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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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 do not miss any of the above, but I did appreciate the reminder and the confirmation that it happens to most of us. If the bar for tolerable behaviour was on the floor before – no, make that underground – then now, it’s hovering just above floor level. 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. I understood, in theory, that Hollywood was a hotbed of sexism, racism and unchecked egos, but I had grand ambitions of making change from the inside.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. 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. I remember being 23, anxiously navigating halls where executives didn’t look me in the eye, holding the muted phone to my ear, thinking: if I have the opportunity to speak, I hope I make the most of it.

I felt personally that I’m just a little bit out of the age range for this as some of the situations in the book were fairly obviously on the way and she just didn’t seem to pick up on the cues. I hadn’t spoken to him in years; he knew me when I was an assistant, and he was a very important executive. It is now, perversely, easier to handle and respond to a boss who grabs your ass than one who has never laid a hand on you or done anything That Bad but just continuously undervalues you and forces you to pretzel yourself into a very specific socially acceptable shape and gradually over time you find yourself full of self-loathing and despair and the most confusing part about it is you don’t think you have the right to feel this bad or complain because no single thing that happened to you was So Terrible and haven’t you heard, there are starving kids in Africa and actresses whose lives were destroyed by Harvey Weinstein? Throwing items in the office, and particularly in the direction of your employees, is now off limits. I told myself that someday, when I had enough power that people cared what I had to say, I would make a stand for what was right.Everyone likes to speak loudly and frequently about how committed they are to diversity and inclusion in the workplace and on screen. Opening sentence: The thing about Los Angeles is that it’s awful and I hate it, but when I’m there, nowhere else exists, and I can’t imagine leaving. 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?