Before she became an author (The Girl in Kellers Way), Australian Megan Goldin was a journalist who reported from the Middle East and Asia for various news outlets. Now she turns her attention to the cutthroat world of Wall Street hedge fund megawealth and workplace sexism in The Escape Room (St. Martin’s, July). In the past decade or so, escape rooms (aka escape games) have become popular entertainment for people from all walks of life. In them, contestants have to solve riddles and puzzles in order to get out of a room. Goldin takes the premise one step further in her new thriller, in which three colleagues must participate in a team-building exercise by escaping from a locked elevator—and survival is not assured.
This seems like a Darwinian setting, a survival of the fittest or perhaps most conniving.
Absolutely. I’d been reading Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens around the time the idea for The Escape Room was bubbling in the back of my mind. It made me look at the corporate world through the prism of evolutionary biology as a modern-day human habitat. Instead of hunting and gathering and living in caves, it’s penthouses, Hermès, and plush Wall Street offices. And instead of bringing back bison from the hunt, it’s junk bonds and bonuses.
You are putting characters into a crucible. What are you seeking to explore—or expose?
Office politics are fascinating—colleagues work together and build up a rapport, an office culture, and often socialize, but at the same time, they are competitors, for resources, for budgets, and, more selfishly, for promotions and salary increases. That usually happens in back rooms through deals, networks, and politicking. I wanted to explore what would happen if you strip down all the pretense of the camaraderie and reveal all the office politics and machinations.
You look at sexism in the workplace. Have you experienced it?
Yes. Like many women, my experiences have been mixed. I’ve had some great male bosses over the years. At the same time, I’ve faced institutional sexism that is deeply embedded within the organizational culture. One of the scenes in the novel actually happened to me: the job interview from hell in which my character, Sarah Hall, is interviewed by a hiring manager who eats fistfuls of nuts throughout the interview and only brought her in so he could tick a box that said he’d interviewed a woman for the role. It was an awful experience. But at least it became good fodder for a novel!
Today, 1:30–2:30 p.m. Megan Goldin will sign ARCs at the Macmillan booth (1544).
