Christine Sneed on Leaning Into the Absurdity of Office Life
In Conversation with Alex Higley and Lindsay Hunter on I'm a Writer But
Welcome to I’m a Writer But, where two writers-and talk to other writers-and about their work, their lives, their other work, the stuff that takes up any free time they have, all the stuff they’re not able to get to, and the ways in which any of us get anything done. Plus: book recommendations, bad jokes, okay jokes, despair, joy, and anything else we’ve got going on that week. Hosted by Lindsay Hunter and Alex Higley.
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Today, Christine Sneed (Please Be Advised) talks to us about leaning on the absurdity of working in an office for her new satirical novel, her long career, almost giving up, deciding to place her latest books herself, figuring out how to hype her work, teaching part-time, and more!
From the episode:
It’s like therapy, because I’ve worked in several offices, but just the absurdity of [being expected] to spend all that time every day with people that you probably would not choose to be with, and you can’t even say what you really think at any point either, unless you’re not worried about being fired. But that was really what I wanted to do with this book: all the things that we’re not supposed to say in polite company, I tried to use that as my guiding ethos for each of the memos.
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Christine Sneed is the author of the novels Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos, Little Known Facts, and Paris, He Said, and the story collections Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry and The Virginity of Famous Men (Bloomsbury USA & UK). She is also the editor of the short fiction anthology, Love in the Time of Time’s Up (Tortoise Books). Her seventh book, Direct Sunlight, a short story collection, will be published in June 2023 (Northwestern University Press).
