MOSTLY JUST A SCREAM AN INTERVIEW WITH HALLE BUTLER On capitalism and The New Me
For the past ten months, I have lived in San Francisco. I work in Silicon Valley. Capitalism swirls around me: Long work weeks, robotic men and women with their faces in the blue glow of their screens on the train, rampant homelessness among the wealth.
If I believe what most people say, I am living in the future. If I believe what most people say, as goes San Francisco, so goes the world. But a bigger question is: If this is the future, will we all stand for it?
When I first moved to San Francisco, I began to read Halle Butler’s The New Me. Although the protagonist of The New Me does not live in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, her life is wrapped up in her work. She is a temp hoping to become permanent in an office that doesn’t understand her. The mundane passing of her days combined with her many failures gives rise to a voice in her head that becomes destructive, and as her life spirals out of control, she spirals alongside it. I thought, frequently, of the people on the train to work, staring deep into their phones, as I read Butler’s portrayal of a woman unraveling within the working world.
Butler’s ability to build out the sharp, sad complexities of office life goes
