I’m writing this from my usual perch on my couch, my laptop balanced on my legs where I’m reminded, as I so often am, of the first line I ever came up with in Whisper Network: “We fell asleep with the heat of laptops burning our thighs.” If there were a single image I could use to illustrate what it feels like to be a working woman and mother today, it’d be this one.

It’s rushing home from work so as not to be late for childcare pickup. It’s scrounging a family meal together, reading and singing through bedtime and falling asleep in my toddler’s bed, only to heave myself out of it thirty minutes later to start work again for the evening. It’s the pull of demonstrating that I’m 100% focused on work while at the office and 100% focused on parenting while at home, but somehow always getting caught in those soggy in between moments where my focus is split, and not always in favor of the direction I intend.

Whisper Network started as a book about how women deal (or don’t) with sexual harassment at work. Like every woman I know, the advent of the #MeToo movement sparked a thousand personal conversations with my friends about what we had and had not experienced in terms of sexually predatory behavior and how we’d dealt with it or, perhaps more interestingly, how we felt about how we’d dealt with it. Those conversations always morphed into a broader discussion of the experience of being a professional woman, of which sexual harassment is certainly a piece, but not the only piece. I wanted to write a novel that could do justice to these insightful dialogues I was having while penning something big and juicy enough that a reader would turn the last page and feel both righteously indignant and the impulsive urge to call up his or her best friend and chat about what exactly happened in that ending! Here’s hoping that’s exactly where you land.

Chandler Baker