“Why do you do this job?” my old boss asked. “The answer can’t be about a paycheck or groceries or because you need a job.” We then took turns peddling mission-driven drivel about our meaningful jobs. The only reasons I could honestly give were the ones she said I couldn’t. So, I lied. At the end of the meeting, she reminded us to be grateful for the important work we do. She was trying to help team morale. Morale stayed the same—bad.
That meeting—and many like it—were top of mind as I read Erica Peplin’s deeply millennial debut novel Work Nights. The novel follows Jane, a twenty-something ad planner at a legacy newspaper in New York City. The events of the novel occur over seven months, each section one month in Jane’s life as she works in “an office where people coughed and the printer was always broken,” the perfect way to describe the classic corporate American workplace.
Jane harbors a workplace crush on the apparently straight intern, Madeline, who is “the only thing that made going to the office remotely worthwhile.” Soon, through her group of friends who throw “Gay Shabbat” dinners, she meets Addy, an intense, serial monogamist musician, who is ready to settle down and commit. It sells this novel short to say it’s about a love triangle. What endeared me most to this story was not the messy, queer love triangle, but how the mess fit into the frank and eerily familiar depiction of what it means to be a corporate, millennial woman.
Through Jane, Peplin captures the cognitive dissonance of professional women. In her first month, after watching her coworkers leave thank you notes for their boss in gratitude for a dinner he threw for himself, Jane muses, “Nobody made me be a professional woman. It was a pressure I put on myself…And yet so much of my life happened inside the office that I knew it was changing me—stunting my thoughts and calcifying certain lonely habits.” Her ability to name how bad this job is for her doesn’t stop Jane from working late on someone else’s project or taking credit for a coworker’s plan. When she is complimented for that same plan, she “felt a momentary sensation of power,” and thinks, “It was a privilege to work in an office to have an address, a salary, a keyboard, and a title.” She recognizes the toxicity of the office, but that doesn’t stop her from leaning into it.
When my boss told me to be grateful for the work that was burning me out, I still kept chasing Inbox Zero like it would save me. I briefly felt saved when someone told me I was doing a good job. And then, I refreshed my inbox. This cycle is the curse of many corporate millennials—the knowledge that work shouldn’t be ruling our lives, but letting it anyway. We know, as Jane puts it, that “this gradual manipulation, this convoluted meritocracy, would slowly colonize my life until one day I’d wake up a middle-aged woman with a crick in her neck, complaining about her kid’s college loans and the ever-present threat of a layoff,” but we keep grinding, caught up in the vicious cycle. Our nine-to-five rules our time, personalities, and future, so we try to escape however we can.
Which brings us back to the love triangle—Jane’s escape. Madeline is young and flighty, dragging Jane along to clubs and jetting off to London or Berlin. Their relationship—if you can call it that—has shifting expectations and unclear rules. She is young and free from responsibility, a way for Jane to try to chase her youth instead of accepting that she is a “gainfully employed adult.” Addy, on the other hand, is ready to settle down. Though she is a touring musician, she offers the apparent stability of partnership. Jane says to Addy at one point, “Someday when I’m seventy-two…I’ll remember this room and you next to me in it.” It’s one of the only times she thinks of her future outside of the confines of work.
As is often the case in a love triangle, Jane tries to have her cake and eat it too, keeping up a texting relationship with Madeline, who’s living in Berlin, and having a toothbrush at Addy’s place in New York. Madeline and Addy offer a way to chase both a carefree past and a stable future, because the present of her day job is making her miserable. For me, the point was never who she would choose, or even if either of them would want to be chosen in the end. The point is that the specter of work hangs over everything, even after you have clocked out for the night.
FICTION
By Erica Peplin
Gallery Books
Published June 17, 2025
