Private Equity: A Memoir
by Carrie Sun (Penguin Press, $29)
“On one level, Carrie Sun’s memoir does for finance what The Devil Wears Prada did for fashion,” said Helen Rumbelow in The Times (U.K.). Sun worked for four years as the personal assistant to the New York City– based billionaire founder of one of the world’s leading hedge funds, and she stacks up delicious details about the casual entitlement of her boss and his top associates. They even hire a woman in heels whose sole duty is to flush toilets for men too busy or preoccupied to do so themselves. “Remember,” Sun’s boss tells her, “money can solve nearly everything.” But in Sun’s account, “the central insight runs deeper.” She’s showing us how the ultra-wealthy daily grow wealthier, widening inequality.
Sun’s boss, “Boone,” isn’t an obvious bad guy, said Laurie Hertzel in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He preaches team. Gives to charity. He even showers Sun with pricey perks. Still, he demands round-the-clock responses from day one, and “it quickly becomes clear that Boone is manipulating Sun—putting her down, judging her appearance, setting impossible goals.” It’s “gaslighting at its most effective, and it begins to ruin her physical and emotional health.” Part of me wants to interject, “Well, what did you expect?” said John Gapper in the Financial Times. Sun, an MIT grad who’d already held a mid-six-figure job at Fidelity Investments, had hoped to find time for writing in her new $300,000 position, only to be nearly obliterated by its demands. But she does arrive at the epiphany that her boss’ only superpower is achieving total and totally boring organizational efficiency.
Adjust your expectations, said Anna Wiener in The New Yorker. Though Private Equity succeeds as an indictment of extreme wealth and today’s work culture, it’s “ultimately about a person finding herself.” Fittingly,
“as Sun starts to come apart under the pressure of her job, the writing gets more fragmented, and more experimental,” and she begins artfully disclosing incidents from childhood, college, and beyond that change how we see her. The maneuver is novelistlike, and “unusually stylish for a memoir.”