Yeats’ haunting line about two sisters, “both beautiful, one a gazelle,” comes to mind when reading this story that deeply explores the decisions made by two women caught in the orbit of lecherous Hollywood men. Our narrator, Sarah Lai, and her boss, Sylvia Zimmerman, are similar to a point. They’re both striving film producers, with Sylvia ahead by years when she hires Sarah, a nervous ivy-league graduate whose parents run a restaurant. They both hate what women endure in the industry, from being passed over in favor of less-talented men to navigating those men’s sense of sexual entitlement. While they ruefully believe that “you have to do what you have to do” if you still want a job, it’s in their reactions to this rule that the women diverge. Via flashbacks from Sarah’s regret-filled current life teaching film at a B-list school, we visit her #metoo years as told to a journalist who’s writing an expose of that time. We know from the start that something untoward happened, but Li (Dark Chapter) reveals the facts in a tantalizing slow drip. The shock and dread build, helped along by lines such as “His British accent slithers out at me.” For those who’ve lived #metoo, you’ll find your experience put to paper, and for those who think it’s exaggerated, you might finally get it.
