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Jillian
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Halle Butler
- Length: 4 hrs and 35 mins
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Jillian
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Publisher's Summary
The "sublimely awkward and hilarious" (Chicago Tribune), National Book Award "5 Under 35" - garnering first novel from the acclaimed author of The New Me - now in a new edition
Twenty-four-year-old Megan may have her whole life ahead of her, but it already feels like a dead end, thanks to her dreadful job as a gastroenterologist's receptionist and her heart-clogging resentment of the success and happiness of everyone around her. But no one stokes Megan's bitterness quite like her coworker, Jillian, a grotesquely optimistic, 35-year-old single mother whose chirpy positivity obscures her mounting struggles.
Megan and Jillian's lives become increasingly precarious as their faulty coping mechanisms - denial, self-help books, alcohol, religion, prescription painkillers, obsessive criticism, alienated boyfriends, and, in Jillian's case, the misguided purchase of a dog - send them spiraling toward their downfalls. Wickedly authentic and brutally funny, Jillian is a subversive portrait of two women trapped in cycles of self-delusion and self-destruction, each more like the other than they would care to admit.
What the critics say
"In its ability to induce paralyzing existential depression, the fiction of Halle Butler is perhaps matched only by those Black Friday news stories in which grandmothers get trampled in front of stacks of fifty-five-inch TVs." (Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker)
"[A] claustrophobic, anxiety-inducing book." (Lydia Kiesling, The New Yorker)
"Few authors capture the acidic angst of downtrodden millennials like Butler." (Huffington Post)