Sad Desk Salad by Jessica Grose

The pink curlicue font on the cover is a little too cute for a book that could be charitably described as bitchy. Bitchy in a good way.

Alex Lyons is a writer for a gossip blog, and she is obsessed. Her personal hygiene and relationships are suffering. She wears the same black muumuu for days on end. The bitchier she is the more views she gets, the less likely she is to lose her job, a possibility that is looming within a month.   

Then someone starts a hate blog about her.

Sad Desk Salad raises a lot of interesting questions. Namely, how much is too much? How much transparency? How much social obligation? How much venom? How much visibility? How much ambition?

How to protect your image without the expectation of privacy?

How to get the toothpaste back into the tube?  

This is not a book I would have necessarily picked out on my own. I am reviewing this for The Well Read Wife blogger book club. I do read chick-lit on occasion, but always somewhat defensively.  

Usually I end up sorry I did. Sad Desk Salad is another story altogether. It's feminist. It's smart. It's funny. I really liked it.