Assembly

The narrator of the book is a Black woman in the UK who, through sacrifice and hard work, has managed to climb the social ladder and now has a relatively prestigious, high-paying corporate job. She also has a posh white boyfriend with vaguely progressive political views. In other words she is, by all society standards, very successful. She is also deeply bitter and unhappy, seemingly because she is at all juncture told that, as a Black woman, she doesn't belong and doesn't deserve what she has [I say 'seemingly' because I believe corporate jobs and posh boyfriend make all kind of people miserable]. When she receives a cancer diagnosis, she almost welcomes it as way out of the life she has constructed for herself.

The book is written in a spare, cold style, essentially as a series of vignettes that explore her feelings and thoughts in various professional and social situations. It works to create a sense of dissociation, which seems to be what the narrator is also experiencing.

I have been thinking about why I feel some sort of antipathy towards her. One explanation could be that I feel defensive and judged by the character, aka plain white fragility. Another is that she is supposed to evoke these feelings because she is ultimately a very flawed person who came to 'play the game' and to some extent even 'think the thoughts' of the white upper middle-classes and elites that surround her: she thinks she deserves her job (which she does in as far as she's capable, but that is not the problem with meritocracy), and she's envious of other people money even though she's objectively well-off. Most likely it's a bit of both.