Metro, August 2022
Set in the years leading up to Hollywood’s reckoning with sexism, harassment and abuse that came with 2017’s #MeToo, the moment Isabel Kaplan’s young protagonist becomes the assistant to a young studio executive immediately feels like dreadful foreshadowing.
This un-named narrator is an ambitious, college-educated feminist who believes she can succeed in toxic Hollywood without selling her soul. But it’s what she learns about the complicity and silence required to climb the career ladder which provides the real emotional and psychological drama.
Kaplan knows this world well – she started out as a temp at a television network – but such granular detail means the sometimes writing can feel too measured; at odds with the implication that the system needs ripping up. Perhaps, though that’s her point, that actually none of the #MeToo revelations were shocking for anyone in Hollywood – or indeed any corporate institution. In that sense, this book is a reminder that the fight has a long way to go.
