Told over the course of a single day and from three fierce perspectives, The Work Wife is a richly observed novel about female ambition, complicity, privilege and what happens when the brightest of stars aren’t allowed to shine.
We chat with debut author Alison B. Hart about The Work Wife, along with the road to becoming a published author, book recommendations, and more!
Hi, Alison! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Hi! I was raised mostly in LA and moved to NYC for grad school in my twenties. After 22 years in the city, I moved with my family to North Carolina last fall. I’m a mom, a dog-mom, a former soccer player, and an uninformed gardener. I show up early to karaoke birthday parties and sing “9 to 5” badly to help break the ice.
How has the first half of 2022 been for you?
Like everyone, it’s been tricky juggling life and Covid—my daughter’s class was virtual for a little bit, then back in the classroom, then masks optional, then masks mandatory again after an ill-fated bus ride for the fifth grade end-of-year trip. But outside of that, it’s been sort of wonderful settling into our new home (what is this Seuss-y looking flower that just sprang up in my yard?) and community (the Triangle has bookstores galore) and, for me, gearing up for the launch of The Work Wife. In the spring, I realized that I would need more time for the latter and I quit my day job, which was terrifying but so far has proved to be a good decision.
When did you first discover your love for writing?
I got third place in a kindergarten writing contest with a piece of autofiction called “The Whole Day.” The first-place story was about a cat who lived in a fish bowl, which was the first time my mind was blown by the possibiltiies of the form. By the time I got to college, I’d become a practical-minded, pre-med student. Then I took a writing class in my junior year. I had to sleep out to enroll, which I don’t remember consciously deciding to do, but as I was trying to fall asleep on the floor of the English department while other hopefuls snored around me, I realized, “Okay, I must really want this.” And I did. I loved that class, and it forced me to rethink everything I was planning to do with my life.
Quick lightning round! Tell us the first book you ever remember reading, the one that made you want to become an author, and one that you can’t stop thinking about!
The first book I remember reading was a biography of Albert Scwheitzer in my elementary school’s library, where I hung out a lot. There was a children’s biography series I was working my way through, but I don’t remember any of the subjects before or after him. The first novel I remember reading—and weeping at its conclusion!—was Where the Redfern Grows. The book that made me want to be an author was Pride and Prejudice. The latest book I can’t stop thinking about is How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz, which comes out in September. The main character, Carla, is 56-year-old job seeker who’s meeting weekly with a counselor at the Senior Workforce Program, and the book is told through a series of interviews, job applications, skills questionnaires, and digressions about her life that are by turns devastating and laugh-out-loud funny. Carla’s gonna stick with me for a while.
Your debut novel, The Work Wife, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Let’s see. Fast-paced, juicy, ambition, complicity, service.
What can readers expect?
The story takes place in one day, so the book has the feel of something that’s taking place in real time. It also engages with the #MeToo movement, without depicting anything too graphic because lord knows we’ve all got enough trauma to contend with. The book is set in the summer of 2019, the week before the criminal trial of an abusive film producer begins. In the timeline of the book, as well as in the actual timeline of the #MeToo movement, that felt like an inflection point. We’d heard so many stories of women who’d been harmed (in Hollywood, as well as in other fields) and there’d been some measure of accountability, but we were past the point of plausible naivete, where you could hope that the corrupt old guard would be swept out, to be replaced by a bright and shiny and morally uncompromised new guard. By 2019, we knew that whatever was coming next was going to be just as messy. There were already hints of a backlash brewing, which we’ve now seen in, say, the Depp/Heard defamation trial. Setting the book in that year gave me the freedom to take the story to an unexpected place. The resolution couldn’t be easy or predictable, but I hope it’s still satisfying.
Where did the inspiration for The Work Wife come from?
Five years after moving to New York for grad school, and carrying a mountain of debt, I got a job as a personal assistant to a wealthy family. While The Work Wife is a work of fiction, and my own experience on a personal staff was (happily!) *much* different than Zanne’s, the world of the family office felt like rich territory that I was in a unique position to explore. I’ve also been an entertainment news junkie for as long as I can remember. (Sad but true: I once missed a flight because I was reading Soap Opera Digest and didn’t hear the boarding announcements.) When I decided to situate the wealthy family Zanne works for in Hollywood, I felt like Beth in The Queen’s Gambit, watching all the chess pieces fly across the ceiling. The #MeToo era was in full swing—Bill Cosby was sentenced to prison (a ruling that’s since been overturned), Les Moonves and John Lasseter stepped down from CBS and Pixar, respectively, and Christine Blasey Ford testified against Brett Kavanaugh, to name just a few of the high-profile stories playing out as I began writing—and I knew all of that would be playing out in the background of the novel, too. Finally, when I was around Gaby’s age, I was in a relationship with a woman about Zanne’s age. While age gaps aren’t a problem for every couple, in our relationship there were some power dynamics that were difficult to sustain long-term. I shrugged them off for a long time—much longer than Gaby does. Now that I’m older, I have a different perspective on it, and I wanted to revisit the issue through these characters.
Can you tell us a bit about the challenges you faced while writing and how you were able to overcome them?
In this book, I had two main structural imperatives to balance: the need to tell the story across three POVs while limiting the action to one day (and night). If I wanted to move forward or back a certain plot point or reveal, that required a bit of calculus to make sure I could do it and still have all three characters get to Stabler Studios at roughly the same time and then back to the Stabler estate at the times the story demanded (while obeying the laws of time and LA traffic). There was too much granular detail for me to carry in my head, so I mapped out the story on my closet door using color-coded post-its. Holly’s chapters were in red (like the berry), Phoebe’s were pink (like the pink gown she packs for the party), and Zanne’s were orange. Being able to visualize the characters’ actions quickly helped me to move story points around and also make sure that their perspectives were balanced.
Were there any favourite moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
I had a lot of fun thinking about the Bump to Pump party, which Zanne is (grudgingly) planning and Holly’s hosting for her charity and Ted wants nothing to do with. I wanted it to be over-the-top in terms of the lengths the staff would go to to bring the theme (a jungle-styled nursery) to life, with these huge last-minute changes that Holly just expects Zanne to be able to pull off. I went down a rabbit hole researching what would be involved in having copper baby bottles custom made for the Moscow mules Holly wants to serve. How much would it cost? How far ahead would they need to order them? Most of us wouldn’t attempt such a thing because you’d be making a huge spend long before the theme had been finalized, and there’d be too big a risk of wasting the money if the theme changed. But for billionaires like the Stablers, it’s a drop in the bucket, and the personal staff gets used to making big gambles like these on their behalf. There may or may not have been a second rabbit hole involving capuchin monkeys—a monkey hole, if you will.
I also really enjoyed Holly’s storyline. She was always a key character in the novel, but I gave her her own POV after I’d already written Zanne and Phoebe’s. Once I spent more time in her head, I was surprised to see what Holly was capable of. She became a much more active character, which made the book stronger.
Were there any ‘must-haves’ you wanted to incorporate when it came to writing your novel, such as tropes, topics, characteristics etc?
I knew I wanted the story to take place in one day, so it feels like the characters are racing against the clock. I’m also a huge fan of multi-perspective stories and the way that switching between them can fold time and add layers to the truth. As I developed the book, I realized there needed to be a specific event that everything was building towards, so that’s how the idea of the party came into play.
What was the road to becoming a published author like for you?
My path to publication took a while. When I finally sold The Work Wife, it was my fourth time being out on submission. The earlier rejections were brutal, but they also helped me learn what writing meant to me. Turns out, I didn’t need one book to be published to start cooking up the next one. The unpredictability of the publishing business made me sad and made my resume untranslatable, but I was able to continue writing on the side, and to my surprise, I found out that I still wanted to (after taking a little time to feel bruised, of course).
What’s next for you?
I’m working on another novel! It’s about four adult siblings whose lives were derailed when their father went missing 10 years ago and what happens when a new clue surfaces and they team up to find him.
Lastly, do you have any 2022 book recommendations for our readers?
If you like The Work Wife, check out NSFW by Isabel Kaplan for a different spin on Hollywood and #MeToo. Some other books I read this year and loved are Post-Traumatic by Chantal V. Johnson, Walk the Vanished Earth by Erin Swan, Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee, and How to Be Eaten by Maria Adelmann. I’m also really looking forward to All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews, which comes out next month.
