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.
About the Author
Halle Butler is a writer living in New York City. The author of Jillian, she has been named a National Book Award Foundation's "5 Under 35" honoree and a Granta Best Young American Novelist.
Industry Reviews
A definitive work of millennial literature - New Yorker
Brilliant. For fans of Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and RelaxationFunny, shocking, clever, and hugely entertainingVicious ... hilariously spot on - Guardian
The best thing I've read in years. A dark delight. Viciously funny. Brilliantly subversive. - Emma Jane Unsworth
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.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.A cringey book about someone's shitty life that makes you feel infinitely better about your own - Vanity Fair