Elisabeth Egan's "A Window Opens" is an autobiographical tale of a mother-of-three who goes to work at an Amazon-like corporation.
Like a lot of former employees of Amazon, Montclair writer Elisbath Egan was aware that The New York Times was working on an investigative piece about the business practices of the tech giant.
What she never expected was that the Times' blockbuster report -- which quickly generated more online comments than any story in Times' history -- would be published exactly ten days before Egan's debut novel, "A Window Opens."
A highly autobiographical novel, it turns out, about a New Jersey mother of three who goes to work for an Amazon-like corporation where brutal hours are the norm, bosses play mind games with their underlings, and a biometric system tracks worker's every minute in the office. The good timing has helped turned Egan's novel into one of the buzzier books of the moment with a feature about Egan in The New York Times, and reviews praising the writer for having "tapped into the zeitgeist."
"This novel is not an exact account of my time at Amazon," says Egan. But the Montclair-based author also acknowledges that what she found so compelling about the Times' article -- and what her book also explores -- is whether the digital age has made work-life balance impossible.
"The family piece of it, the way parents are expected to never be away from their cell phones or emails -- that's what I think about," she says. Is this what the future looks like for work?"
"A Window Opens" tells the story of a New Jersey mother-of-three and part-time magazine editor named Alice Pearse, who takes a job at a company called Scroll. She is supposed to be helping Scroll launch its ambition plan of "retail lounges" -- digital bookstores where people can browse books for free on their devices and then order the ones they want.
Instead she found herself in a world of corporate jargon, passive-aggressive leadership and constant stress. (Comparisons have been made to both Allison Pearson's "I Don't Know How She Does It" and Dave Eggers "The Circle.")
In real life, Egan left her job as books editor at Self magazine to become an editor at Amazon Publishing, the online giant's attempt to circumvent traditional publishing houses and launch its own line of books. Much as with Alice in the novel, the new job proved to be an uneasy fit Egan. (Also like Alice, Egan is married to a lawyer and has two daughters and a son.)
"There was a point in time where it felt very exciting to be a part of what Amazon was doing," says Egan. "The books that I edited I thought were quite good. For me, the issue was really that I didn't like the work culture."
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Egan -- who was born in Staten Island, but moved with her family to South Orange when she was 6 -- left the job at Amazon in 2013, after about thirteen months. (After an ambitious launch, Amazon Publishing has lost much of its early luster; in 2014, the New York Times wrote that "its publishing operations remain a negligible part of Amazon's overall business.")
But the writer's post-employment proved fruitful. She wrote the first draft of "A Window Opens" at the Verona Community Pool in the summer of 2013. She finished the novel on New Jersey Transit "quiet car" trains, while commuting to Glamour magazine in New York, where she was named books editor in fall 2013. She worked on the manuscript in forty minute blocks in each morning and evening.
"I used to do most of the high school homework on New Jersey Transit, so it wasn't the first time I had buckled down on the train," she says.
In the acknowledgments for "A Window Opens," Egan even thanks "the commuters and conductors on the Montclair-Boonton line" -- surely some kind of literary first.
She says, "Like most people, I have a love-hate relationship with New Jersey Transit, but it's mostly love for me."
At present, Egan is juggling her work at Glamour -- her favorites book this year include Hanya Yanagihara's "A Little Life," "The Admissions" by Meg Mitchell Moore, and Tracy Daugherty's new biography of Joan Didion, "The Last Love Song" -- and also working on a new novel, which she expects to come out in summer 2017. It will take same town as "A Window Opens," Filament, a thinly-veiled stand-in for Montclair.
As for her relationship with Amazon, Egan isn't especially worried that she will be seen as having written some sort of scabrous attack against the company -- or that the powerful bookseller will in any way punish or sabotage her. "It's not The Devil Wears Prada," she emphasizes.
That said, she has no intention of antagonizing other powerful literary tastemakers in future published works.
"I would never mock Oprah in a book," she says, laughing.
Christopher Kelly may be reached at ckelly@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @chriskelly74. Find NJ.com/Entertainment on Facebook.
