Her heroine is warm and someone to fight for, even when she’s making bad choices, while the specifically Jewish mother-daughter dynamic (so much guilt) sits just the right side of stereotypical. Light and gossipy in tone, if it’s a beach read it’s also one that will make you think. Heartburn, Ephron’s only novel, is a thinly veiled and darkly hilarious story about a woman whose husband has an affair when she’s seven months pregnant. My friends lived in Brooklyn, but he wanted to live on the Upper West Side. We moved to the Upper West Side. My book was published. For ten days, he seemed glad to support me. It felt great. And then the dynamic changed. He told me I was taking his supportiveness for granted. He said he considered it his responsibility to take me down a peg. I considered parceling out the good news I shared. I tried to need less.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, you could see this as a brilliant film, exactly the sort of complex female-led story Hollywood has long been slow to commission. And she knows too well what men are capable of. Her mother is a veteran feminist campaigner, a lawyer who now practises corporate law but who once fought a public battle for the rights of women who had been assaulted or raped. Readers who were obsessed with My Dark Vanessa, this one is for you. A blistering look at the hidden side of Hollywood Glamour, 'BEST NEW BOOKS' But despite her worldliness, she finds a world even more rotten at the core than she’d expected, one where male studio executives can do what they want, when they want, and the women are expected to be grateful. This month, when my book was published in the US, he sent me a congratulatory message, saying how thrilled he was for my success. He has definitely not read the book; I don’t know if he has read the description. If he has, he must not have thought my critique of the patriarchy in Hollywood might include him.

She has an idea of what she wants her life to be but she is just starting to learn that maybe none of that will make her happy. In addition to her work life we see her romantic life and in particular her regular interactions with her mother, who is paying for a lot of the things our narrator can't afford on her small salary, and who constantly demands her time and attention. Her mother in particular is a fascinating character, and a type we have seen often in the last decade, a woman who knows and understands the structures that men use to assault women, who knows how difficult it is to bring charges up at work or to the police, and a woman who will say "Oh Robert didn't do that," when the man involved is a friend. They know you need to be thoughtful about what you say. Some of them now begin sentences with, “I probably shouldn’t say this anymore, but...” A frank account of the inherent filthiness of leaning in. A study of the psychological and at times, literal, gymnastics that are required of striving women." - Raven Leilani Brilliantly deadpan and spiky in all the right ways. An accurate, darkly funny but also brutal portrayal of everyday workplace and world power dynamics. I couldn't put it down Emily Itami, Costa-shortlisted author of Fault Lines

We had just moved in together for the first time, in Paris, when he confessed that my keeping a journal made him uncomfortable. People in relationships make all sorts of off-the-cuff comments, and they don’t mean anything, he explained. It made him nervous to think of me remembering or writing down things he said. He joked that if I wrote about him, it would be the end. Sharp, funny . . . The writing is fresh and stylish and the conversational tone helps the thought-provoking narrative zip along. I loved it Daily Mail In a simple sense, NSFW comments on how insidious rape culture is and how it’s particularly perpetuated in the workplace, both consciously and unconsciously, by both men and women. The novel places a focus on the complicity of both men and women – but more interestingly, the complicity of women. It’s kind of expected that men will never say anything because they’re ‘protecting their own’ or don’t see it as a problem that affects them – so then is the women’s responsibility to do something because ‘women support women?’ What role do women play in this corrupt system when they turn a blind eye to accusations against their male family members or friends, when they shrug it off because ‘he’s never done anything to me’. But then again, how can women be tasked with fixing a broken, patriarchal system that they didn’t create in the first place? Shouldn’t men be the ones who step forward and use their position to create change?Prior to this summer, though I had read quite a bit of her writing, I had never seen a Nora Ephron movie. No, that’s not quite right. I saw Julie & Julia in theaters. I know: what kind of person knows the essay panning the egg white omelet but not how Harry met Sally? I wandered Central Park while listening to Nora narrate I Remember Nothing. I watched When Harry Met Sally, then Sleepless in Seattle, then You’ve Got Mail. I watched her son Jacob Bernstein’s documentary, Everything is Copy. I reread Heartburn. I read Richard Cohen’s memoir of his friendship with Nora, She Made Me Laugh. I gaped at the chapter in which Cohen wrote that he personally would have preferred for Nora to keep the whole sordid business of Carl Bernstein’s affair a secret. I read the critic Leon Wieseltier’s Heartburn review , published in Vanity Fair under the pen name Tristan Vox, in which he accused her of child abuse. Nora Ephron was the patron saint of militarized vulnerability. She refused shame. Take, for example, her Esquire essay about having small breasts. Society said: hate your body, but don’t talk about it. Nora said: you don’t get to have it both ways.

We urgently need to develop avenues for conversations about all the behaviour that lives in this grey space. We also need to stop blindly applauding powerful women in Hollywood as if their success is inherently “good for women” or an illustration of the system working in a more egalitarian way. Some of the worst men in Hollywood are women. It’s an ugly truth, and one that’s difficult to discuss in the nuanced way it deserves, but women are often better foot soldiers of the patriarchy than men. Particularly women who have held positions of power for a while. Understandable: they, too, are the product of structural forces. That may explain, but it doesn’t excuse. And a number of them wield their gender as a protective shield against criticism. A frank account of the inherent filthiness of leaning in. A study of the psychological, and at times literal, gymnastics that are required of striving women. Raven Leilaini I found the protagonist here to be unbearable, the story difficult to care about, and the #metoo theme forced, as if the author wrote this book because she wanted to capitalize on the movement and threw together a copycat and clichéd way to make it happen. Deliciously sharp, ridiculously funny, and surprisingly heartfelt . . . I cannot wait to discuss it with everyone I know Coco Mellors, author of Cleopatra and FrankensteinNSFW is the story of a young Harvard grad who, thanks to a fairly healthy dose of nepotism adjacent connections, lands a temp job at the television network XBC. Her own skillset is what gets our unnamed protagonist promoted to an assistant position for one of the major movers and shakers of the network and eventually even allows her to sit in on pitches for new program development. The timeframe is prior to #metoo where office engagement is taken as . . . . You thrive under pressure, and are determined to excel. But there's a dark side to the industry that's about to rear its head. And soon, you must decide your place in it:

I struggled to understand what he found so threatening about women expressing their feelings. He used to like that I was a writer. He edited the column I wrote for our college newspaper; he came to a reading for my young adult novel when we were sophomores.When rumours of an assault start to circle the office, and your close friend confesses her own disturbing experience, you know there is plenty to gain from staying silent. I was complimented for having “good energy”, and my “niches” were identified as “women” and “books”. I regularly listened to horrifying conversations on mute. (In Hollywood, assistants listen in on all of their boss’s phone calls.) I was privy for the first time to private conversations among men. I heard sexist and racist comments and fumed silently, exchanging outraged instant messages with other assistants. We were all frustrated, mad, appalled. But so what? Who cared? To whom could we complain? To what end?