Caroline O’Donoghue’s Promising young women - gender, workplace and destructive passions in the LinkedIn era

The following essay contains mentions of rape and sexual abuse, among others. And, of course, you can also expect spoilers for the book discussed.

Last year I decided, on a whim, to finally read a book that had been sitting on my shelf for literal years. I had found it in a second hand bookstore and took it because it seemed interesting, it had a cute cover, and it looked almost brand new. Before I knew it, it had become one of my favorite books of the year. The book was Promising young women by Irish author Caroline O’Donoghue, her debut novel first published in 2018, and today we are going to be talking about how the book portrays power dynamics, relationships, gender, and more over the course of its roughly 340 pages.

Here’s the premise: Jane Peters works for a marketing company in London. As a hobby, she also is an “agony aunt” known as Jolly Politely. In her blog, people submit questions and ask for advice from “Jolly”. Jane has just turned twenty six, is dissatisfied with her work and after a breakup… let’s say she’s not in the best place. Before she knows it, she’s having an affair with Clem Brown, her middle-aged, married, senior colleague/boss. Fasten your seatbelts because what follows is a downward spiral with no breaks.

Narration, structure, tone

Right from the start, O’Donoghue traps the reader with her past paced narration and quick dialogues. She doesn’t necessarily pursue realism as much as she pursues agility. The narration is done in first person, present tense by the protagonist, Jane. Intertwined in the narrative are the emails she gets from those who ask for her advice as the internet personality/informal counselor “Jolly Politely”. These tend to be funny and not have all that much to do with the story. This is a painpoint, as the two sides of Jane, and the story, don’t tie together as smoothly as they could. Jane is sometimes immature, sometimes annoying and mean, but she’s relatable and funny enough in her observations to keep you engaged.

The book starts off as a moderately dark comedy, but later on acquires the qualities of a psychological thriller, with a slight borderline gothic flavor on top. The gothic comparison is even brought up within the book through parallels Jane draws to Jane Eyre and vampirism. Being her debut, O'Donoghue is not exactly subtle in her writing techniques.

Each part of the book marks a lower step in Jane’s descent. She becomes an increasingly unreliable narrator not because she is lying or willing to lie, but because she starts to literally lose her grasp of reality, going into spirals such as frantically posting on her blog or calling her ex and not remembering at all the next day. This contributes to the gothic feeling, the trope of an often isolated female protagonist slowly, but inevitably, losing her mind. Promising young women is, among other things, a story of decay. It’s the moral, professional, sexual, and eventually, physical downfall of its protagonist, a hellish cycle she has to go through before she snaps out of it and begins anew. Far from crazy, Jane is a young woman taken to the edge by a situation she can’t control, a toxic environment, loneliness and a devastating, abusive relationship. From the very beginning of the book, when the humor was still so present, I was already clutching my teeth as Jane started the path of her own destruction. I wanted to tell her “no girl, don’t do that!” all the time. It was like seeing a friend of yours making a really bad decision ignoring all the red flags –a train crash you can’t stop but you can’t take your eyes off from.

Themes and characters

Patriarchy and the workplace

Jane, lost, angry, and fragile, ends up engaging in a toxic relationship. It’s a relationship that is doomed from the start: she’s the stereotypical “other woman”, the playmate of a much older, well-off, professionally established and charming, married man. His name is Clem, and he also happens to be kind of her boss, further unbalancing their already heavily tweaked dynamic. Of course, Jane is no angel. No one forced her to return the filtrations of a married man, no one forced her to get involved with a coworker, no one put a gun to her head and told her she had to start a sexual relationship with him. In that specific sense, Jane is no victim. However, the abuse she suffers within that relationship, the way it affects her life and her other relations, the way he becomes controlling and domineering, and how he hijacks her professional life are not to blame on her. It's easy to judge her and say “she had it coming” but that would be unfair. However morally reprehensible, Jane does not “deserve” the abuse –no one does.

Professionally, Clem first encourages Jane to be more proactive, and sensing her potential, seemingly involves her in juicier teams and work projects, with the promise of a promotion on the horizon. Jane feels stuck and bored at her job, having worked there for two years with no prospect of ever progressing so when Clem shows interest in her ideas, he validates her in a way that feels addicting. Jane quickly becomes his right-hand person… Only to have her ideas and work appropriated and stolen by him when the novel is approaching the final parts. This validation-invalidation cycle is yet another way in which Clem exerts power over Jane –a way in which seniors often exploit their juniors, and men have historically erased women’s work.

When it comes to other characters in the novel, I think it’s interesting to start by talking about the other women. Women act as foes and enemies but also as friends and saviors throughout the story. So for example, Jane’s socially awkward but well-meaning co-worker Becky, goes from a bit of a nuisance to a being a source of strength. There is also Darla, Jane’s friend who is also a coworker. She’s a bit of a mean girl, especially to Becky, and is a highly driven overachiever. Eventually, there is a rift between her and Jane as Darla perceives her as a threat and rival in the workplace. By the end of the novel, Darla refuses to listen to Jane and is about to go down the very same dark path. Jane physically rescues Darla from Clem’s hands by interrupting/preventing a sexual assault, but their friendship is not repaired. Jane needs Darla as a counterpoint, and by saving her from Clem, she is also saving herself¹.

We also have Deb, a senior co-worker and Clem’s alleged rival. However, she doesn’t act as a mentor to Jane. Her warnings, if there were any, were too soft. As the novel progresses, Jane realizes the firm she works for is a grinding machine for the so-called promising young women, who have their work relegated, their ideas stolen, and it explains why they have such a low retention rate for female employees in certain positions. Deb being the only senior woman in her department. By not acting earlier, being too caught up in her own problems, and continuing to work in that toxic environment, Deb becomes complicit, by omission (and perhaps inadvertently), to the abuse women like Jane and Darla suffer. Of course, Deb can’t be blamed for the actions men around her are committing, but it shows how systemic the problem is, since she is seemingly willing to turn a blind eye if it means keeping her career and her peace of mind safe.

Darla’s desire to advance in her career and her distrust of other women, who might steal the spotlight is a big part of what breaks her relationship with Jane. For Deb, maybe, not speaking up is also a way to keep her career going. In the end, it is women’s mistrust to each other and the implicit fact that only so many women can achieve a certain status within the company motivate these decisions, and create much friction and jealousies not just between the women but also among their male colleagues.

Patriarchy and relationships

Outside of the workplace, we have two key female characters. On one hand, there is Renata, Clem’s wife, a sophisticated woman. She knows about her husband’s affairs and she condones them. As long as he gets her what she wants, she doesn’t care at all about the other women, or their well being. Renata acts as the ultimate symbol of how women favor the patriarchy by enabling, justifying and/or accepting men’s abuse of power. By contrast her sister (therefore Clem’s sister-in-law) Luddy tries to warn and help Jane. Luddy is an eccentric character, and is a bit of a comic relief. She starts kind of stalking Jane, writing anonymous messages to her Jolly Politely blog. These messages freak out Jane, and perhaps contribute to her faulty grasp of reality as the novel progresses, but the intention behind those actions is good. Luddy is doing her best to try to warn Jane about how awful Clem is, how he has done this with other girls, how he will do it to another girl again when he’s done with her. Luddy has detected, and is opposed to, Clem’s tactics and patterns. However, Jane doesn’t listen. And frankly, Luddy’s methods aren’t the best. She’s one of those women that seem a little crazy and no one pays too much attention to them, an outsider to the dynamic her sister is enabling.

Ultimately, Jane’s mother, whom she pushes away for most of the novel, is also key in saving her and helping her recover. Jane has a complicated relationship with her mother on account of the father who left them when he became involved with another woman. It’s easy to see how this, what Jane is doing with Clem, and how she ends her relationship with Max, are related.

Finally, let’s mention Max briefly. Max is Jane’s ex, who used to live with her. He dumps Jane because she has become insufferable, because she doesn’t love him anymore and is not putting any effort in the relationship –or so one can assume. Max is generally a good man, who was nice to her, and who tries to help when he gets sincerely worried about her. And yet, despite not loving the man, Jane can’t stand the idea that he’s now dating another woman. She questions frantically whether he left her because he was already in a relationship with this other woman and goes as far as to imply that to her friends to gain their sympathy. Jane’s insecurities go sky-high when she starts comparing herself to his new girlfriend. Patriarchy teaches women about competition for men’s attention, with physical attractiveness being a key component of the supposed mix. By comparing herself to another woman, Jane becomes more aware of all her flaws –she hates that new woman she doesn’t know, she becomes paranoid about her past relationship and what it meant.

Sex and power

Simple sexual attraction is also present in the book. Jane doesn’t get into an affair with Clem as a means to advance in her career. In fact, she spends much of the novel anguished that it might ruin it if people found out. And her own heartbreak and unexpressed feeling over her ex and others surely contributed. But ultimately, Jane is, simply put, sexually attracted to Clem. Her desire is expressed honestly and frequently. Ultimately, her desire for both the man himself, and the man as a means to palliate her loneliness are things Clem takes advantage of.

As the book progresses, the politics of desire are expressed in different ways. One of the ways in which both this politics of desire and Jane's downfall are expressed is through her own body. In this regard, there are multiple, contradictory feelings. Jane begins by losing weight, a thing she has wanted in the past. One passage reads: “Whenever I went on a miserable diet, Max would always say the same thing. ‘Men don’t love skinny women. Men who love themselves love skinny women.’”. However, as time goes on and she keeps rapidly losing weight, her strength, strange rashes appear on her skin, her hair starts falling off, and so on. At the same time, and in contrast to the physical decline, Clem buys Jane lingerie, he encourages her to dress and act in certain ways. He wants her thin and pretty. For a man like Clem, the look of the woman he's having sex with is also a status symbol.

The most concerning and disturbing parts of the book directly involve sex. As I mentioned previously, Jane’s decline is also a markedly physical one. She’s often feeling unwell and takes very little care of herself. Her unhealthy habits worsen or multiply, with drinking being the most noticeable. In fact, in most of the instances where she is having sex with Clem, she is inebriated to some extent, partly because he encourages her to drink big quantities of alcohol when they are together. As the book progresses, it only gets worse, to the point Jane realizes she can’t recall them having sex –though they have. The implication of rape is one that is too hard for Jane to bear, so she never quite calls the word or thinks about it in that way. Near the end of the novel, Clem takes Darla, drugged, to a toilet where he assaults her. This time, Jane confronts him which results in a physical fight between the two. Once again, the words rape or sexual assault are not mentioned, but the fact is still there. Clem doesn’t have enough exerting power over these young women by virtue of his position and his emotional manipulation, he also needs to exert complete sexual control over them. As Jane expresses during their climatic fight “He is a man whose confidence exists solely in the arena of his ability to control other people.”

During the novel, Jane asks herself, and the readers of her blog, why older men get involved with younger women. She receives many answers. However, when I finished reading the book I couldn’t avoid interpreting the story as an implicit answer to the question: older men get involved with younger women for control –the control they think they can, and sometimes can indeed, exercise over these young women.

Mythologizing and self narration

But Jane also asks the question “why do young women get involved with older men?” The reply she receives reads “for the story”.

Clem and Jane share a certain “love” and genuine passion and attraction for each other. The abuse isn’t built on nothing. In a way, Jane identifies with him, or with the idea of him. This last point is important. Jane spends much of the book mythologizing their relationship. She says, early on, “I don’t know why I keep layering new myths on top of us: Antony and Cleopatra, Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester, Taylor and Burton. We can’t be ourselves, because we’re too locked into the long history of people who aren’t supposed to be having sex.” Being able to novelize herself, to think of her, her relationship and her situation, as akin to fiction, helps her deal with reality and understand it. Ultimately, the mythologizing leads to a certain romanization that contributes to Jane not leaving the relationship. During her climatic fight with Clem, she still thinks Clem did really love her –in his own fucked-up, toxic way. As a reader, I must ask to which point Jane still wants to be special in his life, instead of just one among many others. Jane can’t think of herself as just a plain Jane who happened to catch the eye of a predatory man. She still has to think of herself as the heroine of her story.

It’s only at the very end of the novel that Jane begins to question her own narrative. Her healing and epiphany are evident by her decision to leave London and start a new career. Tellingly, however, it is repairing her relationship with her mother, confiding in her all the recent events, what really sets her free. Jane says “Of all the love stories I have attempted to mould myself into, hers is the one I was born with.”

Social structure vs the self

In the end, Clem is arrested and questioned for assaulting Darla, but that’s where things end. We don’t know if he ever leaves the company, if he faces prison, if Darla presses charges against him, if any of this had any long-lasting consequence for him or the company. We also don’t know how Darla ends and whether or not she repairs her relationship with Jane. We don't know any of that because Jane leaves, and the book ends soon after. Leaving is good for Jane, yes. She needs to go on with her life. But what about Becky, Darla and everyone else working at the company? Jane is liberated from the toxic clutches of the company and Clem, but the structural circumstances that facilitated his behavior so many times are still in place. Will there be another woman like Jane? And how many other Clems are there?

Promising young women is an interesting, sharp portrayal of the relationships between men and women, and the workplace, in modern times. Surely, the most unrealistic aspect of the story is that there is no apparent concern for Jane about the possibility of spending a long time unemployed. O’Donoghue is more interested in telling this story as a personal one, crossed by gender relations, and how it relates to the workplace than she is in actually examining all other structures or the difficulties of the job market. Yet, I think it still is a fairly nice reflection of the “LinkedIn era”, an era in which every workplace seems great on the surface, business leaders can exploit their “personal brand” in social networks and finding a job is… a ride. O’Donoghue does not explore any of the things I have described as part of the LinkedIn era. She mentions social networks little for example. But she mentions explicitly the pressures women, and specifically young professional women, face in the current western world. Deb, for example, is heavily conditioned by the fact that she is a mother of two, in a way that Clem wouldn’t if he had any children.

Here’s the thing: Jane is a young millennial with a desk job. Despite her own personal circumstances, she could be any other young millennial with a desk job. To me, and I guess to many other people, her story resonates not because we have a similar personality or have lived a similar thing, but because we recognize common struggles about balancing work and relationships, dealing with self esteem/self image issues, navigating sex, pondering on our own career and futures, and more. It’s about dealing with the uncertainties of growing up in the big city. Jane’s story is a cautionary tale. And sure, Clem is arguably a little bit of a caricature, but we all know there are men willing to abuse their power everywhere –and women and men who will enable them, consciously or not, willingly or not. But ultimately, that is what it is: a cautionary tale about an individual. And that individual ultimately chooses to put an individual solution to a systemic problem. Jane can afford to leave everything behind and go back to her mother while she figures out the next steps. She saves herself. And that is ok, she can’t change the system on her own and, by putting herself first she is also subverting the micro-cosmos of her workplace by refusing to participate in it. And yet I wish there had been a bit more of a collective conclusion, considering the abuse she suffered was not an isolated experience. Ultimately, however, the book is realistic in that each character navigates the situation best they can and go on with their lives. It’s by connecting with others, reconciliating with her past, and reckoning with herself that Jane can finally break the cycle and start stepping up to the surface again.