Whisper Network

by Chandler Baker

We fell asleep with the heat of laptops burning our thighs.

It’s funny to me that in so many ways I’m exactly where I was when I started writing WHISPER NETWORK. Right now, I’m sitting on my couch, cross-legged, with my laptop balanced on my lap. It’s hot. This was the first line I ever wrote in this book. It felt visceral. I was working full-time as a lawyer. I had a three year old and was trying to write this book and, like so many women I know, I was barely holding it together. I can go back to this paragraph and think: yep, that’s how it felt. And, while I’m not working as much as a lawyer anymore, I still have these nights after the kids go to bed when I’m trying to multitask: watch TV, work and enjoy some time with my spouse once the kids go to bed, maybe wash my hair, and then, if I’m lucky (and probably like you, not too tired) try to read my Kindle before I fall asleep.

Children turned men into heroes and mothers into lesser employees, if we didn’t play our cards right.)

I spent the first nearly five years of my professional life feeling as though the other lawyers on my team were consistently wondering: When is she going to have kids? In some respects, I get it. We were constantly stretched too thin. Everyone was working crazy hours. And if I went on maternity leave, my team members were going to have to absorb those hours somehow, some way. But the thing is that there were plenty of married guys on our team and we never went around worrying about when they would have kids. That was the tone in which I entered motherhood as a professional woman and that was the tone that continued. I never mentioned stepping out for a pediatrician’s appointment. Instead, I frantically answered emails as if I was still at my desk. I did the same with sick kids and for relieving nannies. I never got over the feeling that the idea of me having children felt like a liability for my co-workers. Have you experienced a motherhood bias? Do you see it applied to women whether or not they actually have children?

Men could get away with hedging. It came across as thoughtful. If Sloane waffled it would sound like she didn’t know what the hell she was doing.

I don’t know about you, but in my professional life, I notice so many of these small socially-ingrained biases. The crazy thing is that even though I’m a woman and I write books about gender politics, I’m still as susceptible as anyone to them. Typically, if I have to negotiate a contract over the phone, I’m instantly more intimidated when there’s a man’s voice on the other end. I often think that the men in the room “sound smarter” than I do. I’ve overcome this feeling only with vast amounts of experience. Much more than I truly should have needed to feel confident in my competence. But what’s frustrating to think about is how my anxiety is somewhat warranted because the other people I work with are more than likely working within the exact same framework of socially-constructed biases.

But Ms. Sandberg was right about something. We had to lean in. It was the only way to hear the whispers.

I’ve always chuckled at the image of a writer waking up in the night and scribbling an idea in a notebook. I mean, come on! I have kids and every second of sleep is precious, so no way am I reaching for a pen in the wee hours. Well, I have to tell you that this very line woke me up in the dead of night. I barely knew what I was writing when I typed it into my phone, I was so groggy. But the next morning I read it and the words went in the book verbatim. It still tends to be the line I see quoted most often from my book. So far this has never happened to me again.

Sloane’s most closely held tenet was that women could not be real friends unless they were willing to talk shit together.

Does this line sound mean? I hope not! There are some friendships I’ve had throughout the years that have remained surface level. I never seem to be able to convert them from lady-I-have-lunch-with-every-few-months to friend-I-force-to-take-a-walk-with-me-when-I-need-to-vent. Can you think of these surface level friendships in your own life? As a person who quite likes to confess things, I find them frustrating. You can feel the moment a relationship crosses over into true friendship territory and it’s often when one person offers a real, no holds barred opinion because to do that requires trust (I trust you not to think I’m a bad person for saying this, I trust you not to tell anyone, I trust you with my true, unedited thoughts…).

But Sloane knew she was terrible at keeping up with mental reminders. Her life was empty water bottles rolling around on the floorboards of her expensive car. Unopened mail on kitchen countertops. Thank you cards written but never sent. In the back of her mind, she was already moving on, adding this mental reminder to the detritus of unfinished tasks to be recycled into background stress, where it would serve as fuel for her spotty and unexplained bouts of insomnia, chin acne, and stomach bloating.

Author Nora Roberts once spoke about juggling work and home life. I’m paraphrasing, but she said that some of the balls you have in the air are made of plastic and others glass, you just have to know which are which because some balls will drop and that’s okay…as long as they aren’t the glass ones. That’s how I feel about Sloane’s water bottles and unsent thank you notes. Those are her plastic balls. Like a lot of women, myself included, the reason she’s able to balance work, motherhood, and friendships is because she lets some things fall through the cracks. She fails. She has to accept that she will never be on top of everything. But there’s a price to pay in the form of a constant thrum of stress that runs underneath her life. I relate to this so strongly.

No two people of the opposite sex argue over subjects as mundane as condiments unless they want to sleep together.

Sloane, Sloane, Sloane…I knew that Sloane’s affair would make her difficult for a lot of readers to like. But it was important to me to highlight the complicity a lot of women feel in men’s sexually predatory behavior. In the vast majority of sexual harassment cases, there aren’t going to be a perfect set of facts. There is no perfect ambassador either for the #MeToo movement or for a specific claim. And we shouldn’t expect one. Sloane’s messed up. But I think, for me, that makes her all the more brave.

(Because we knew this logic: we were always supposed to be thankful when anyone thought we were pretty.)

I’ve found myself thinking about this line far more than I thought I would after writing it. As I spoke to book clubs, many women brought up what’s on a lot of our minds: what kind of social messaging do our young girls receive? It’s true that women are taught from a young age that much (even most?) of their value stems from how they look. I’ll admit that lately I’ve been wondering about the flipside, like, what kind of social messaging young boys receive. Are they learning that their value is measured by financial success? Something else? What impact does that have? I don’t think we should spend too much effort on the interiority of badly behaved men. But, I’ll admit, I’m growing more and more curious about these questions as an origin story for men like the one in Whisper Network. It’s become a sticky idea for me, one that I may wind up writing about in the future. We’ll see.

And then we took it as a compliment when one of the men in the office told us we had balls. So, tell us again how this wasn’t a man’s world.

I’m constantly after myself not to be that person in an argument quibbling over semantics, but, in my heart of hearts, that’s me. Because words matter! And our language is steeped in misogyny, phrases like “pussy,” “hysterical,” “man up,” and “being a little bitch” to name a few. I struggle with not wanting to be overly sensitive (read: hysterical?), but also understanding that these phrases are repeated so often and so casually that they are bound to reinforce our gender roles without us even realizing we’re doing it.

Ardie, like many of us, had caught perfectionism, an illness that we heard was more common in women by a factor of roughly twenty to one.

When I wrote this, I was thinking a lot about how affected I can be by Instagram and Pinterest. I see these lovely home décor profiles and think: if my home doesn’t look like that, I’m failing. I see these fashion and beauty profiles and I think: if I don’t look like that, I’m failing. I find these Pinterest pictures of kids’ lunches and family dinners and worry that if I’m not doing it like that, then I’m not doing my best. You know what’s funny? I don’t hear my husband express those same types of concerns nearly as often, which is probably why so many of these industries that promote beauty narratives, wellness, fitness, lifestyle, success…they’re primarily aimed at women. I also started thinking: it’s probably no coincidence that we hear, for instance, how women believe that, in order to apply for a new job, they need to be 95% qualified whereas men feel the percentage is much, much lower. (I cringe to recall how guilty I am of this last one).

Women walked around the world in constant fear of violence; men’s greatest fear was ridicule.

I’m teaching my daughter “stranger danger” right now and it’s weird to think how, for my son, the “stranger danger” lesson will be one that becomes increasingly less relevant in his life with age, but for my daughter, it will always be there, like background music. My husband says he doesn’t worry about walking to his car alone at night. That blows my mind. It’s a little depressing that I can’t imagine walking around the world like that.

If she went over the story enough times, she could nearly convince herself that, in the end, he’d chosen to jump. Sloane stretched across the table and squeezed both Grace’s and Ardie’s hands, and Ardie felt a little sorry for men because they never got to hold hands with each other.

When I started writing the book, I believed Katherine alone killed Ames and went to jail for it when the cleaning staff turned her in. As I kept writing, I re-conceptualized the ending entirely. I considered everyone fresh. Who could have killed Ames? The only person I was certain didn’t kill Ames was Sloane. She confesses too much both to herself and others. If she did it, she would reveal it in the narrative. I even considered whether Ames might have actually killed himself. I didn’t believe that he would. I also tried the idea of not ever revealing who exactly killed Ames, but instead having the end play out through the “we” narrator and therefore the reader would know that a woman killed him but not which woman. My editor smartly pointed out how unsatisfying that would be to anyone who reached the end. So far no one has said to me: Gee, I wish I never know who did it! That’s fair. And I like where it ended up, with Ardie and Katherine working together. I very nearly left Grace not knowing that she wasn’t, in fact, responsible for Ames’s death, but in the end, I wanted a more hopeful, fresh start for Grace.

Our legacy would be our words. Shouted out loud. For all to hear. We were done petitioning to be believed. We were finished requesting the benefit of the doubt. We weren’t asking for permission. The floor was ours. Listen.

Discussing WHISPER NETWORK with readers has truly been one of the great joys of writing this book and it’s no exaggeration to say that my next book, THE HUSBANDS, is a direct result of those discussions. So many of you asked the question: how can we make corporate culture better for women? And the response was often that we need more women at higher levels…but how? Because what I also heard time and time again is that women today feel increasingly overwhelmed. (Hi, I do, too!) Taking on greater responsibility at work can feel untenable while trying to balance a full plate of responsibilities at home. Women are entering the workforce in record numbers, women are equal financial partners, women are breadwinners, but for a myriad of reasons, division of domestic labor tends to remain starkly unequal between men and women. So, while WHISPER NETWORK was all about voicing the challenges of working women in the office, THE HUSBANDS offers its counterpoint by bringing women home and imagining a world where the burden of the “second shift” is equally shared – and what it might take to get there. It’s my biggest wish that you guys will follow me to THE HUSBANDS and discuss it with me just like you did this one. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54860592-the-husbands