Private Equity

October 1, 2023

The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Sun triumphed in school and (with some detours) clambered successfully up the corporate ladder but found herself physically and mentally devastated by her job; Private Equity reminds us of the need to examine our relationship to work. Prepub Alert.

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December 1, 2023
MIT graduate Sun felt like she was floundering after leaving her analyst job and dropping out of an MBA program. After 14 rigorous interviews, she was hired at a very respected hedge fund as the personal assistant to the founder. Sun shares with readers her personal account of working there and navigating the culture. She describes a siloed world where, like in many small firms, people live to work and time knows no bounds, with responsibilities bleeding into weekends and holidays. This firm's culture valued total commitment and return on time, pushing employees to the brink. It also offered a fully stocked kitchen, lunches, dinners, lavish events, bonuses, and more. It wasn't long before Sun realized that perks and money cannot solve everything. Fearing losing her identity to work, she takes the radical step to leave it behind. She shares with readers the valuable lessons she learned while working, as well as how to evaluate and persevere, creating personal balance in one's life. Those in high-pressure careers or in the financial industry will find this book insightful.

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January 1, 2024
A memoir about the alluring world of high finance. "No one...Yes, that's right, no one has ever voluntarily left Carbon." So says the pseudonymous billionaire behind a pseudonymous Manhattan hedge fund that showed every promise of making him the world's first trillionaire. Sun recounts how she took a job as a personal assistant to "Boone Prescott," which required her to be available around the clock and to "make the world work for Boone" in whatever way he saw necessary. To call Prescott a control freak is to undervalue the term, but Sun found herself falling into a sort of corporate fantasy world in which he was one of the good capitalists, an illusion that she eventually shed even after working hard enough to land her on a therapist's couch. The author is candid in acknowledging that she was a willing participant for far too long, giving up what she really wanted to be--a writer--in order to take part in a lucrative but draining world in which the boss slowly transformed into Gordon Gekko ("Carrie, remember, money can solve nearly everything"). There's a Devil Wears Prada dimension to the narrative, which becomes increasingly grimmer as it goes, and a few self-indulgent moments, while doubtless cathartic for the author, make for tiresome reading. On the whole, however, Sun's memoir provides both a measured account of how soul-devouring the corporate world is and of how employees as well as bosses are complicit: "I became in-terned in a reality in which succeeding at Carbon took me further away from the self I had longed to set free....The trauma plot and the capitalism plot are increasingly the same plot. Each one rewards you for staying inside the other." Middling, but still a useful cautionary tale about the dangers of unfettered capitalism and unquenchable greed.

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March 18, 2024
Sun debuts with a thought-provoking if undercooked account of her time working as an overqualified assistant for the founder of a Manhattan hedge fund. At 29, after four years as a highly paid financial analyst, Sun wanted to make a career switch—the more she earned, the more she “recoil from it all.” Hoping to lean into her artistic impulses, she decided to obtain a graduate degree in creative writing. To support that pursuit while pivoting away from financial analysis, she searched for a job that would help her pay for school. Ultimately, she landed a position assisting “Boone Prescott,” billionaire founder of the hedge fund “Carbon” (Sun changed the names of most of the people and companies she discusses). She wrote Boone’s speeches, prepared his PowerPoint slides, and ordered his car services; all the while, he dodged the press and maintained an unusual level of secrecy at the firm. As Boone hit Sun with more and more work, attempting to buy her loyalty with bonuses, raises, and lavish perks, she grew increasingly weary of his demands and the company’s faux-familial culture. Eventually, she left the firm despite Boone’s protests. Sun tugs at intriguing ideas—including an assertion that her emotionally repressed childhood “made me the perfect handmaiden for financial capitalism”—but the book’s momentum drags in places. Still, it’s an intriguing portrait of millennial burnout. Agent: Melissa Flashman, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.