The New Me

Praise

“In just under two hundred pages, Halle Butler made me laugh and cry enough times to feel completely reborn.” —The Paris Review
 
“If you loved My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, don’t miss this sardonic and grimly relatable new book from Halle Butler.” —Bustle

“Halle Butler creates humor in the mundane . . . Writing with wit and spirit, she gives us a sharp and candid satire of the American workplace . . . No matter which generation you’re in, this dark, psychological comedy is a must-read.” —The TODAY Show

“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 . . . Ingenious . . . [Butler’s] wit and insight keep the pages turning.” —The Chicago Tribune

“[The New Me] dives deep into the idea of millennial burnout. . . Many readers will identify with Butler’s psychologically astute yet somewhat hopeless inner monologue.” —Mind Body Green
 
“Office Space meets millennial burnout in this inspired comic novel . . . A must-read for misanthropes, victims of office lunch theft, and anyone whose illusions about the American dream of steady work and a pension need shattering.” —Esquire

“Anyone who has ever felt like their life is going nowhere—and to make it worse, going nowhere in an achingly slow manner—will recognize themselves in Halle Butler’s new novel.” —Nylon

“A skewering of the 21st-century American dream of self-betterment. Butler has already proven herself a master of writing about work and its discontents.” —The Millions 

“Millie is just the kind of misanthropic, hopeful/doomed thirty-year-old we’ve all known, and/or been, and/or loved, and/or hated. Butler is an essential contemporary voice.” —LitHub

“A brilliant excoriation of the marketers telling us that life offers an unending parade of do-overs. Butler nails the unspoken hierarchies of contemporary office life in this wry and utterly terrifying work.” —Vulture 
 
“Few authors capture the acidic angst of downtrodden millennials like Butler, whose heroines, trapped in precarious and soulless work, take comfort in consumption, in cynicism, in ill-fated self-improvement.” —Huffington Post

“In The New Me by Halle Butler, Millie goes from her temp job to her home and back again, repeating an unfulfilling cycle every day. The New Me is a sharp, darkly comedic examination of capitalism, millennial life, and how to escape it all.” —Bitch Media

“This quick-paced novel . . . make[s] you feel things you’d have to wait hundreds of pages to experience in a much longer epic. Meet Millie, who at 30 is keen on reinventing herself. The answer, the millennial believes, may come in the form of a full-time job, but of course, capitalism, feminism and general laugh-out-loud angst all interfere.” —amNewYork

“Wake up, look in the mirror, swear it will all be different today. Sound familiar? Here’s that feeling in novel form: Meet Millie, a 30-year-old flailing around in dissatisfaction. A job offer seems to promise reinvention—but, sadly, easy transformations are for caterpillars, not lonely, anxiety-ridden women.” —Elle

“Even in the midst of Millie’s strained hopefulness, Butler’s incisive prose cuts sharp. Millie is, like us all, nominally an adult in a world that finds little dignity in adulthood.” —Chicago Review of Books

“[The New Me] brilliantly captures the anxiety of the era . . . It’s depressing and hilarious, cynical and side-splitting. Butler’s observations of character, dialogue, and social class are barbed and relatable.” —Newcity Lit

“The kind of humor found in The New Me is so sharp it cuts.” —Popsugar

“A sharp and observant writer, who takes to task the tragicomedy of modern capitalism . . . Butler has created a disquieting heroine with an indelible voice.” —Publishers Weekly

“A bouncy, profane, highly addictive novel about work, female friendship, and other alienations. Halle Butler’s insane talent shimmers on every page of this deadpan misanthrope’s ode. A must-read!” —Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Gold Fame Citrus and Battleborn

“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.” —Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble

“A dark comedy of female rage. 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, showing us the futility of betterment in an increasingly paranoid era of self-improvement. Hilarious.” —Catherine Lacey, author of Nobody Is Ever Missing and The Answers
 
“A bleak and brutal book that exposes a nearly unbearable futility to life in the workforce, not to mention life outside it. Butler’s vision is funny and raw and dark—a cautionary tale, hilarious and intimate, against growing up and making do.” —Ben Marcus, author of The Flame Alphabet

“Halle Butler has a way of looking at our twenty-first-century neoliberalist condition that simultaneously exposes its brutality and renders that same brutality absurd, hilarious, fizzy with humor.  She’s an incisive, curmudgeonly bard of the uniquely precarious times we live in, and it is crucial that you read her immediately.” —Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine