Clearly I like a more character driven story that has some plot thrown in on the side. This clearly was not for me . .

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.

And that is usually, according to the notions of being happy enough/successful enough--not enough. It's a bleak thought, that you, just as you are, can never get to where you want to be but The New Me makes you see what the cost of living trying over and over to be "enough" is.

Everything.

There are occasionally articles, usually by Gen Xers, about how there's no "definitive" millennial novel. As a Gen Xer, I have to say we're full of it. There are definitive millenial novels out there--and this is one of them. The New Me is about life in a world where "good" is defined and out of reach and all that's left is platitudes. Millie sees this, rages against it, and it seduced and trapped by it all the same.

The 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.

Or, to use the bitter, unflinching last line: "The countless hours between now and the end."

Very highly recommended.

A strangely compelling journey through the travails of aimlessness as experienced by a young woman who cannot realize her full potential (and perhaps doesn't want to). While some reviewers remark on the book's humor, I found little to laugh about in this fictional account of depression. The inability to connect with others, the tendency to go to work unwashed, the sour contempt for everything around her makes one cringe and shudder while nonetheless turning the page. The ending, in its insistence of meaninglessness, was something of a letdown, but the voice made me interested in seeing what Butler writes next.

This feels like it should've been a short story but instead but stretched out into a novel. Campy, kinda boring, and most likely written by a person who's somewhat jilted. Not my cup of tea.

Well, The New Me seemed to be some kind of brain dump by a very unhappy woman. I kept waiting for the main character to experience some kind of growth throughout the book, but to no avail. Unfortunately she will resonate with a lot of people out there. She is dysfunctional at times, unlikeable, obsessive, dismissive, sarcastic, and all around off putting to me. It just wasnt a match for me I suppose.
I received my copy through NetGalley under no obligation.

The New Me by Halle Butler

The plot of Halle Butler’s The New Me is decidedly simple. Millie is a 30 year old temp working as a receptionist’s assistant at a fashion agency downtown. She’s living in a nest of old clothes,Top Ramen and depressive body odor. She wants to be the kind of person who listens to music as she cooks, but instead she watches reruns of Forensic Files because the familiarity feels safe. Her best friend is a self-centered acquaintance who serves as a stand-in for actual intimacy.

“No one wants to do what I want to do, and I’m so permissive, so ‘Oh, okay!’ all the time, so ‘Tell me about your day’ all the time, that time after time I end up doing things I don’t want to do, acting the therapist...pushing my limits and biting my tongue until the inevitable happens and I snap and say something mean. But I don’t need to feel this way. I want to be happy, and I want to nurture my friendships, and I want to be happy to see Sarah, so that’s what I’m going to do. I’m happy!”

Her parents emanate pity and disappointment at Millie’s various highs and lows. Thoughts of her ex boyfriend still bring sudden fits of rage as she dwells on her insecurities and anxieties. At 30, I relate to Millie on a molecular level.

“You can’t ask somebody to help you without letting them know you’re different than advertised, that you’ve been thinking and feeling strange things this whole time. That you’re uglier, weaker, more annoying, more basic, less interesting than promised. Without letting on that your feelings are easily hurt, and that you are boring, just like everyone else.”

But once Millie’s temp job starts to become more permanent, she begins the upswing of planning a less temporary life for herself. She’s going to clean, clean, clean! Make lists! Buy those real groceries from Whole Foods, wake up early and go on three-mile runs, purchase professional clothes and get a haircut. She’ll have real friends again, maybe meet somebody new, be nicer to her mother on the phone.

“The kitchen is the heart of the home, no one has touched my body in more than a year, and I have a beautiful living space.”

It’s hard to say that one work of literary fiction can be the ultimate in defining a generation, but this one is a gold medalist. Right next to Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (reviewed here) and Claire Bennett’s Pond (reviewed here), The New Me reigns as another in a hopefully long line of painfully perfect odes to the insecure, the apathetic, the depressed, and the uninspired. It is honest and brutal, as caustic and bitter as Millie’s inner dialogue.



“No one thought about the scope of history that would evade them, the sea of identical people who would replace them as time made its waves back and forth, back and forth, seemingly linear, deceptive, stationary and changing all at once.”

Don’t mind me while I leave this Dorothy Parker poem here and call it a day.

“There's little in taking or giving
There's little in water or wine
This living, this living , this living
was never a project of mine.
Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse is
the gain of the one at the top
for art is a form of catharsis
and love is a permanent flop
and work is the province of cattle
and rest's for a clam in a shell
so I'm thinking of throwing the battle
would you kindly direct me to hell?”

Cringeworthily hilarious in the best possible way, this is a satirical look at one woman’s attempts to find her place in the workforce. A lifetime of preparing for a successful career comes up against the realities of a cynical workforce. More important than the years of education and hard work she has put in is how socially competent she is and how she dresses. More important than even that is knowing the culture of success. As they say, fake it till you make it. But some of those faking it seem to know their audience a little better. That seems to be the problem for Millie, she cannot seem to understand her audience, and no matter how hard she tries, she keeps doing the wrong thing in the most awkward kind of way, mostly without realizing it. I found this one of the most significant aspects of the novel. What she thought was normal, even appropriate behavior, was looked down upon by her coworkers, and Halle Butler uses a nice device to get this across. While the book was mostly written from Millie’s perspective a few parts come from external perspectives, her coworkers' perspectives for instance. I found this combination effective, contrasting Millie’s experience with her coworkers’ observations, and the large divide between the two: experience vs. appearance.
In an article for Vulture, Hillary Kelly describes a new micro-trend in fiction she calls “repulsive realism.” She lists Ottessa Moshfegh as the queen of this micro-trend, but also includes this new book by Halle Butler. With a culture obsessed with blemish-free life, repulsive realism focuses on the repulsive, but very real parts of life. What the difference is between this and “dirty realism” or “grunge lit” I’m not sure, but I am enjoying this trend and its direct contrast to the social media fueled obsession with the superficially perfect life.

A short-story-sized notion stretched and pulled and lathered/rinsed/repeated into a numbing slog . . . kinda like the workplace hell at the heart of the tale.

There is a certain sub-genre of contemporary being aimed at the burned out millennial set (My Year of Rest and Relaxation, The GIrl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky, Severance, The New Me, etc) and while I think this is a topic that 100% deserves to be explored, I'm not sure I love the method in which it has been so far. These sparse, repetitive, almost stream of consciousness works have never really been my thing (not when Dave Eggers was the biggest thing on Earth, and not now). So while I love this look at how modern career, relationships, social media, self-improvement etc are literally draining some of our wills to live, I wish we could get a more traditonal novelization on the subject. This will probably appeal more to fans of Ali Smith and Sally Rooney!

This wasn’t the worst book I’ve ever read, but not the best either. I just felt like I wanted more from this book. The whole thing was rather one dimensional and lacking. Millie annoyed me more than entertaining me for sure. This just wasn’t my favorite book.

Insightful, compelling, and bleak — Halle Butler truly captures the essence of a young woman "on the verge of a nervous breakdown" and the anguish of learning to “adult.”

Great writing. Ultimately, I think what Butler accomplished in this book is showing that even though Millie is disaffected, depressed, and lost, because she doesn't see that anything she does makes any sense or any difference, neither do any of the other characters. That's life? We are always looking for more, trying to identify that one part of their life that they can change and be better, be happier, and give their lives more meaning. It feels kind of bleak, but perhaps that is the new reality for this generation?

For fans of My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Millie is lost. Having broken up with her boyfriend, she lives alone in her apartment and watches episode after episode of the Forensic Files to pass the time. She seems to not care about much; she is financially dependent on her parents, she has friends who she doesn't really like, and let's face it, she's kind of a filthy slob. She's been working a temp job that she thinks is a joke, but once the idea of full time employment enters the picture, Millie’s actions begin to shift.

I'm not gonna lie: I love a good book about a millennial being lost (just take a look at my 2018 reads, they pretty much plague that list!). However, this particular book fell flat for me. It was almost as though it was trying to be Otessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation... only it was not nearly as interesting or well written. I know this book was satirical, but come on, even a satire requires a bit more of a plot than "depressed millennial is depressed".

Anyway, there is one thing that really saved this book from being a one star read: the Millie/Karen dynamic feels so real! How many times have you met a Karen in your life? That one person who is so off putting and so observant that you can feel their eyes judging you when you turn your back? The. Worst.

A special thanks to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.