Questions About Promising Young Women

by Caroline O'Donoghue (Goodreads Author)

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Answered Questions (3)

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Caroline O'Donoghue I'm wasting time on Goodreads, so I thought I'd give this one a go!

When I first started writing this book, my plan was to riff on popular gothic ficti…moreI'm wasting time on Goodreads, so I thought I'd give this one a go!

When I first started writing this book, my plan was to riff on popular gothic fiction tropes, where the heroine is usually wandering through an awful, grand house full of uncertain people and a sense that something bad is living in the walls, in the water, in the soil. I wanted that, but for the office. It's where we spend (or spent, pre-pandemic) the bulk of our time, and those spaces and those people can take on new meanings for us. Sometimes the bullying and abuse we experience in work is real... sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's us just freaking out about a weird email that really had no malice behind it. I wanted that confusion to be a big part of PYW.

There's evidence to support the theory that he was drugging her, or just that she was having a nervous breakdown. There's also evidence to support that he's quite literally a vampire. I'm ok with all these readings! The thing I'd like people to take away from the book is to think about the power we give to work, the people we work with, and the patriarchal structures that most offices are built on. That, if you don't have a strong sense of yourself going in, it's really easy to lose yourself in the muck and mire of it all.

Hope that (kinda) answers your question! (less)

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