Jen has reached her early thirties and has all but abandoned a once-promising painting career when, spurred by the 2008 economic crisis, she takes a poorly defined job at a feminist nonprofit. The foundation’s ostensible aim is to empower women, but staffers spend all their time devising acronyms for imaginary programs, ruthlessly undermining one another, and stroking the ego of their boss, the larger-than-life celebrity philanthropist Leora Infinitas.
Jen’s complicity in this passive-aggressive hellscape only intensifies her feelings of inferiority compared to her two best friends—one a wealthy attorney with a picture-perfect family, the other a passionately committed artist—and so does Jen’s apparent inability to have a baby, a source of existential panic that begins to affect her marriage and her already precarious status at the office. As Break in Case of Emergency unfolds, a fateful art exhibition, a surreal boondoggle adventure in Belize, and a devastating personal loss conspire to force Jen to reckon with some hard truths about herself and the people she loves most.
Jessica Winter is features editor at Slate and the former culture editor of Time. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Bookforum, The Believer, and many other publications. She lives in Brooklyn.
Literary Agent: Claudia Ballard (WME)
KIRKUS REVIEW | Kirkus Reviews | May 4, 2016
Work woes and fertility issues, female friendships and marital challenges are among the factors at play in this satirical novel.
Some of the details of the day-to-day life of Jen, the overly accommodating protagonist of Winter’s debut novel, will sound all too familiar to many young women: the cavalier (not to say cruel) treatment she receives at the company where she works, a vanity charitable foundation that purports to empower women while robbing Jen of her own sense of self; the sweet husband she dearly loves yet wishes was more of an economic provider; the college friends she feels closest to but can’t help envying; the struggle to conceive a child—in Jen’s terms, a “hypothetical tiny future boarder”; and the squelched yearning for some kind of self-actualization, although Jen and her crew would probably dismiss the very concept as sounding too much like something Leora Infinitas, the TV sitcom star–cum-socialite who heads the nonprofit at which Jen works, would hold a board meeting to discuss. When she’s not toiling away at her pointless job—her chief duties are writing memos no one reads; devising acronyms no one likes; and reading the heartfelt, meandering musings of the privileged women Jen and her caustic-yet-caring work pal, Daisy, have dubbed “the Judys”—Jen makes art and is actually a gifted portraitist. Her work evokes the hidden, perhaps happy, perhaps sinister inner lives of her subjects, and over the course of the novel she finally begins to get a handle on her own inner life. While at times the story veers uneasily between the broadly farcical and intimately emotional, it gains momentum as it goes along. At a certain point, Winter’s hold on the plot, her characters, and, as a result, her readers becomes surer as it leads to its satisfying conclusion.
Half rollicking sendup of celebrity philanthropy and half meaningful meditation on marriage, friendship, family, and adulthood, Winter’s curious, captivating novel seems to teeter at times between split purposes but ultimately finds a pleasing balance.
Break in Case of Emergency | Publisher’s Weekly | July 2016
Jessica Winter. Knopf, $25.95 (288p) ISBN 978-1-101-94613-8
Winter’s debut novel offers an entertaining and smartly satirical glimpse inside a New York City nonprofit startup. Jen, in her mid-30s and a new hire at the Leora Infinitas Foundation (also known as LIFt), attempts to navigate the office culture of meaningless jargon, comically hollow acronyms, and self-congratulatory meetings about vague project proposals. Jen, who is by nature accommodating and eager to please, becomes conflicted as she realizes that the company is more concerned with appearances than empowering women all over the world, as its mission statement claims. Still, unlike her coworker Daisy, who is hilariously blunt in her mockery of the foundation, Jen is determined to please her superiors and succeed in her position, having given up on her dream of becoming a visual artist in favor of a stable income for the next phase of her life. She and her husband have been trying to conceive for long enough that they’ve devised their own code language for doctors’ visits and fertility tests. But as Jen’s job begins to affect every aspect of her life, she’s forced to reexamine her choices, relationships, and aspirations. This is both a biting lampoon of workplace politics and a heartfelt search for meaning in modern life. (July)
Fertility and foundation problems come to Flatbush. In Brooklyn author Winter’s satirical debut novel, heroine Jen’s anxiety is spiraling out of control. By day, she labors for a narcissistic boss at a feminist nonprofit in Manhattan. At home in Brooklyn, frustration grows as she and her husband Jim struggle to start a family. Things go from bad to worse on a trip to Belize, when Jen finds herself stranded on a desert island with an Australian video-game tycoon who’s into role play. This biting rendition of life in the Big Apple and beyond belongs in your beach bag.