Not Safe For Work: Author of the viral essay 'My boyfriend, a writer, broke up with me because I am a writer'

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When someone senior tells you how pretty you look, you smile and thank him – and make a mental note never to wear that dress alone with him again. Quickly becoming embroiled in the day to day discussions, power struggles and gossip in her office, she meets a pretty astonishing array of dreadful people, classic LA/Hollywood characters. It is widely understood that you are not to grope or make sexual advances on your employees, and that if you do so, you may face consequences.

My plan was to work my way into the halls of power and then fling the doors open wide for those who had been excluded. The writing is fresh and stylish and the conversational tone helps the thought-provoking narrative zip along. My job straddles the worlds of Hollywood and publishing: I run book-to-screen development at a literary agency, which means I am responsible for identifying books that would be good for adaptation, whether as a movie or TV show, and then pitching and helping shepherd them from page to screen. Ambition bites back in Isabel Kaplan's Not Safe For Work, a novel that hits close to a few recent news events . I grew up in a privileged community in Los Angeles and knew the restaurants to mention, the workout classes to attend, the neighbourhoods to spend time in.Please get in touch and we will do our best to source your book, no matter how unusual or specialist. Here, the former Hollywood assistant and current director of book-to-film development at a literary agency reflects on the horrifying behaviour she witnessed as a twentysomething – and how little has actually changed in the five years since the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Rape law and sexism were common dinner table topics in my childhood, and I knew about implicit bias before I knew about blowjobs. I get the impression it was supposed to be more hard hitting than it was, and it didn’t really say more than we already know. She gets a job in an agency through family connections – her mother is a well known, ball-bustin’ lawyer.

Throwing items in the office, and particularly in the direction of your employees, is now off limits. Sometimes it’s easy to preach about what you would do in a theoretical situation, until you are facing it head on.Not Safe for Work is definitely one of the harder-hitting books I’ve read in recent times, but that’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it. When someone senior tells you how pretty you look, you smile and thank him - and make a mental note never to wear that dress alone with him again. If I thank him for his congratulations and leave it at that, am I demonstrating complicity, failing to practice what I preach?

I also knew he had passed on projects I advocated for because of their “narrow” focus on mostly women. How can I separate my desire to raise awareness and increase discussion about complicity in Hollywood from my desire to be one of the voices in the conversation? I was surprised when it ended – this is quite a slim novel and it felt like she was just getting started, when it ended. This month, when my book was published in the US, he sent me a congratulatory message, saying how thrilled he was for my success. I ran open-armed into a burning building hoping if I moved quickly enough, I’d be spared the flames.I hadn’t spoken to him in years; he knew me when I was an assistant, and he was a very important executive. But certain gendered instincts – people pleasing, playing peacemaker, considering another person’s comfort a precondition for my own – served me well. He ended up leaving that production company shortly thereafter, so I didn’t feel compelled to engage in further communication. The story is delivered by an unnamed protagonist, a young woman, recently graduated from the prestigious Harvard university.