NOT ALL IN A DAY’S WORK
Is the word promise in the book’s title an adjective or a verb, wonders Jennifer Platt
It’s sad cos it’s true, it’s funny cos it’s true and it works because it’s a cliché. A young woman living in London, working at an ad agency, has an affair with her boss who is 20 years older than her. What Promising Young Women does well is that it puts the tawdriness, awfulness and bleakness of that situation on display and dissects it. This is a timely debut from Irish writer Caroline O’Donoghue, who is a contributing editor for ThePool.com — an online platform known for its forthright and honest content tailored for women. O’Donoghue also cohosts the podcast School for Dumb Women. Her writing is incisive, clear and funny — Marian Keyes “loved it”.
Jane Peters is a 20-something everywoman who works for Mitchell Advertising. She has not been promoted in years and is among the young women working on the bottom rungs of the agency.
She is also an anonymous agony aunt known as Jolly Politely — dispensing useful and useless advice to anyone willing to write to her blog.
Clem Brown, one of the account managers who is known as a “HUGE flirt”, takes an interest in Jane. He decides to mentor her and she runs along to meetings with him, pitching advertising campaigns. They win a lucrative deal thanks to Jane’s quick thinking. She is suitably praised and they have a party to celebrate. It is here that she makes the decision to sleep with Clem.
The following day she is promoted by Howard Mitchell, the firm’s owner. She is obviously concerned that she was not given this position because of her hard work.
“No matter what happens now, no matter how far I go or how much money I earn, I’ll never escape the suspicion that I got ahead by having sex. I have been trying to imagine Clem’s conversation with Howard since he gave me the [business] cards, trying to picture how the whole thing went down. In my head, it was like Mad Men, all double entendres and raised eyebrows over the rims of whiskey glasses.”
Jane disappears into the affair with Clem. She ignores her own advice about having sex with her married boss. Her body, however, is sending her violent messages. Her hair starts falling out in clumps. She loses weight and develops a rash on her thighs that she calls “leg thrush”. She starts drinking heavily and has blackouts — not remembering conversations or rough sex. She reaches rock bottom quickly and soon learns some harsh truths about herself and Clem.
At this point O’Donoghue’s book takes a slightly off-tone route into the fantastical, explaining Clem’s behaviour as mystical, which does not work. Thank goodness the story is pulled back and we are mucking about in Jane’s messy reality once again.