I Hope This Finds You Well by Natalie Sue

Format: Audiobook (Spotify)
Read: December 2024

I picked this audiobook on Spotify because it was the exact amount of hours I had left in my month, and I thought a workplace comedy about loneliness might be what I was in the mood for after our Christmas party! It turned out to be OK, it’s a solid three stars.

The story follows Jolene, a lonely office worker in her late thirties who struggles to interact with her colleagues positively. She’s just been caught writing rude messages to her colleagues in white font at the bottom of emails. I was initially a bit worried these messages would be a chunk of the plot because it is so stupid – it would be so easy for people to see this! Her punishment is to take sensitivity training with the HR guy and for her access to emails to be restricted. The twist is that the email restrictions were not set up correctly and she ends up instead with access to her whole Department’s private emails and chat messages. When she finds out the rumoured layoffs are in the works she decides to use this fuck up to her advantage to secure her job.

There is a romance subplot with the HR guy, Cliff, but it isn’t the main focus of the novel. It did feel a bit too convenient given everything else that was going on in the office. He is essentially a white knight who rides in and lifts her out of her isolation. I may have preferred it without the romance element and the focus just being on building relationships with her colleagues. There is also a minor subplot with a neglected twelve-year-old neighbour girl, Miley, that didn’t really go anywhere meaningful but that was fine because I can’t stand precocious child characters!

Jolene was a frustrating character, and I don’t think she felt convincingly like a real person. She’s hard to like because she is extremely judgmental of all her colleagues and often it feels uncalled for. She’s barely spoken to anybody other than her Persian parents or Miley in eight years, and that includes the people she works with, and yet when Cliff is around she’s miraculously- immediately – charming and about to throw out these effortless quips. I know people are different depending on who they are with (I’m very different with my partner compared with everyone else in the world) but there was no warm-up when she met Cliff, there was no transition! She was like two completely different people.

She also makes quite a lot of bad decisions that I know are necessary for the “comedy” but felt annoyingly unrealistic. I’m sure if I had access to all my colleague’s emails and messages (which holy fuck I do not want) it would not be that hard to not act as suspiciously as she does. Stop starting directly at people while you read their chat messages! Stop blurting out things you shouldn’t know! Fact check the name of your creepy boss’s wife! Don’t agree to lie to a dying woman!

However, I did find a lot of her small everyday experiences very relatable. The paralysing anxiety over being asked to bring drinks to a party, the buying too many and of too many different kinds because you’re so worried nobody will like them… and then for someone to make a snarky comment, nobody to appreciate the effort and nobody drink any of it anyway, is uncomfortably real! I understand always feeling like an outsider and never being included. A year into my job I’m still not sure what the deal is with after-work drinks, I’d go in on a Friday and feel slightly sick all day over whether my colleagues have decided to go for drinks and if I’d get invited, and if I’d actually feel like going or not…

I actually wish Jolene’s story had not been built on the foundations of a rom-com, because the bones of it are a lot darker than the rom-com box will let it be. If this was written by someone like Ottessa Moshregh instead, and allowed to be as weird and twisted as I think Jolene has the potential for, it would be been a lot more interesting. It’d be better either without Cliff or by letting Cliff be the equally fucked up weirdo he has the potential for. As it is he’s just this perfect bland, blonde white knight character whose only edge is he likes Warhammer, I guess (I didn’t know that was popular in Canada!). Why exactly is Mr Sunshine attracted to Jolene, the hostile office weirdo?!

On that note, I think the “wildly funny” on the cover is a major stretch. I didn’t find much humour in this book, it’s not a workplace comedy, sure it’s got the rom-com fluff, but it is actually about a depressed, anxious woman struggling with grief and trauma in an office full of people who are also lonely and dealing with their own struggles. That’s actually OK by me, I don’t like cheesy comedy books (this is still plenty cheesy) but just don’t pick it up expecting it to be a feel-good laugh riot.

In the end, it becomes very sickly and self-helpy, and honestly, I think it is unrealistic that all her colleagues, parents – and Cliff – would forgive the massive betrayal of trust. Again because of that rom-com box I knew where we were going to end this story. I wish it had been a little rougher and dark and real, the potential for that was there. There were moments that really hit home for me.

And a note on the audiobook, the narrator (Nasim Pedrad) read it with a forced sweet tone in her voice for much of it, it reminded me of a Disney princess. I hated the way she made her voice soft and sickly in the romance scenes. It made me cringe every time. It was way too much, and it didn’t make sense as Jolene’s voice. Her character came across as much drier and deadpan to me.