THIS TIME COULD BE DIFFERENT

A stressed-out bank executive questions what she really wants in life in Wierman’s novel.

“Standing there in pajamas she’d been wearing for most of the last month, milky face pale, red hair wild,” Chicago-based Madeline, 49, tells her fiancé, Rob, that she is scared she is going crazy since she just found a missing earring in an unexpected place in their apartment. He sympathetically reminds her, “I think your world has been pretty well upended.” The novel then flashes back to six months earlier, when Madeline, on the way to her job as a senior vice president at National Megabank, spots and brings home a stray that reminds her of the cat that her grandmother, who raised her, took away from her as a child; the incident seems to spark something in her. Madeline then, as usual, gets emmeshed in time-sucking work meetings and demands from her boss. She has recently started seeing Olivia, a therapist who has her explore her feelings more thoroughly than she ever has before. Madeline makes the momentous decision to quit her job, shocking her married best friend, Emma, who also works at the bank and is now contemplating the promise of a promotion. Will Madeline find her true vocation? Can Emma advance at the bank while also balancing being a wife and mother? The author notes that she quit jobs with Fortune 500 companies after decades of “building a career that was lucrative, ego-boosting, and a little bit soul-crushing.” Anyone who has toiled in corporate America will appreciate the inclusion of nagging corporate email correspondence and a fake-nice CEO—there are plenty of laugh-wince moments to enjoy in this novel. Wierman also masterfully delves into deeper psychological ground as Madeline’s reckonings with her issues are dramatically realized in interactions with Olivia and others.

Both an insightful depiction of therapy supporting growth and a dead-on skewering of corporate culture.