An Interview with Christine Sneed

Interviewed by Vincent Francone

When Jabber was envisioned as a place for the absurd, we couldn’t have imagined Christine Sneed’s Please Be Advised, because only she could. But I do recall hearing what I now know was a selection from this novel in memos in 2019 when I had the pleasure of reading with her at the Northwestern Summer Writers Conference. Now that the book is in print, I wanted to chat with Christine and get some insights into the novel as well as her own history with office life. She was kind enough to oblige my request, results below. (PS: Please Be Advised is about the funniest and most original thing I’ve read this year. Buy a copy. Buy two. Give one to someone you know. Read it, enjoy and  commiserate with anyone who’s ever worked in an office.)

Vincent Francone:  Jabber was essentially created as a place to house what I was reductively calling “absurd” literature, though we’ve branched out a bit. Please Be Advised fits what I was looking for perfectly. Am I wrong to consider your novel as a perfect example of absurdist literature? If forced, how would you classify it? Corporate satire? 

Christine Sneed: It’s definitely meant to be an absurdist take on the ennui-inducing corporate workplace.  It took me a little time to realize I was writing, in particular, a surrealist examination of the dictatorial insanity and the related indignities that often characterize the experience of working in a corporate office. 

I think for me the biggest challenge was not being bored by the work I was given to do during my stints as an office employee—which could often be completed within a matter of a couple of hours (and then, what to do with the rest of the day other than try desperately to look busy?) I think many of us are familiar with this pressure, especially if you’re in a support staff role. Tedium! Ennui! And the repetitive schedule of 8 or 9 AM – 5 PM five days a week—it drove me bonkers. 

I think most of us would be a lot better off if employers trusted their staff to do the work in the actual period of time it takes to complete a task and subsequently allowed them to pursue creative projects for the remaining hours. I suspect some people would take advantage of this generosity, but I bet productivity would increase overall. 

VF:  I’ve worked in a number of offices, and so much of Please Be Advised feels correct, despite the exaggeration (I once read an office memo about appropriate casual Friday clothing that your memo regarding proper footwear nailed). I have to assume you’ve worked in a few offices in your time, right? 

CS: Oh yes! I have worked in quite a few offices, starting in high school when I got a job doing part-time secretarial work in a collection agency in Lincolnshire, Illinois, which was about 20 minutes or so from the town where I lived. The pay was abysmal, under four dollars an hour (this was the ‘80s), but the people I worked with were funny and interesting, and in some cases a little kooky. My closest friend Melanie and I worked there together one summer, and we both still joke about some of the characters we encountered. It was a fun workplace, despite the boring, repetitive nature of the work we were doing, e.g. stuffing envelopes and filing. 

I also worked for the two years between college and graduate school at a highway safety products company located in the building where Quest Industries is housed (1 E. Wacker Drive), and it is this job, probably, that provided the biggest inspiration for Please Be Advised, although none of the characters are based directly on anyone there—the atmosphere of that corporate office instead provided a springboard for the events and people in Please Be Advised. 

I’ve worked in at least five or six other offices too—academic and non-profit, each place defined by its own quirks. For the most part, I really liked my colleagues, even if the work itself was far from inspiring and also poorly paid (hence the trope about some of the Quest employees making wages so low they essentially need second jobs.)  

VF:  The book is fun, a pure joy to read, but I imagine it was a hard sell considering the format (a novel in memos) might not make sense to some readers. Did you have trouble convincing agents or editors to give it a shot? 

CS: It wasn’t an easy sell, you’re right. I showed it to a few agents I know and/or had worked with over a period of several years, none of whom were interested. The first two thought it wasn’t really a novel; the third did not get the book at all. Humor obviously is nothing if not deeply subjective—not everyone will laugh at the guy who slips on the banana peel—some will feel sorry for him and worry about the damage to his tailbone, which I think explains why drama is an easier sell—no one can disagree that a new mother being killed by a hit-and-run driver is a tragedy. (Even just typing that phrase, I find myself cringing.) And look at all the hype disaster porn movies and TV shows get – they’re everywhere (and I find them, in most cases, extremely tedious—I’ll always take a guy slipping on a banana peel over a story about a tornado wiping out half a town’s population in a matter of minutes). 

I wrote most of Please Be Advised in late 2017/early 2018, and it wasn’t until almost four years later that it landed with Kurt Baumeister at 7.13 Books. He got it immediately and told me within a week that he wanted to publish it. This was a very happy day, needless to say, and he was an excellent editor for it—he knew what to play up and also suggested I add another plot thread or two. After this conversation, for example, I came up with the IRS audit, and also added a few more memos to the matchmaker thread.  

VF: One thing that struck me was how much I found myself rooting for some of these characters, even when they acted horribly. Specifically, the ascension of Ken Crickshaw Jr. And even Hannah-Louise Schmidt and Bill Dubonski—I followed their relationship the way people follow Ben Affleck and J Lo. Curious if you had any intentions (or concerns) in regard to making the characters likeable despite objectively bad behavior.

CS: To be honest, no. I didn’t worry about making anyone likeable because I liked them! I felt instinctively that the humor would carry the book and all the questionable behavior of the goofballs that populate it was what really fueled the narrative too. Because I was having such a good time writing it, I didn’t worry about readers being put off by the hi-jinks of someone like Bryan Stokerly, Esq. 

My thought was, If they’ve gotten onboard with the tone within the first few memos, this is why they’re going to keep reading the book.  

VF:  Again, regarding the characters: the danger of a book like this might be in making characters into caricatures, but I didn’t get that from your book (even the tone of Jeff Snow’s story of getting laid for the first time was spot on). Any thoughts on how you avoided this?

CS: Well, I’m not sure how I did it, but I used the same tactics I do for some of my more straightforward, less overtly comedic books—I was always striving for the telling detail, for specificity. Specificity and precision are usually the qualities I admire most in the books I love best (as well as the tone—e.g. Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy—those three books and how their narratives unfurl are somewhat mysterious to me—Cusk is equally adept at creating an interior, emotional landscape to go with what’s external in her books.)  

The universal is in the particular—I think that’s how this maxim goes. I’m always most interested in and/or identify best with characters whom I recognize based on some detail, no matter how small, that the writer incorporates into the story. You mentioned Jeff Snow’s Story of Personal Triumph—when I added the detail about the red Illy espresso machine he keeps in his bedroom, I thought, Ah ha, that’s who this guy is. Even if he lifts weights and has a big science calculator, it’s the espresso machine that was the key for me as I wrote his story. 

VF: The point about little details making the character or giving the reader something to lock onto is interesting. Of all the people in Please Be Advised, I most looked forward to the memos by President Bryan Stokerly (am I wrong, by the way, in seeing him as a reference to Bram Stoker?). But! Stokerly is objectively terrible. Nevertheless, I laughed hardest at his memos, including the one that speaks… um, candidly about his employees. I don’t guess this was your intention, but my eagerness to lap up his terrible behavior feels like it has to do with more than just laughing at what a rotten person he is. Maybe there’s a way that the reader (or me, I guess) is implicated as they read? Feel free to ignore this question or tell me I’m full of shit.  

CS: I wasn’t thinking of Bram Stoker when I came up with Bryan Stokerly’s name, but my editor asked me that same question, so maybe there is something inadvertently to it. I do know that I wasn’t sure who Bryan really was until I started writing more and more of his memos. Eventually it became clear he was a delusional egomaniac, an unapologetic drunk, and a well-spoken buffoon. Those faults aside, I do think he’s a good critic of American culture, though he has no sense of his own shortcomings, like most egomaniacs, I suspect. 

I’m so glad you laughed at his memos. That was very much my hope! It was important to me that he have no idea of how ridiculous he is, how grandiose and self-important others at Quest find him. He is meant to be a spectacle of some of the worst qualities in a corporate leader, and of course he’s not even qualified for the job with his BFA in Fiber Arts. But frankly, an arts degree strikes me as, if not more, valuable than an MBA. Bryan has an imagination, but it’s addled by booze, his egotism and single-minded pursuit of pleasure.