The Glow

A desperate young publicist tries to save her career by turning a grungy retreat centre and its charismatic leader into the hot new self-care brand in this darkly comedic, razor-sharp send-up of the wellness industry. For fans of Halle Butler's The New Me, Abigail Bergstrom's What a Shame and Liane Moriaty's Nine Perfect Strangers

Jane Dorner has two modes:

PR Jane is twenty-five, breezy, and clever in a non-threatening way.

Actual Jane is twenty-nine, drifting through mediocre workdays and lackluster dates while paralysed by her crushing mountain of overdue bills.

Enter the impossibly gorgeous Cass, whom Jane discovers scrolling through Instagram – proprietor of a 'wellness retreat' based out of a ramshackle country house that may or may not be giving off cult vibes. Suddenly Jane realizes she might have found the one ladder she can climb.

But inner peace, shiny hair and glowing skin always comes at a price...

About the Author

Jessie Gaynor's work has appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The New Yorker, WSJ Magazine and elsewhere. She is a senior editor at Literary Hub and she has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Rona Jaffe fellow. She lives in Richmond, Virginia with her family.

Reviews

"Jessie Gaynor's plot is breezy and hilarious, but where she really shines is the character of Jane herself, a self-centered and image-obsessed nightmare whose observations about NYC Millennial culture made me LOL more than once. You'll never look at wellness PR pitches the same way again once you've heard Jane's commentary on the entire endeavour" ―Glamour, The Best Books of 2023

"The Glow is the first truly dead-on satire of wellness culture, understanding it as not just a consumer trend, but a way of thinking and speaking. With terrifying wit, Jessie Gaynor shreds the overrated virtues of prosperity and healthy moisture barriers, and extols the underrated virtues of irony and sanity" —Tony Tulathimutte, author of Private Citizens

"Gaynor's sharpened blades are out for the wellness industry and its cult-like devotion to personal brands, but The Glow is more than just incisive observation and pitch-perfect satire. There's a deep well of human ambition and desire at the root of this story, not to mention a sharp plot that bounds ahead with the assurance of the best thrillers. Gaynor builds layer on layer of mystery out of everyday human yearning, creating a whole that's deeply satisfying and always surprising" ―CrimeReads

"Jessie Gaynor's writing is wickedly funny and sly in its observations, pairing human truths with a setting that can only belong to our present moment. The Glow manages to be both savvy in its sendup of the social-media-influencing world and empathic in its portrayal of the millions who flock to it. I tore through the book in a state of pure delight, pining to return to it whenever trivialities like 'work' or 'sleep' so rudely interrupted" —Julia Pierpont, author of Among the Ten Thousand Things

Dimensions: 12.8 x 2.8 x 19.6 cm