"I didn't want to write a novel about a middle-class woman who sits in her house and worries about income inequality."

Bestselling author Adelle Waldman on plotting a caper, spending all night in her book's setting (literally!), and her razor-sharp new novel, HELP WANTED

Check out the collection of past Words With (Author) Friends, wherein I g-chat with an author and you get to read over my shoulder, and order Adelle’s devilishly smart new caper!

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Me: Adelle, hello!

Adelle: hi!

Sorry to be late--I was all logged in, but I started writing an email in gmail and suddenly looked up and noticed it was after ten.

No worries! We're very informal up in here.

also thanks for sending me detailed instructions. As you correctly intuited, i am the kind of old person who is clueless about these things.

It's not just you! G-chat is the forgotten gmail feature.

How are you feeling a couple months post-launch?

overall good and relieved, I think, but also it's an adjustment. I'm such a slow writer that I've been laser-focused on this book and its publication for, literally, years. It's strange to think about what comes next.

I hear that!

Like for years my inner life was oriented toward "March 5, 2024." And it was a good distraction, or a place to put all my anxiety. Now I'm like how do I organize my inner life? What do I focus on?

Even on your publication day, everyone's like, "So what's next???"

Well, today I want to focus on Help Wanted, at least for a moment—can you share more about the book?

So, the book is about a group of workers at a big-box store. They are on the team of workers responsible for unloading the trucks of new merchandise that arrive at the store each day. They come in very early--at 4 a.m..--to get the items unpacked and onto the store's shelves before the store opens to customers at 8 a.m.

In the book, the workers have an annoying boss. She is self-involved and a micro-manager and she also isn't very good at the job. The workers get the idea that the only way to get her off their backs is to get her promoted from line manager to store manager, a position so exalted she'll be too busy to bother them. So they set about making their incompetent boss look brilliant so that corporate will promote her.

I love this premise so much. Because the expected thing would be for them to try to get her fired. This is a much more complicated task!