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.
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.
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Reviews
Outrageous and amusing ... reads like rubbernecking or a junk-food binge, compelling a horrified fascination and bleak laughter
Wretchedly riveting
Butler is an essential contemporary voice
A master of writing about work and its discontents
The funniest book I've read in a long time, but also one of the most important ones
The feel-bad book of the year ... sublimely awkward and hilarious
Few authors capture the acidic angst of downtrodden millennials like Butler
Butler is an extremely sharp-eyed satirist, and the books are very funny, especially on the deadening banalities of office life