How a bad job led to a good book

It’s not often that you find a novel set in a corporate HR department, but that’s the setting of “This Could Hurt” by Jillian Medoff (Harper), a charming novel that introduces readers to Rosa Guerrero, a tough, attractive sixty-something woman who is the longtime chief of human resources at Ellery Consumer Research. Rosa handles her department with skill and poise, maneuvering staffers through rounds of layoffs. But when she suffers a debilitating stroke a few months shy of pension age, her colleagues conspire to do her job for her and hide it from the company brass.

If Medoff (inset) seems to depict corporate America with unusual accuracy and attention to detail, it’s because her weekday career is in management consulting, where she advises senior leaders and HR execs on how to communicate effectively with employees, business managers and shareholders. She has worked for Deloitte, Aon, Marsh & McLennan and other Fortune 500 companies, mostly as a client-facing consultant.

But the inspiration for this novel came from a year spent as the communications manager in the HR department of a small research company.

“My boss, a woman in her early 60s, was a manipulative, tyrannical bully who lied, yelled, and tormented her staff. In a rare self-disclosure, she admitted that she’d had a stroke a few years before, and it occurred to me that this might account for her er- ratic, impulsive behavior as well as what appeared to be signs of a mental decline,” says Medoff.

“Or was I imagining the decline? I couldn’t be sure, so I never stopped scrutinizing her. In the morning, she was alert and energetic, but by midafternoon her thinking grew muddy. Along with forgetting names and dates, she drifted off during meetings and became easily confused.”

Eventually, Medoff moved to another job, but she remained fascinated by the question of the stroke, her creativity sparked.