The New Me
Millie is thirty years old, lives alone in a Chicago studio with a layer of dust on her single chair, and has just started a temp assignment shredding paper at a designer furniture showroom. Her supervisors barely register her presence; her co-workers gossip about her clothes; her parents pay her rent and want to know when she will be on her feet. Millie tells herself the temp job will become permanent, that she will lose weight, that she will stop spending evenings drinking white wine in the bath while watching disturbing forensic documentaries, that the New Me is days away. Halle Butler's second novel cuts between Millie's first-person spiral and the sharper, more contemptuous interior monologues of the women around her, building a tight, uncomfortable comic novel about millennial precarity, the gig economy, and the small humiliations of being unwanted at work. It was a New York Times Notable Book of 2019 and one of the era's defining workplace novels.
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Thirty-year-old Millie is a long-running temp at a Chicago design firm, doing data entry behind a half-wall and going home to a basement apartment and a glass of wine. The novel runs across a few weeks as the firm dangles a permanent job and Millie keeps drafting a new self.
The New Me was written by Halle Butler and published in 2019. Butler is also the author of Banal Nightmare. The New Me established her as a leading voice in millennial literary fiction.
Yes. The New Me is a deadpan dark comedy about a 30-year-old temp worker spiraling toward unemployment. It is widely paired with My Year of Rest and Relaxation as a defining post-2010s alienation novel.
The New Me is 208 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The New Me takes most readers 3 to 5 hours to finish.
The New Me is a standalone novel by Halle Butler, not part of a series.
The New Me is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
