A Special Place for Women is a Deep-Dive Into the World of Girlboss Feminism
An everything bagel with garlic scape ceam cheese, roma tomatoes, red onion capers, and smoked salt to accompany this NYC hilarious novel.
A playwriting professor of mine once said that every story needs Alice to go to Wonderland. I haven’t read a book in a long time that I thought fit this writing advice so precisely.
Jillian Beckley is a freshly unemployed journalist grieving her mother while being forced to sell her mother’s house. She is determined to impress her ex-boss (as she wants to jump his bones) and get the inside scoop on what happened to Nicole Woo-Martin a politician that a secret society may have gotten elected and destroyed.
A Special Place for Women gets its title from the famous Madeleine Albright quote, “There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women." The cover’s bright pink cover with white Millennial single line portraits of women and a long neon-ensconced hallway (or is it a mirror looking into another mirror?) screams girlboss.
The novel’s cooperative working and event space goes a bit further than the NYC coworking space The Wing as no one knows who is a member or where they meet. The group is called Nevertheless, only ever spoken about in whispers. (Though it’s never explicitly stated, I have to assume it is in reference to “Nevertheless she persisted.”)
Her childhood best friend Raf’s new restaurant and subsequent glowing Vanity Fair write-up proves to be enough celebrity for Beckley to latch onto.
The novel’s chapters are extremely short and snappy, often ending on a meaningful moment or hook that surprisingly kept me up until two in the morning reading. The language is to-the-point, fitting for a journalist’s interior monologue, and full of biting humor. A Special Place for Women is extremely self-aware, when there are tropes, they are eventually called out by one of the characters.
I successfully guessed 1-1 ½ of the discoveries that Beckley makes. The entire time I read the novel I thought, “I would watch this TV show” and luckily it is already being adapted by Samantha Dee. A Special Place examines friendship, loss, love, and belonging while keeping a close and watchful eye on how rich, privileged, white CEO-chasing feminism isn’t the elite club it pretends it is.
