The New Me

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Masterfully cringe-inducing and unsparingly critical, “The New Me” extends Butler’s interrogation of those subjects, making the reader squirm and laugh out loud simultaneously. Drinking? Oh, no, for sure not. I’m just clearing my head, going on a walk in the park,’ I say. Then, like maybe it will make a difference, I point over my shoulder and say, ‘I live right there.’ Wake up, look in the mirror, swear it will all be different today. Sound familiar? Here’s that feeling in novel form.”— Elle Millie realize she could apologize to her mother....let her know she has been depressed but wasn’t blaming her for it.... hoping to have a better, but low-key relationship with her mom. It's fun to watch these characters go off the rails. They have terrible thoughts, the kinds of things we all end up thinking on occasion. We hate ourselves afterwards just like they do. It's painful to see yourself in such loathsome thought patterns, but in the end you still have empathy for these people. You think they could be just fine if they stopped and made a few life changes. And that is both comforting (because that's true for us too) and frustrating (because who actually changes their life?).

Maybe artists dread the process question because it seems sort of beside the point or hard to answer properly. The answer is something like, I really have no clue what I’m doing, but I like doing it.She says the clothes are fine, and then goes on to tell me that I shouldn’t worry about it. She mentions maybe waiting until I get the job offer to buy the clothes, and I say, ‘But you think I should get these?’ She says, ‘Yeah, they’re fine. I mean, if you can afford them.’ This book. I read it because my book buddy Hannah thought I might like it. And I did! But jeeez, did it break my heart. I really felt for Jillian. Maybe because she reminded me of so many of my clients (I represent low-income tenants who are facing eviction). Maybe because since becoming a mom I am so so much more sensitive. Maybe because she is truly a tragic character.

HB: I think structure is important. When you have structure for your day, you don’t have to worry about what you’re going to do. You can just do what you’re doing. But, of course, it depends on what you’re doing. When I was temping, I would have this really creepy feeling every morning where I was really aware of my mortality — like, “okie dokie, here we go again until I die!” That was awful. But when I think about my best, happiest times, many of them involve the routine of morning coffee, reading at night, making dinner, spending a few hours on a project, those kinds of routines. I imagine her getting a walkie-talkie call about me – the creepy stumbling man/woman – and looking down at me from her window in the field house, and deciding that she was going to just nip it, just come down here and take me out, get ’er done, as they say, and then her hustling down the stairs, body in full motion, a little articulation of the elbows, a little pneumatic pump of the arms. Nothing really that my ultra-smooth cadence can do to convince her of my innocence in the matter. When the possibility of a full-time job offer arises, it seems to bring the better life she's envisioning within reach. But with it also comes the paralyzing realization, lurking just beneath the surface, of how hollow that vision has become.

If you've ever questioned your place in society and wondered how to separate self worth from a career or the expectations of society then there'll be something in here for you. The New Me is short and immensely readable, with my beloved flowery, witty writing and a phenomenal voice. Halle Butler writes addictive repulsive realism so well. 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. 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.

This is the world of alienated labour, and it is the world that Butler, who featured on Granta’s best of young American novelists list in 2017, has been drawn to twice; in Jillian, her first novel, which was published in the US in 2015 and is now being released here, and in 2019’s The New Me. It’s also a world she has inhabited. After she graduated from art school in Chicago in 2008, she felt at a loss that was as much existential as material: “When I was in my 20s, I knew that I would have to have a job, and I knew that I would have to have a career, but I didn’t understand how to get excited about that,” she tells me, as we talk over the phone. “I didn’t understand what that would even mean. And I was like: ‘OK, I like to read, I’ll try to be a copy editor.’ I would take copy-editing classes and apply for jobs and I couldn’t get them because I didn’t have the enthusiasm for it. Every time I tried, it felt really forced. And so I found myself in jobs that would be considered menial. And the advice that I kept getting was that I needed to find a career.” But that came with its own question: “Just how do you cure the pain of jobs with more jobs?” As this is a book that explores hating other members of our species in a capitalist system, leaving the history of racism out of the conversation is a discomfiting choice.

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The New Me is a claustrophobic and brilliant novel that takes a good long look at what's on offer to millenials these days and tears open the relentless yammering maw of "if you just try, you can do it/tomorrow is another day/just eat better, exercise more/try meditation/just do one small thing and change your life!" to show that it's just noise and, at the end of it all, past the self-help, self-care, and "adulting" is just you and who you are. The narrator of “The New Me,” Millie, spends her days stapling papers in pursuit of the elusive “temp-to-perm” while teetering on the brink of total emotional breakdown. Her parents, comfortable retirees, subsidize her tiny apartment. She ruined her last romantic relationship. She has one quasi-friend, Sarah, but it’s a parasitic situation—Millie lets Sarah monopolize conversations, which makes Sarah rely on Millie’s company, which gives Millie a way to feel superior. Millie is thirty: young enough to expect more from life than twelve dollars an hour at work and episodes of “Forensic Files” on her laptop, but old enough to see that, although her job may be temporary, her feelings of insignificance and inadequacy might never go away. The dog, my replacement, a taut, bitchy terrier named Cindy, approaches me barking nervously, tail between her legs. I ignore her. This is the only instance in my entire life where someone's shitty behavior toward me is actually rooted in jealousy. I feel almost complimented." 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?’ Originally from Bloomington, Illinois, Butler graduated with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008. [1] [2] As of 2017, Butler was living in Chicago. [3] Career [ edit ]