Adelle Waldman Takes the Early Shift

In 2013, she published a novel that literary Brooklyn couldn’t stop talking about. It took a $12.25-an-hour job at a retail store to write the next one.

- Emily Gould

When adelle waldman’s daughter was 21 months old, Waldman would wake at 2:30 a.m. to nurse her, take a shower, then drive from her house in Rhinebeck to a big-box store across the Hudson, arriving early enough to stash her belongings in a locker and clock in before her shift from 4 to 8 a.m. (One time, she got a speeding ticket because she didn’t want to get written up for being late.) She would then join her team in spending the next four hours unloading a truck full of boxes, then dispersing their contents throughout the store. There was one 15-minute break halfway through the shift, and some employees would smoke cigarettes to help them stay awake. As we share American Spirits on the smoke-break bench outside the store one afternoon in late January, Waldman tells me everything else about the six months she spent at this job, the seed of her new novel, Help Wanted.

A stint at a $12.25-an-hour part-time job upstate was a long way from the scene-y events that greeted the publication of Waldman’s first novel a decade ago. The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. was praised almost universally by reviewers and included on nearly every notable- and best-books list. On then-ascendant Twitter and at media parties, it was, for a time, all anyone could talk about: Does anyone know who its protagonist, Nate Piven, is based on? Nate is a Brooklyn-based debut novelist who has total contempt for women yet perpetually attracts them, even though they should be too smart to fall for his bullshit. It wasn’t any one guy, of course. It was all of those guys, and in the character of Nate Piven, Waldman captured them with laser-guided precision and just enough empathy to make readers care.

Help Wanted, by contrast, is much wider in scope and aim. Like