Today’s GalleyCrush is Leigh Stein’s Self Care, forthcoming from Penguin Books on June 30, 2020.
Perfect pitch: “The female cofounders of a wellness startup struggle to find balance between being good people and doing good business, while also trying to stay BFFs.”
First lines: “By the time Devin found me, I’d been at the office for fourteen hours and was lying on a lavender velvet chaise, fortifying myself with room-temperature-staff-kitchen chardonnay that I’d poured into a MALE TEARS mug, scrolling through my various feeds, using multiple search terms, absorbing every abusive thing people were saying about me, @MarenGelb, M**en G**b, libtard, feminazi, stupid fucking cunt.”
Big blurb: “Self Care is a skewering mockumentary about influencer culture, internet feminism, and the infinite ways that big tech capitalizes on our worst fears and insecurities. Utterly teeming with humor, this is exactly the sort of book that Dorothy Parker would have written if she’d been reincarnated as an Instagram celebrity.” —Catherine Lacey
Book notes: Paperback, fiction, 256 pages.
Author bio: Leigh Stein is the author of the acclaimed 2012 novel The Fallback Plan, a poetry collection the same year, and the 2016 memoir Land of Enchantment. From 2014 to 2017, she ran a secret Facebook group of forty thousand women writers in her role as cofounder and executive director of Out of the Binders/BinderCon, a feminist nonprofit organization. She’s been called a “leading feminist” by the Washington Post and “poet laureate of The Bachelor” by the Cut.
