Not Safe For Work: Author of the viral essay 'My boyfriend, a writer, broke up with me because I am a writer'

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Sharp, funny . . . The writing is fresh and stylish and the conversational tone helps the thought-provoking narrative zip along. I loved it Daily Mail A Harvard graduate, she’s smart enough to know what is expected of women like her in this world: it’s not enough to be good at your job, you need to also be appealing and attractive, and willing to play the game, whatever that may be.

Blisteringly sharp, hypersmart, and compulsively readable―meet Isabel Kaplan’s searing debut novel about a young woman trying to succeed in Hollywood without selling her soul. Our narrator just graduated from Harvard and is the daughter of a prominent attorney known best for her work representing women in sexual assault and harassment cases. It is because of this pedigree that she is able to go to one of her mother's good friends, the head of development in fictional network XBC, to get a job. While it's a low level assistant position, she has also skipped a few years of even worse work to get there. She is ambitious and we get to see her work in detail, so if you do enjoy that kind of behind the scenes look this has a lot of that. This book captures that feeling of your early 20's so well, when you start to feel like you are in over your head, when you realize that all the things you thought you knew about yourself and your family and the world may not be true. Her heroine is warm and someone to fight for, even when she’s making bad choices, while the specifically Jewish mother-daughter dynamic (so much guilt) sits just the right side of stereotypical. Light and gossipy in tone, if it’s a beach read it’s also one that will make you think. NSFW is the story of a young Harvard grad who, thanks to a fairly healthy dose of nepotism adjacent connections, lands a temp job at the television network XBC. Her own skillset is what gets our unnamed protagonist promoted to an assistant position for one of the major movers and shakers of the network and eventually even allows her to sit in on pitches for new program development. The timeframe is prior to #metoo where office engagement is taken as . . . .I found the protagonist here to be unbearable, the story difficult to care about, and the #metoo theme forced, as if the author wrote this book because she wanted to capitalize on the movement and threw together a copycat and clichéd way to make it happen. My friends lived in Brooklyn, but he wanted to live on the Upper West Side. We moved to the Upper West Side. My book was published. For ten days, he seemed glad to support me. It felt great. And then the dynamic changed. He told me I was taking his supportiveness for granted. He said he considered it his responsibility to take me down a peg. I considered parceling out the good news I shared. I tried to need less. Since the protagonist was unnamed, it was easy to put myself in her shoes despite not having anything in common with her. The ending also more or less leaves things up to the reader’s interpretation. I thought this was an interesting way of showing that these things can happen to any woman.

The more I share about our relationship and breakup, the more vindicated he will feel in his fears. But if I don’t write about it, he succeeds in forcing my silence. If I don’t go into enough detail, the story won’t resonate with people who have experienced similar dynamics, but if I share too much, I run the risk of coming across as bitter and vengeful. I can’t prove I wouldn’t have written about the relationship had it not ended in this way, just like I can’t prove I wouldn’t write about a child I don’t have. It’s a trap. From the outside, the unnamed protagonist in NSFW appears the vision of success. She has landed an entry-level position at a leading TV network that thousands of college grads would kill for. And sure, she has much to learn. The daughter of a prominent feminist attorney, she grew up outside the industry, better versed in gender dynamics than box office hits. But she’s resourceful and hardworking―what could go wrong?But that didn’t make sense. He first broke up with me a few years ago because I wasn’t successful and independent enough. He wanted a partner, not a wife, he said. He didn’t suggest that I give up writing. He purported to support my ambitions, and I tried to come up with justifications for keeping a private journal. I didn’t counter that maybe he should choose his words as if I’d remember them. Frank, funny and unputdownable . . . behind the glitter and the justice, everyone is tarnished and compromised - including even our narrator. Kaplan, with her sharp and nuanced eye, sees it all, and tells it brilliantly Claire Messud, New York Times bestselling author of The Woman Upstairs

People misunderstand her phrase everything is copy,” my boyfriend explained. “It’s really about making yourself the butt of a joke first so that other people can’t do it to you.” In a simple sense, NSFW comments on how insidious rape culture is and how it’s particularly perpetuated in the workplace, both consciously and unconsciously, by both men and women. The novel places a focus on the complicity of both men and women – but more interestingly, the complicity of women. It’s kind of expected that men will never say anything because they’re ‘protecting their own’ or don’t see it as a problem that affects them – so then is the women’s responsibility to do something because ‘women support women?’ What role do women play in this corrupt system when they turn a blind eye to accusations against their male family members or friends, when they shrug it off because ‘he’s never done anything to me’. But then again, how can women be tasked with fixing a broken, patriarchal system that they didn’t create in the first place? Shouldn’t men be the ones who step forward and use their position to create change? I was complimented for having “good energy”, and my “niches” were identified as “women” and “books”. I regularly listened to horrifying conversations on mute. (In Hollywood, assistants listen in on all of their boss’s phone calls.) I was privy for the first time to private conversations among men. I heard sexist and racist comments and fumed silently, exchanging outraged instant messages with other assistants. We were all frustrated, mad, appalled. But so what? Who cared? To whom could we complain? To what end?Not Safe for Work follows an assistant in a major Hollywood TV studio in the early 2010s, described as "an ambitious young woman striving to get ahead in a world where a glossy veneer of glamour masks a deeply toxic underbelly". Meanwhile, her outwardly impressive but privately difficult and unstable mother is a constant source of stress. At some point, something has to give. The question is, is success worth all the compromises? And at what point do you become complicit in a system you recognise is problematic?