a minute to get into it. But once I get into it I really roll. I remember a lot of times I've been downright charming. I also remember a few times I've been abruptly aggressive, sure, but it's unhealthy to dwell on the past." MJS: Do you think we’re becoming robots — conditioned to be autonomous, performing tasks that pay us enough to continue doing those tasks? 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.

MJS: Really wish we could just be ourselves all the time. If that were true, how long do you think it would take before society would crumble? But hating the face one chooses to show the world is to hate their attempts at success, at assimilation. 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. That to accept the world as it is, and to become soothed by conveyor-belt, good-school-to-good-retirement-home, status-seeking consumerism would be a kind of spiritual death.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)” Very few people have ever asked me about my process. I guess it’s a balance of trying to stay relaxed and attentive, right? I was thinking about the term toxic as it relates to people and friendships, and how that relates to self-improvement. Identifying and eliminating toxic people was kind of a craze in 2015, 2016. I’m toxic, I need to eat mushroom powder, my friend is toxic, I need to put up a boundary. I was thinking of Millie as a toxic person, but one with a very good argument.

I visualize myself getting coffee with Sarah tomorrow, really bonding and getting to know each other, breaking out of this two-year pattern of drinking, complaints, and misunderstandings. Maybe we could go out for breakfast, play cards, really listen – or better, not have anything to say. We could just exist together. 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 Made me laugh and cry enough times to feel completely reborn.”—Nikki Shaner-Bradford, The Paris Review Is it on your mind because you feel that Chris isn’t taking your criticisms of his management style the right way? And you feel some connection there, between your cousin’s frustrations and your own?’

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No spoilers - not necessary to spill the beans on how things wrap up .....or give detail specifics ....( friends, job, boss, other work colleagues, etc.)... Mille is 30 years old and lives alone in NYC. She separated with her boyfriend of 4 years over a year ago and has yet to be touched since. She works at a temp job she hates with people she loathes. She is a bit socially awkward, slovenly by nature, full of internal rage, and desperate for a change in life. That pretty much sums up the story. Similarly to her prequel, Butler explores the mundanity in our daily personal, and professional working lives and the consequences (or breaking points) that occur when we aspire to such far-out-of-reach idealism’s. If I could have been myself at the office, I would have been so much happier. I wish people could be themselves all thetime. I’m interested in Millie’s hostility. In The New Me there are long, digressive tangents in which Millie examines and surgically dissects social cues and other forms of politeness. She’s an observer of the world around her, yet she doesn’t spare herself from this examination.

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. I wanted to become her friend immediately. This would be a good place for me to describe, in summary, Butler’s new novel, The New Me , but I hesitate to say that it’s about loneliness, alienation, depression, and friendship. I will say that I experienced waves of empathy for her narrator and her narrator’s anxiety sweat. The New Me is a bold and absurd work of comic genius that dissects social mores, neoliberalism, and consumerism disguised as self-improvement. In other words, Butler and I are kindred spirits and I’m so grateful to have become her friend (when she’s not making fun of me). It's a tension that sort of ends up infecting her body, too — her shoulders are always tight. She's always hunching and it's these little things that just sort of ratchet her up. 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 MillionsThe nihilism of The New Me is relentless, but is there a freedom in it? I don't think so, and that is what makes the book so fascinating and so utterly, thoroughly, raw and uncompromising. It's not a comforting read, but it doesn't want to be. It's screaming into the void and aware there will never, ever be a reply. Girls + Office Space + My Year of Rest and Relaxation + anxious sweating = The New Me .” ( Entertainment Weekly )

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