JENNIFER LIPMAN
PLENTY OF people read to understand more about the world, but fewer write a novel to do so. In fact, for Manhattan lawyer Erica Katz, penning her debut was a form of therapy after a decade of long hours, demanding clients and outrageous expense accounts.
“I’ve always sorted my thoughts in writing,” explains New Jerseyborn Katz, whose soapy, page-turner of a debut —The Boys’ Club — has already been scooped up by Netflix. “The world was changing around me, Donald Trump was elected, the #MeToo movement was at a boiling point, and my thoughts were having trouble sorting themselves. I started to write and the words came out in fiction. It was the most amazing form of therapy I could’ve imagined.”
The resulting novel, written over 18 months during rare annual leave days, is an outrageous, gossipy tale of a naïve associate called Alex at a fictional New York firm, and the scandals she becomes embroiled in. It’s a world of extortionately expensive client lunches, free-flowing booze and endless designer clothes and handbags, not to mention badly-behaved businessmen and competitive colleagues. It’s familiar territory for the author, now 36, who joined a Magic Circle type firm straight out of Colombia Law School, and fell headfirst into the intense culture of “Big Law”.
Still, Katz — it’s a pseudonym, her real name “is actually even more Jewish if you can imagine” — insists the book is not about her experience per se. Klasko & Fitch is not a version of the firm she worked for. She never worked in Mergers & Acquistions, the division notorious for bad behaviour and lack of women (she practised in capital markets) or for a partner like the charming, manipulative Peter Dunn. And she never witnessed the seedy goings-on she writes about, from sexual harassment to freely available cocaine, or from a young lawyer contemplating suicide after a workplace affair to another caught with a prostitute on a company retreat.
“It’s not anyone’s experience who I know, but you need only open a newspaper to know things like this happen every single day,” she says. When she started writing, people queried whether her plotlines would be believable; a few years on, there has been much more discussion of how power dynamics play out. “Now no-one is questioning whether the book is realistic, just whether it happened to me, because they know how often it happens. This isn’t my life, and it’s not the life of people I know. It’s the amalgamation of stories I’ve heard or rumours or stories surrounding me that all happen to one character.”
But some aspects are drawn from life. Alex works round the clock and occasionally uses an office “nap room”; as Katz says, “there’s no real beginning and end to your day. It is 24/7, emails don’t stop ever.”
“The hours and the dinners and the money is the only part of the book that is true to form that I saw,” she says. “When you’re closing a deal and so much money is on the line, no-one cares if you are well-rested or if you see your family and kids.”
Growing up in a family of doctors, Katz knew some Manhattan lawyers, but didn’t have much exposure to the ins and outs of that world. “The general anxiety Alex feels in her first few days is very much true to my experience,” she says. “There is a sort of competitiveness that you don’t necessarily understand why it being is imposed on you.”
She recalls the lavish salary she was paid even as a summer associate and how fascinating she found the glitz and glamour at first. “I grew up outside New York, and I understood nice places. I wasn’t shocked by the nice restaurants but I was shocked by the amount of the money. It’s something you have to reckon with whether that’s the life you want.”
Katz is currently riding out lockdown in her family’s vacation home away from New York, while working as hard as ever. When she signed her book deal, she switched to a management role in her firm. Now with some distance, does she think things will ever shift at the top of an industry like corporate law?
“I don’t know how practically it can change,” she says of the alwayson culture. “There’s just work that needs to get done. Someone needs to take care of things, and it makes sense that the people who have been in it the least amount of time should deal with that, because they’re fresher and perkier and maybe don’t have kids yet.”
But the book highlights the sexism, classism and racism that can be endemic, which she thinks can and