Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English

SELF CARE

Leigh Stein

A Novel

Maren Gelb is on a company-imposed digital detox. She tweeted something terrible about the President's daughter, and as the COO of Richual, "the most inclusive online community platform for women to cultivate the practice of self-care and change the world by changing ourselves," it's a PR nightmare.

Not only is CEO Devin Avery counting on Maren to be fully present for the upcoming Series B closing, but indispensable employee Khadijah Walker has been keeping a secret that will reveal just how feminist Richual's values actually are, and former Bachelorette contestant and Richual board member Evan Wiley is about to be embroiled in a sexual misconduct scandal that could threaten Richual's future forever. When self-care is part of your revenue model, can confessing your damage be good for business?

SELF-CARE is a highly readable, taut, and witty book, in the same category of fiction as the works of Mona Awad, Halle Butler, Jennifer Weiner, and Curtis Sittenfeld. It holds up a mirror to women everywhere who buy into "self-care" in one way or another. Stein's skewering social commentary is buoyed by enough levity to make it both entertaining and eye-opening.

Leigh Stein is the author of the acclaimed 2012 novel, The Fallback Plan (Melville House), a poetry collection called Dispatch From the Future (Melville House, 2012), and the memoir, The Land of Enchantment (Plume, 2016). From 2014-2017, before she was 30, she ran a secret Facebook group of 40,000 women writers, in her role as cofounder and executive director of Out of the Binders/BinderCon, a feminist nonprofit organization.

Available products
Book Published 2020-06-30 by Penguin Paperback Originals

Comments

A hyper-timely - and unexpectedly heartfelt - satire of #girlboss culture and the wellness industrial complex... compulsively readable... brilliant. Read more...

Self Care is the bitchy beach read for people who wear a 'Bitches Get Shit Done' T-shirt, but who are also well-versed in debates about reclaiming the word 'bitch.' Stein is the kind of writer who would be at home both in The New Yorker and on a Tumblr page devoted to writing poems about The Bachelor... At its core, it's a very clever satire.

NY Magazine featured SELF CARE in the *best*quadrant of its Approval Matrix: Highbrow- Brilliant! Read more...

It's not just that I found Self Care wildly entertaining, I found it deeply illuminating. So this is how the clickbait gets cooked up! I learned, I laughed, I loved every page. What I especially admired was Leigh Stein's rare ability to be hilariously wicked while remaining deeply empathetic. I say skip your next juice cleanse and read this brilliant and delightful novel.

Leigh's incredibly insightful essay on the fall of the #girlboss: ..."Until this country is willing to reckon with its extraordinary wealth inequality, and our government requires corporations to pay their fair share in taxes, we will continue to see reincarnations of the girboss because she's a manifestation of the American myth that says if you're not succeeding, it must because you're not trying hard enough." Read more...

A titillating satire about our quest for validation and the lengths that some will go to for #selfactualization, Self Care is an intelligent, delightful read that will make your mind (and epidermis!) glow.

Leigh Stein's novel might just be the hit of adrenaline you need to delete your apps permanently - or at the very least, leap off your couch and do something better with your time.

Merciless and mordantly funny... Stein gives her ruthless romp through influencer culture an authenticity born from a genuine love of the interner... This is the self-aware callout culture novel that we need, but don't deserve. Don't sleep on Self Care (unless your Fitbit tells you to sleep more - then do that, hydrate, and add 20 minutes of Headspace before reading.

A novel of manners for our 280-character era.

Though the turmoil at the center of [the novel] is entertaining, its twist ending a clawed swipe at the irony of the scarcity myththe zero-sum foundation of capitalism - it's not the thing that kept me reading. Instead, it was Stein's deft navigation of the shades of superficial feminism, the lexicon of start-up culture and the tone of a generation reckoning with how to be honest with itself.

Just try not to snort your Moon Juice out your nose while laughing your ass off.

A darkly witty romp through corporate feminism.

The plot flies by, but the real appeal lies in Stein's merciless skewering of startup culture. Read more...

So damn good. I stared reading, kept reading, and didn't look up until I was done. There is so much to applaud about Stein's novel... A juicy, funny, smart read. Did I already say it was a smart read? Leigh Stein is so smart and so understanding of the internet I am in awe.

Stein offers a look into the dark underbelly of these easily marketable spaces, the promise that a room full of women equals safety, and the egos and violence that sadly so often exist within them.

"Highbrow, brilliant." The Approval Matrix, New York magazine One of Cosmopolitan's 12 Books You'll Be Dying to Read This Summer A Publishers Weekly Best Book of Summer 2020 A Vulture Best Book of Summer 2020 One of Refinery29's 25 Books You'll Want to Read This Summer An Esquire Must-Read Book of Summer 2020 A Book Riot Best Book of 2020 *so far

Stein's sharp writing separates her from the pack in this exquisite, Machiavellian morality tale about the ethics of looking out for oneself. Read more...

Leigh Stein's latest novel is as decadent and brutal as a vampire facial. It's an exposé of feel-good feminism, an indictment of contemporary capitalism, and an absolute treat to read. This book will make you laugh, gasp, and vow to get off social media for good - and it'll understand when you can't help but log right back on.

...the book is timely and playful, offering a juicy glimpse into the pathos and ethos of the wellness industry and the influencers who make it all appear so shiny and bright.

Self Care proves Leigh Stein's status as a great 'demolition expert' (Kenneth Tynan's term for Bernard Shaw) of the influencer era.

A smart critique of the wellness industry... but also a very fun read.

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.

A brutal dissection of 'Insta-Worthy' culture, the unconscionable capitalistic impulses behind wellness ventures, and the farce of forced community building.

Wickedly talented Leigh Stein - for my money, one of our sharpest millennial writers - knows the internet, and she's used that intimate knowledge to write a pitch-perfect novel for our times. Self Care is a hilarious and sneakily moving send-up of what it means to try and live when every move you make is observed and dissected online, by a writer who sees the truth and says it with so much humor and heart you'll laugh (and maybe cry) out loud.