Jillian

(Paperback)

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Description

Twenty-four-year-old Megan may have her whole life ahead of her, but it already feels like a dead end, thanks to her dreadful job as a gastroenterologist's receptionist and her heart-clogging resentment of the success and happiness of everyone around her. But no one stokes Megan's bitterness quite like her coworker, Jillian, a grotesquely optimistic, thirty-five-year-old single mother whose chirpy positivity obscures her mounting struggles.

Megan and Jillian's lives become increasingly precarious as their faulty coping mechanisms--denial, self-help books, alcohol, religion, prescription painkillers, obsessive criticism, alienated boyfriends, and, in Jillian's case, the misguided purchase of a dog--send them spiraling toward their downfalls. Wickedly authentic and brutally funny, JILLIAN is a subversive portrait of two women trapped in cycles of self-delusion and self-destruction, each more like the other than they would care to admit.

Reviews

Outrageous and amusing ... reads like rubbernecking or a junk-food binge, compelling a horrified fascination and bleak laughter - Kirkus

Wretchedly riveting - New Yorker

Butler is an essential contemporary voice - Literary Hub

A master of writing about work and its discontents - The Millions

The funniest book I've read in a long time, but also one of the most important ones - The Rumpus

The feel-bad book of the year ... sublimely awkward and hilarious - Chicago Tribune

Few authors capture the acidic angst of downtrodden millennials like Butler - The Huffington Post

Never before have a pair of characters made me so sick with hatred and empathy at once. Butler is writing exactly what I want to read.

Author Bio

Halle Butler is a writer living in New York City. The author of Jillian, she has been named a National Book Award Foundation's "5 Under 35" honoree and a Granta Best Young American Novelist.