Dear reader, A few years ago, an acquaintance invited me to have coffee with her at an exclusive women’s coworking space in New York. I’d heard of this place before and had been intrigued by the utopia it promised, a sisterhood where you didn’t need to worry about men bothering you, as long as you could afford the dues. As I sipped my expensive cold brew on a fancy, peach-colored couch, I remember being fascinated by the peaceful clubhouse. I was also wildly intimidated by the women roaming around, exuding effortless cool. I didn’t belong among them. They were all so sparkly, so accomplished! On the elevator ride back down to the real world, I overheard a woman telling her friend about the big struggle in her life: that it was really hard dating a celebrity chef, because he was never free for brunch. The experience stayed in my mind as I watched these types of spaces grow in popularity and then face a backlash. Critics slammed them as a luxury good that, in trying to rectify one kind of inequality (gender), ended up reinforcing others (economic and racial). The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t exactly help with membership. CEOs resigned, doors shut, waitlists disappeared. And yet, the idea of these spaces still appeals. After all, what’s more seductive than belonging? We all want to find a place that feels like it was made for us, where we can be safe and celebrated and loved by likeminded people. But does making a place special always have to mean keeping others out? With A Special Place for Women, I wanted to explore this kind of environment, heightening it even further by making my fictional women’s club secret and maybe a little bit cultish. (These women really like their tarot cards and rituals!) I set out to examine power and ambition, to include elements of a few different genres, and most of all, to make it really freaking fun. I also obviously had to include a sexy celebrity chef among the cast of characters. Thank you so much for choosing this novel for your book club. I hope it gives you much to discuss. Please know that I’d be delighted to drop into your online meetings to say hello or answer any questions, although if your book club is too exclusive for me, I understand.
Warmly, Laura
A Conversation with Laura Hankin Tell us about A Special Place for Women. What inspired you to write this story? A Special Place for Women is about an undercover reporter who infiltrates a secret social club for women, only to find that the occult-obsessed Bohemians and self-proclaimed “girlbosses” who make up the membership are far more powerful than she ever imagined. Your protagonist, Jillian, joins a women’s-only secret club in order to expose its secrets. What is most interesting to you about the secrets we choose to keep? Deciding that something (a piece of information, a fancy social club, etc.) needs to be secret gives it extra power. Secrecy can turn something bad into a weight that might destroy us. It can make something fun seem far more special than it otherwise might. I wanted to give the characters in A Special Place for Women both kinds of secrets and explore how that affected them. Similarly, choosing to share a secret with someone else is one of the quickest ways to heighten a relationship. Suddenly, this person can help us share our weight, they might feel a really exciting sense of community with us, or they might have leverage over us. And that’s super-fun in fiction! (If not always in real life . . . ) Which of the characters in your novel do you relate to the most? The least? Even though I’m different from Jillian in all sorts of ways, I still relate to her the most. We’ve both dealt with the grief of losing our mothers, we share a belief in the power of writing, we have a tendency toward skepticism or judgment that we’re learning to get over, and we both may have been a little mixed up in our love lives in our twenties! I’ve also got a fondness for Libby, Jillian’s fellow newbie in the club, who wants very badly to be liked by everyone she meets.
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I probably relate the least to Margot, the astrology guru and socialite who is one of the leaders of the club. Tragically, she’s way cooler than I could ever hope to be. But I will keep trying. Both A Special Place for Women and your previous novel, Happy and You Know It, allow readers to take a peek into the lives (and scandals!) of New York City’s wealthy elite. Why do you think we are drawn to stories about how the other half lives? Well, it’s always fun to read about nice things and feel, for at least a little while, like we can have them for ourselves! But I also tell these stories to call out some of the drastic wealth inequality we’re dealing with in this country. Jillian is not an elite, and one of her major criticisms of the club is that, while it presents itself as this incredible safe place for women, it’s only available as a luxury good to the privileged women who might need it the least. Although you’re not a member of a secret women’s society (or at least we don’t think you are!), you were able to create a group of women who come together and find a place to empower themselves and each other. Why do you think this is so important? Yes, I’m definitely not a member of a secret women’s society. (Which is exactly what a member of such a society would say?) Many women feel like they’re living in a world that was designed for men. A world where men are the ones who get ahead and who hold the ultimate power, and where people who identify as women have to fight twice as hard to get what they deserve. All that fighting can get exhausting. So of course we long for a place to go where we can be free of that pressure, find our allies, and rest up before we have to dive back into the struggle. The members of Nevertheless, the secret club in the novel, are having fun, sure, but they’re also trying to make the world better for women generally—that is, if they can stop their own egos and personal ambitions from getting in the way.
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What do you hope readers will take away from A Special Place for Women? Most importantly, I hope readers will have a ton of fun reading it, laugh a lot, be surprised by some of the twists, and swoon over the romance. But also, there’s been a popular sentiment recently that if women just ran everything, it would fix all of our problems. It’s very tempting to believe that, if women took over, things would magically improve in every way. But making the world better for everyone takes work and involves a whole lot of trial and error. I hope readers take away that it’s okay if we don’t do things perfectly the first time. We just have to try again.
Listen While You Read “TKO” by Le Tigre “Run the World (Girls)” by Beyoncé “I Put a Spell on You” by Sylvia Black “Slow Burn” by Kacey Musgraves “Come Over” by Dagny
1.
What’s your opinion on spaces meant for women only? Have you had any personal experience with them?
2.
What do you think of Jillian’s ultimate decision about her article? Would you have made the same choice?
3.
The novel’s title references the famous Madeleine Albright quote, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t support other women.” How do the characters embody or go against her words?
4.
What do you think of Jillian’s view of things we cannot prove—like astrology and the occult—and how that view changes over the course of the book?
5.
How did you hope the love triangle would resolve? What do you think drew Jillian to each of these two very different men?
6.
One of the book’s major themes is about the appeal of truly belonging. Would you want to belong to a club like Nevertheless? If so, how would you get yourself in?
7.
Did you find your perceptions of any of the characters changing over the course of the book? Who surprised you the most? And if you could hear the events of the book from another character’s point of view, who would you choose?
8.
What did you think of how the book played with different genres, from satire to romance to the occult?
9.
Share your thoughts on the scandal involving Nicole Woo-Martin, and how that relates to the book’s view of power and ambition. How do you think that such a scandal would have unfolded with a male politician at its center?
10. What do you think is next for the women of Nevertheless?
About Laura Hankin LAURA HANKIN is the author of Happy & You Know It. She has written for publications like McSweeney’s and HuffPost, while her musical comedy has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Funny or Die. She splits her time between NYC, where she has performed off-Broadway and acted onscreen, and Washington, DC, where she has sung to far too many babies. LauraHankin.com •
LauraHankin •
Author photo © Ricardo Quinones
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