How’s this for a job offer? In the span of no more than 10 years, you’re to have seven babies for C-suite women at a major tech firm. You’ll be on a strict diet and exercise regime, your vitals constantly monitored. You can’t have sex. Or a C-section (lest you forgo the “natural birth bonus”). Nor can you tell your loved ones what your actual job is (as far as they’re concerned, you’re in “consulting”). You’ll get just six months of downtime between pregnancies. And, as the test case for this “groundbreaking pilot program” to make The Company “the world’s most equitable workplace,” you’ll earn more than a million dollars.
In Natalie, the narrator of Sarah Anderson’s very funny debut novel, Fallow, The Company finds a taker—one who isn’t, readers soon discover, quite the sucker she may seem to be. She’s a recent college graduate, wryly aware that she is not the typical striver. Motherhood versus career is not a dilemma that haunts her, which gives her an unusually deadpan perspective on angst about work-life balance. Anderson does more than skewer corporate posturing; she shows Natalie stumbling into unexpected insights about freedom and entrapment.
At 23, Natalie is employed in a soulless call center, fielding complaints on a hotline for disgruntled employees in many spheres, but when her family expresses concern about her future, she says, “I don’t need a path. I have a path. I just need money.” Her job has enough upsides—flexible hours, livable pay, and her friend Libby, who “regularly dosed the communal break-room coffee with CBD oil”—that she might have languished in it forever. But then her wisdom teeth start wreaking havoc and she’s forced to find work that comes with dental insurance. That’s when she happens on the position at The Company.
Natalie, of all people, should be wary of the offer, with its unorthodox contract and its demand for real body-morphing labor. After all, at the call center she’s had to listen to endless complaints about work life (from “disputes between coworkers over fridge real-estate” to “accidents caused by coked-out managers operating heavy machinery”). And, as one of 11 sisters, she’s seen firsthand what multiple pregnancies can do to a woman. Throughout Natalie’s childhood, her mother was “tired and round and looking for a bathroom, body waxing and waning like the moon.”
But she is broke and her jaw is aching, so Natalie convinces herself that a job at The Company isn’t so bad. Seven is four fewer kids than her mom carried for free, plus, she thinks, “I didn’t even have to do the hardest part; I didn’t have to keep the babies.” Staring at the contract’s $700,000 completion bonus, she begins to see the role as a way to earn enough money to opt out for good: “a basic Would You Rather—one decade of my body to win back the rest of my life.” (This being the 2020s, she’s also swayed by the $60,000 cosmetic-surgery bonus. She pictures herself, postpartum, a decade hence: “Thighs slender and firm, colt-like, a gap between them through which light could shine upon every person who stood before me.”)
In prose that is sharp and entertaining, Anderson refreshingly takes on several familiar themes at once: the hidden tolls that working women still face, the stranglehold of Big Tech, the Orwellian nature of corporate-speak, the relentless self-monitoring of wellness culture. Her unifying conceit is that the ideal of “having it all” is not just impossible to neatly pull off, but impossible to simply escape.
If you’re thinking, Wait, we’ve been here recently, perhaps you’ve read Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear, a debut that sold more than 1 million copies within a few months of its release last spring. Burke’s narrator, also named Natalie, is a young Christian tradwife influencer whose lifestyle, as shown on Instagram, is a carefully curated middle finger to the having-it-all quest. Yet as both her influencer business and her family boom, she finds herself caught in a twisted version of just that ideal: the resentful mother of many kids and the secret, stressed-out breadwinner.
[Read: What happens when the tradwife dream goes wrong?]
From the start, Yesteryear’s narrator seems like little more than her author’s puppet, a caricature devised to puncture the tradwife fervor of the past few years. This kind of formulaic flatness could easily have befallen the people employed by The Company—an Amazon-esque behemoth that “did everything, everywhere, their logo as familiar as your own name.” Instead, Anderson gives revealing cameos to quirky figures, including Shane, the conniving but guileless SVP of People Experience who toggles between HR euphemisms and saying the quiet part out loud. In a presentation about the company’s mission to enhance gender equity through surrogacy, he itemizes how taxing pregnancy can be for a woman and her colleagues alike. “Nausea, exhaustion, bathroom breaks, brain fog—it’s hard on everyone,” he laments. The long-term goal (drastically cutting parental leave) goes unstated at first, but he lets slip that the short-term aim isn’t exactly altruistic, either: An executive named Valerie is “the perfect candidate for the launch,” he tells Natalie, because she was “frankly a nightmare to be around” during her first pregnancy.
Then there’s Astrid, Natalie’s “minder,” a 20-something Scandinavian woman who adds a passive-aggressive energy to Natalie’s mandated workouts, “slowly edging her treadmill speed and incline just past mine, always doing an extra crunch.” Meanwhile, Astrid’s massages feel “80 percent vindictive, 20 percent transformative”—the corporate lean-in ethos (quite literally) operating even among the lowly ranked.
Anderson’s greatest feat of character construction is Natalie herself, particularly her voice. She tosses off clever metaphors for her situation. Pregnancy, for example, becomes a housing issue. Weeks after her first delivery, her body is a “slightly looser, wetter version of itself, a room with non-catastrophic water damage.” Summing up the deal she’s struck—constant surveillance and social isolation in exchange for money and a luxury condo with minimalist decor—she remarks, “I myself was a fetus, in a particularly tasteful womb.”
When Shane suddenly announces that she’s required to be in the office three days a week, Natalie reports to work to pursue her pregnancy regimens in view of her “colleagues,” becoming a working mother in an unfamiliar sense: maternity operating according to a calibrated plan. Natalie’s office door is marked Development Manager, and the children she bears fall under “Deliverables” in her performance reviews—biology blurring into corporate strategy, life reduced to a measurable output from the very beginning. (Anderson’s vision is at once outlandish and recognizable: More than a few companies have been known to offer parents perks, including breast-milk delivery for moms on business trips, with the ulterior motive of maximizing productivity.)
Fascinated and repelled by the way the spheres of work and life converge, Anderson gives Natalie a chance to push back—and to discover the difficulty of doing so. Natalie lives for the “fallow periods” between pregnancies, when she’s left to her own devices and structure falls away. Astrid is gone, and so are the Pyrex dishes of healthy food in her company-provided fridge. She gets drunk and high, has sex, and eats mountains of junk. Each time, she’s surprised by the darker feelings that bubble up: “the sadness of excess, a feeling in my brain of bottoming out.” The realization slowly dawns on her that she’s losing touch with her sole friend, Libby, and the one sister she’s close to (the rest are a blur).
Still, Natalie considers these rebellious bursts “sacred,” exhilarated by the sensation that she’s “moving the plot”—even as we watch her cyclical existence get subsumed into the company agenda, which calls for her to be the “best possible vessel.” After her benders, she “atone[s]” with yoga, acupuncture, and spa treatments—her pampering a kind of penance as she dutifully prepares her body for the next baby. Her paychecks, which at first gave her a thrill, leave her feeling hollow. She turns to Wirecutter and Reddit for inspiration about how to fill the void. There, she considers “the type of person I could become. A person with a toaster that had a screen. A person interested in the quality of leather.” Seemingly unable to see beyond being a pregnant person, she buys a comfy couch and calls it a day.
The dark joke of Fallow’s first act is that, without her even realizing it, Natalie’s entire 20s have essentially become one prolonged fallow period in her own development. Anderson captures the way our tech-driven world pulls us into an absurd social experiment that cuts us off not only from others, but also from ourselves. And she’s not done. In the book’s final act, Anderson drops Natalie into a very different petri dish: a feminist commune where dozens of women live off the land and mostly off the grid. As a connection-starved Natalie settles into her new, shared life—making some close friends and embracing her animal-tending duties—Anderson suggests that her drawn-out fallow period might have laid the groundwork for something better.
If this all sounds a little too tidy or corny, rest assured that you’re in good hands. Anderson isn’t out to offer a utopian release from the conundrum of work-life balance; she’s reminding us that the demands of nurture and structure are inevitably muddled. The commune may be a flailing farm with a woo-woo bent, but here, too, much to Natalie’s chagrin, designated labor hours, set mealtimes, and surveillance (via a granola version of Astrid) are part of the deal. What is different is Natalie, who now appreciates that money is a lousy substitute for a path—but that sisterly bonding has real value, even if it comes in bigger doses than she bargained for.