This Could Hurt

by Jillian Medoff

Overview

“Periodically a writer captures the pattern of comedy and tragedy that peppers office life like alternating colors of carpet squares. . . . As smart as Medoff’s critique of corporate inanity is, it’s tempered by compassion for these people, who are ultimately tender with each other, too. . . . Medoff finds plenty of hurt—but strains of hope, too.”

—Ron Charles, The Washington Post

A razor-sharp and deeply felt novel that illuminates the pivotal role of work in our lives—a riveting fusion of The Nest, Up in the Air, and Then We Came to the End that captures the emotional complexities of five HR colleagues trying to balance ambition, hope, and fear as their small company is buffeted by economic forces that threaten to upend them.

Rosa Guerrero beat the odds as she rose to the top of the corporate world. An attractive woman of a certain age, the longtime chief of human resources at Ellery Consumer Research is still a formidable presence, even if her most vital days are behind her. A leader who wields power with grace and discretion, she has earned the devotion and loyalty of her staff. No one admires Rosa more than her doting lieutenant Leo Smalls, a benefits vice president whose whole world is Ellery.

While Rosa is consumed with trying to address the needs of her staff within the ever-constricting limits of the company’s bottom line, her associate director, Rob Hirsch, a middle-aged, happily married father of two, finds himself drawing closer to his "work wife," Lucy Bender, an enterprising single woman searching for something—a romance, a promotion—to fill the vacuum in her personal life. For Kenny Verville, a senior manager with an MBA, Ellery is a temporary stepping-stone to bigger and better places—that is, if his high-powered wife has her way.

Compelling, flawed, and heartbreakingly human, these men and women scheme, fall in and out of love, and nurture dreams big and small. As their individual circumstances shift, one thing remains constant—Rosa, the sun around whom they all orbit. When her world begins to crumble, the implications for everyone are profound, and Leo, Rob, Lucy, and Kenny find themselves changed in ways beyond their reckoning.

Jillian Medoff explores the inner workings of an American company in all its brilliant, insane, comforting, and terrifying glory. Authentic, razor-sharp, and achingly funny, This Could Hurt is a novel about work, loneliness, love, and loyalty; about sudden reversals and unexpected windfalls; a novel about life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062660763
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	01/09/2018
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Jillian Medoff is the acclaimed author of the national bestseller I COULDN'T LOVE YOU MORE, as well as the novels HUNGER POINT and GOOD GIRLS GONE BAD. Her first novel, HUNGER POINT, was adapted into an original Lifetime movie. She has an MFA from NYU and has studied with writers including Mona Simpson, Jonathan Dee, and Alice Walker, and taken master classes with Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, and Grace Paley.

Editorial Reviews

10/30/2017
Medoff (I Couldn’t Love You More) explores the effects of the 2008 economic downturn on a small staff of human resources managers at a research firm in this witty novel. At the twilight of a successful career, 64-year-old Rosa Guerrero, Ellery Consumer Research’s widowed HR chief, is losing her edge. She experienced a ministroke some years earlier and now has had a second; at work, she’s endured a major lieutenant’s embezzlement and company cutbacks. Rosa is tough but secretly a mother hen, so it’s sweet (but never saccharine, because of Medoff’s wry and ironic sensibility) when her most trusted staffers nurture and cover for her to keep her at the job that is her whole life. At least one of the four underlings whose stories are told along with Rosa’s has ulterior motives, but all will recognize their weaknesses and become more fulfilled by the end. The characters are well-drawn, though the author gets stuck in their personal tangents, which occasionally drags down the storytelling. Nevertheless, this is a sharp and moving novel. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

Searing, sexy and surprisingly funny, Jillian Medoff’s This Could Hurt burns through the pages. No one is safe in this cruel but compassionate take on corporate America. I loved it.

Marcy Dermansky

Tender and compelling, Jillian Medoff’s THIS COULD HURT reveals what happens when the ties that bind us start to fray and we are called upon to care for each other. That these relationships are among coworkers in an HR department makes them as unpredictable as they are hilarious but always real and always entertaining.

George Hodgman

The workplace novel has long been the territory of male novelists—well, no more. Medoff’s provocative, comic portrait of modern American office life is a study of power, and how having it and wanting it, tests the bonds coworkers share far beyond the break room. It not only upends female stereotypes like a cheap desk, it also earns Medoff a place at the table. And all for seventy cents on the male dollar.

Elissa Schappell

You wouldn’t expect a corporate HR department to house a thrill-ride of a novel, but Jillian Medoff pulls off the impossible here. Funny, searing and wholly original, THIS COULD HURT illuminates an ordinary American workplace and the characters who animate it.  With a sharp eye for the absurdities of modern office life, and even deeper compassion for her characters, Medoff knocks this one out of the park.

Darin Strauss

Jillian Medoff is one of those talented writers who make other less talented writers (myself) want to write flattering blurbs. Funny, painful, and ultimately redemptive, THIS COULD HURT is a beautifully drawn canvas of corporate America in all its lunacy. THIS COULD HURT won’t. Hurt, I mean. See? I told you I wasn’t a good writer.

John Kenney

Clear your Outlook calendar and have tissues at the ready for this huge-hearted page turner that reaffirms the healing power of plain old human kindness.

Courtney Maum

Corporate America has been trying to stamp out individuality for decades but Jillian Medoff brings it back to fresh, sexy, sharply funny life again. This Could Hurt is a missive to everyone who feels stranded in an office: You are not alone.”  

Katherine Heiny

Shrewd and deeply affecting. . . . Sharply drawn intimate details about the lives of each character add even greater depth and broaden the timeless appeal of this very smart, thoroughly absorbing story.

Shelf Awareness

Incisive. . . .Medoff’s scenarios will be familiar to everyone employed everywhere, no matter the company size, and she cogently captures the angst and celebrates the camaraderie of coworkers committed to group success while struggling with personal demons.

Booklist

Set within the cogs of corporate America, This Could Hurt tells the story of five colleagues struggling with professional tumult, uncertainty, and ambition. Jillian Medoff unfolds these characters’ daily lives, the hours spent at the office, with precision and a strong dose of humanity.

Southern Living

All too often, characters in novels live in that rarified novel-world where real-life concerns like jobs and bills and the sudden vital need for a flowchart simply don’t exist. Jillian Medoff remedies this with a refreshingly authentic portrait of corporate America and the varied souls that dream, conspire, flounder and triumph there, and this she does with a great deal of affection and charm. A very enjoyable book.

Joshua Ferris

A delicious, satisfying book. . . . This Could Hurt is a worthy follow-up to Medoff’s bestseller I Couldn’t Love You More. Filled with heart and humor, it will ring true to anyone who’s experienced both the cruelty and the camaraderie that make up the modern American workplace.

BookPage

There’s an air of ‘The Office’ TV show in its darkly comic tone, but it delves more deeply and seriously into the dynamics of a workplace. . . . It’s a rich lode. Medoff mines the phenomenon of the “office wife,” generational values, gender politics, racial nervousness, networking and more, all set against the irrevocable reality of meeting the bottom line. . . . She’s a deft observer of office politics, as well as human relationships. She has a sense of history. And she wastes no one’s time: The narrative cracks along, without an indulgent passage in the book.”

Minneapolis Star-Tribune

As smart as Medoff’s critique of corporate inanity is, it’s tempered by compassion for these people, who are ultimately tender with each other, too… Through the subterranean strata of this failing office run alliances and feuds, love affairs and betrayals that influence raises, promotions and dismissals. And when Rosa herself gets in trouble, how far will her beloved staff go to protect her from the rigid mechanics of the corporation? The answer to that question becomes the story’s central problem, its funniest routine and its most moving element.

Washington Post

Uplifting and hilarious.

Real Simple

This smart, jaunty novel takes the lid off a small company’s faltering human resources department to reveal intrigue and backstabbing that only intensify when the boss gets sick. But, as Medoff deftly reminds us, decency can find a way of surfacing even among the filing cabinets.

People

★ 11/15/2017
Rosalita Guerrero, chief of human resources, is the beating heart of Ellery Consumer Research Group. She has weathered market downturns before, but the latest round of layoffs pared her department to the bone. Though a widow and in her 60s, Rosa can't imagine not working: her people need her, and her to-do list is miles long. Chapters alternate among Rosa's key staffers, delving deep into their hopes and fears, their loneliness, their courage, and their loyalty to the woman who gave them their jobs. Handy organizational charts track staffing changes over time. Anyone who has worked in a modern office will relate to the sly jabs at corporate mores and business jargon. But this novel is more than an HR primer—it's a thoroughly satisfying character study and exploration of the social microcosm that is the modern workplace. VERDICT Medoff (I Couldn't Love You More) is a master of the small, telling detail that completely nails a person's psyche, delivering a cast of characters flawed yet struggling to redeem themselves. An ultimately hopeful, completely inventive tale. [See Prepub Alert, 7/9/17.]—Christine Perkins, Whatcom Cty. Lib. Syst., Bellingham, WA

Library Journal

2017-09-28
Intrigue swirls around HR executive Rosa Guerrero in this engrossing workplace drama by Medoff (I Couldn't Love You More, 2012, etc.).Ellery Consumer Research Group is one of "a glut of boutique research firms…fighting for market share" in the wake of the economic meltdown. The HR department has already shrunk from 22 to 16 to 13 as the story begins in November 2009, and the CEO is pressuring Rosa to cut more. She's just had to fire her trusted right-hand man for embezzling, leaving her at age 64 without an obvious choice to groom for succession. Longtime training and recruiting director Rob Hirsch is blatantly burned-out, while hotshot Wharton MBA Kenny Verville is too busy looking for a better job at a bigger company to pay much attention to his current work. Rounding out the cast of principals are Communications/Policy VP Lucy Bender, gunning for a promotion, and Employee Benefits manager Leo Smalls, Rosa's principal confidant. These two cover for their boss after she has a minor stroke and, once back at work, her memory and behavior continue to deteriorate. Although Medoff frankly chronicles plenty of scheming and self-serving, Rosa's devotion to her staff is repaid with loyalty and affection that are all the more poignant coming from believably flawed characters. People get second chances here: Kenny buckles down at Ellery after blowing an outside prospect, and Rob finds that getting laid off is the kick in the pants he needs to revitalize himself. At the center stands Rosa, a tough corporate infighter who is also a mother hen; she's the most vivid figure, but everyone gets nicely textured treatment in an engrossing narrative that manages to encompass Lucy's therapy issues, Rob's devotion to his family, Leo's search for Mr. Right, and Kenny's troubled marriage while maintaining the main focus on their lives at work. An economical epilogue makes clever use of corporate organization charts to quickly trace the characters' odysseys after the story's bittersweet conclusion in August 2010.A sharp-eyed novel of corporate manners.

Kirkus Reviews