The New Me

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What to expect

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. Misanthropic and morose, she spends her days killing time at a thankless temp job until she can return home to her empty apartment, where she oscillates wildly between self-recrimination and mild delusion, fixating on all the little ways she might change her life. Then she watches TV until she drops off to sleep, 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 - one that involves nicer clothes, fresh produce, maybe even financial independence - within reach. But with it also comes the paralyzing realization, lurking just beneath the surface, of just how hollow that vision has become.

Darkly hilarious and devastating, THE NEW ME is a dizzying descent into the mind of a young woman trapped in the funhouse of American consumer culture.

Critics Review

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, wearing ill-fitting tights, scrutinizing old take-out leftovers. THE NEW ME shows us the futility of betterment in an increasingly paranoid era of self-improvement, one in which the female body is grated into little bloody empowered bits of itself. A dark comedy of female rage. Fucking hilarious.
Catherine Lacey
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
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
Halle Butler has a way of looking at our 21st-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
A bleak and brutal book that exposes a nearly unbearable futility to life in the workforce, not to mention life outside of it. Butler's vision is funny and raw and dark-a cautionary tale, hilarious and intimate, against growing up and making do.
Ben Marcus
Painfully and hilariously socially astute. Sometimes I wasn't sure if I was crying with laughter or just sympathetic misanthropy. Millie is caustically funny, obstructively depressive and self-consciously complicit in an endless mise en abyme of utter vapidity and I am absolutely in love with her.
Luke Kennard
A novel so darkly funny and acutely observed that it feels like a documentary; a state-of-the-nation book about the Millenial condition
Andrew McMillan
Funny, shocking, clever, and hugely entertaining
Roddy Doyle
Vicious ... hilariously spot on
Guardian
A definitive work of millennial literature
New Yorker
Brilliant. For fans of Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Pandora Sykes
The best thing I've read in years. A dark delight. Viciously funny. Brilliantly subversive.
Emma Jane Unsworth
Made me laugh and cry enough times to feel completely reborn
The Paris Review
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
Nylon
Halle Butler's slim, acrid novel is a pleasingly cruel glimpse at the world of work and temping.
The New Statesman
A deliciously dark satire of office life
Guardian
A cringey book about someone's shitty life that makes you feel infinitely better about your own
Vanity Fair
wake up, look in the mirror, swear it will all be different today. sound familiar? here's that feeling in novel form: meet millie, a 30-year-old flailing around in dissatisfaction. a job offer seems to promise reinvention-but, sadly, easy transformations are for caterpillars, not lonely, anxiety-ridden women
Elle
The New Me is a pitch-black and wickedly funny take on millennial work culture and the lie of self-improvement. I loved it.
Nicole Flattery
It's terrific. So funny.
Zadie Smith
Monstrously depressing but so comic and well observed that I didn't really mind ... It is great
Dolly Alderton

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