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"[A] memorable portrait of the mad hunger of corporate toil...superbly committed to its own beliefs — truthful, dryly funny and often subtly moving." – Charles Finch, The New York Times
In this genre-bending memoir, Leigh Claire La Berge reflects on her stint at one of the most prestigious management consulting firms in the country and what it teaches us about the absurdity of work—for readers of Bullshit Jobs and fans of Office Space and Sorry to Bother You
While headlines blazed with doomsaying prophecies about the looming Y2K apocalypse, Leigh Claire was quickly introduced to the mysterious workings of The Process—a mythical and ever-changing corporate ethos The Andersen People (her fellow consultants) believed held world-saving powers. Her heroic task: printing physical copies of spreadsheets and sending them to a secure storage facility somewhere in the bowels of New Jersey.
After performing a series of equally mundane tasks, one well-timed deployment of an anecdote about a legendary quarterback catapulted her into the ranks of middle management. It wasn’t long before she found herself jet-setting on the firm’s dime to thirty-minute lunch meetings in Johannesburg, and giving impromptu lectures to Japanese executives about limiting liability at the end of the world.
By the end of her brief time as a businessman at a fake firm, in a fake industry, dedicated to solving a fake crisis, Leigh Claire had accumulated a lifetime’s worth of lessons about the absurdity of work and the nature of financialized capitalism. Fake Work blends memoir with post-facto theoretical interjections on the philosophical problems posed by contemporary corporate culture—from the inadequacy of poststructuralist inquiry to the alienation of office jobs—to tell the story of the techno-armageddon that wasn’t.
"[A] memorable portrait of the mad hunger of corporate toil...superbly committed to its own beliefs — truthful, dryly funny and often subtly moving."
—Charles Finch, The New York Times
“In this brilliant fusion of memoir and critique, La Berge has given us the anti-bildungsroman of the second millennium. As it slowly dawns on her that management consulting is an exercise in interminable interpretation, with no discernible referent, she finds an unexpected use for her training in 1990s poststructuralism, but also has to unlearn everything she thought she knew about corporate capitalism. At once hilarious and deadly serious, La Berge’s chronicle of the absurd tells us more about the logic of contemporary capitalism than any work of standard economic history or organization theory.”
—Melinda Cooper, author of Family Values
“What if Severance was a documentary? Leigh Claire's Y2K autofiction is a message in a bottle, an artifact from a lost world, a reminder that even—or precisely—when it was most buoyant, the lifeworld of capitalism was most hollow”
—Quinn Slobodian, author of Hayek’s Bastards and Crack-Up Capitalism
Prologue: The Almost End of the World
Phase I: Taking Inventory
Chapter 1: Millennial Transitions
Chapter 2: Quality Assurance
Chapter 3: “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte”
Chapter 4: Write What You Know
Chapter 5: Teamwork
Phase II: Media and Mediations
Chapter 6: My Putative Promotion
Chapter 7: A Total Bitch and an Absolute Fraud
Chapter 8: A Tepid Marxist and a Bubble Popped
Chapter 9: My Joke of a Promotion
Phase III: Contingency Planning
Chapter 10: Continental Comportment
Chapter 11: Frequent Fliers
Chapter 12: Floods and Fires
Chapter 13: The End of the End
Afterward: Weeks and Decades
Acknowledgements