The Me Years

Ellen Finnigan embarked on her twenties in the first years of the 21st century, at the crest of third wave feminism, at the height of the chick-lit craze. If chick-lit is about jobs and boys, and all Catholic books are about, as Walker Percy once said, "screwing and God," then this is a spiritual autobiography in which the critical questions of the "me years" (about jobs, boys, screwing and God) are dramatized when a Catholic-ish "good girl" in the midst of a quarter life (existential) crisis falls for a Nietzsche-quoting "bad guy" and self-described hedonist. As they carry on an illicit office romance in the absurd corporate culture of a failing start-up, and he tries to convert her to bohemianism, she is forced to doubt and examine herself and her own weakly held convictions, until eventually questions of faith loom above all, and a serious reckoning is at hand.