YOU KNOW WHAT THEY SAY

In Graham’s debut memoir, she reveals an abusive culture at a Wall Street firm.

In the early 2000s, Graham was living in New York and working her dream job—a trader at one of the city’s major financial institutions. Her first six months on the trading floor involved long hours and high stress, but Graham found the work thrilling. There was no place she wanted to be more. When she got wind of a “reorganization” coming, she wasn’t worried. She had just aced her performance evaluation and received a large bonus, so she knew her work was valued. However, it wasn’t long before Graham realized that the new managers had brought with them a very different office culture than the one she had known. She was soon forced to perform menial tasks, which were more befitting those of a personal assistant than a trader, for Todd, one of her bosses. All the while, Todd started to steal her clients out from under her. Evenings out with clients became nights of partying and excessive drinking, and the frat-boy atmosphere of the office extended to the way Graham’s colleagues began to speak to her. “I was repeatedly subjected to verbal and physical sexual abuse in and out of the office setting. It wasn’t inconceivable to hear Todd tell me gross things like, ‘Isn’t that shirt a little too loose?’ Or ‘Don’t you have too many buttons buttoned?’ ” Unfortunately, things only got worse from there. Todd escalated his behavior beyond what Graham could bear, and she sought legal action against him. Things didn’t go quite as Graham foresaw, however, and the decision to stand up for herself ended up costing her quite a bit more than her job at the firm.

Despite the book’s serious topic, Graham writes with a heaping dose of gallows humor. (She refers to her former employer pseudonymously as “Bigg, Swingin, Johnson and Co.”) The prose isn’t always very detailed, but Graham manages to create urgency with her declarative, engaging voice, as here on the morning after Todd’s assault: “When I reached the trading floor, I noticed that there were more people in at this time than usual and one of them was Todd. Then it hit me. People knew. That’s why Andrea was so nice to me and that’s why Todd was here so early. I panicked. My heart started pounding and I couldn’t catch my breath.” The most fascinating—and tragic—sections of the book are those that deal with what happened after the transgression as the firm bungles the response and Graham’s personal life begins to unravel into addiction and mental health issues. She illustrates with grim specificity the emotional and mental tolls exacted when victimized and gaslit by an employer. The book’s subtitle, “A Memoir Presaging #metoo,” is a fitting description. Readers will recognize the same behaviors documented in the media during the last few years, and Graham demonstrates how the women who came forward in previous decades also risked their own careers and well-being.

A chilling memoir of a woman who spoke out against a predatory office culture.