Whisper Network

“Our universes seemed disconnected, occasionally bumping up against each other because of proximity alone. Or so we thought. We needed only to have knocked at the door to one another’s world to find out how our histories knitted themselves together, weaving shared threads into a noose of our own making.”

The novel quickly sets up the idea that the lives of the women in the offices are more connected than they think, foreshadowing that by whispering, rather than talking, the women are doing themselves a disservice.

“‘Only believe the nice things this one tells you about me, Katherine.’ And his laugh, it lingered a split second after the door closed behind him.”

Ames blatantly abuses his male privilege and power as company president and soon-to-be CEO. In this scene, Ames taunts Ardie with the fact that he raped her and that she will not come forward about it, knowing that if she tried to no one would believe her work over his.

“The idea came to her a week earlier, when Liam had casually inquired as to when they’d start thinking about having another baby. Grace was no spring chicken, he’d said, though he’d used nicer words because, of course, Liam was a good person. Throughout her entire pregnancy, he’d been fastidious in assuring her how beautiful she was.”

The question of what makes a man good is at the heart of this book. Here, Grace demarcates “goodness” and “badness” as semantics, allowing readers to extrapolate that “good men” merely know what to say to sound socially appropriate, rather than genuinely having a solid moral compass.

“It’s problematic because when we allow young boys to so casually call a young girl ‘crazy,’ well, it offers everyone else permission not to believe her. Were any of these boys called crazy for inventing this made-up story about shoes, of all things?”

The school’s response to Abigail being bullied reflects the way that women at Truviv and elsewhere are treated for coming forward about sexual harassment. The principal blames Abigail for reacting to the bullies in self-defense, just as women at Truviv are disbelieved and/or punished for coming forward with their stories.

“She couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked her in the eye or the last time he’d glanced in her direction and hadn’t made an expression that made clear her entire body was personally offensive to him.”

Ardie is keenly aware of how her rejection of beauty standards makes Ames feel. She knows that he sees her decision to not spend time working out, putting on makeup, and finding cute outfits, as an insult because he feels entitled to every female body in the office.

“‘You women all think the system is out to screw you.’ ‘You are the system, Ames.’ She stood, stared down at him, thought about how her stilettos could poke clearly through his eye sockets if she wanted them to.”

Ames places blame on women for feeling victimized, rather than recognizing his role as a misogynist, abuser, and criminal. Sloane often has violent revenge fantasies about Ames, showing how far she has been driven towards the edge by all her years being harassed in the office. 

“Plagiarism was wrong. This was the opposite. Sloane was giving Ardie credit for a memo that she’d written herself. It was actually fairly nice of her, wasn’t it? No harm, no foul, and whatnot.”

This quote exemplifies Sloane’s tendency to talk herself into believing that the ways she uses other people to get what she wants is not bad.

“Rosalita walked with her son to a house that represented the two directions in which their lives were already pulling and she worried how her heart would take it if one day he looked back at her not with pride, but pity. She supposed, in the end, that was motherhood.”

Rosalita’s life as a poor single mother constantly abuts the lives of the rich, mostly white people she is surrounded by at work. She worries that her son will eventually view her as inferior for being a cleaner because he will soon attend a private school and seems destined for a white-collar job.

“He could be an asshole, she had no doubt. Not to her, but he was, she agreed, capable. But she doubted whether Sloane and Ardie, for instance, had as much experience with men of a certain ilk as she did. Because Grace had grown up in Cotillion, been a debutante, joined a sorority, and at each stop, she’d understood the discreet underpinning at the heart of these men’s behavior. It was entitlement.”

Grace excuses the harm that men cause and believes that her ability to withstand it makes her a superior woman; Grace’s viewpoint supports the patriarchy and misogyny. Grace has come to think like this because of the traditional, patriarchal, systems she was raised in.

“Perhaps nosiness was a biological adaptation. Survival of the most informed.”

Baker suggests that because of our society's systems of policing gender, the desire to learn secret information is a survival tactic, formed through nurture rather than nature. The passage legitimates a behavior that is often seen as gossipy, catty, and stereotypically female.

“‘Desmond was a loss, no doubt.’ Ames shoved a hand in his pocket. ‘Truly saddened me. We’d been through a lot together.’ He watched Rosalita, who at once understood that there was a script to this meeting that she hadn’t been provided. She said nothing. ‘I don’t expect any problems from the cleaning staff. Is that right?’”

Ames wields power and fear over Truviv employees without directly saying anything incriminating. There is nothing Rosalita can say in this scenario because their power differential is so large and because when she did come forward, she was silenced with money. Insightfully, she understands that Ames isn’t really talking to her in this moment—he is having this conversation based on a “script” in his head that she does her best to quickly absorb and protect herself from.

“How did we know when behavior was inappropriate? We just did. Any women over the age of fourteen probably did. Believe it or not, we didn’t want to be offended. We weren’t sitting around twiddling our thumbs waiting for someone to show up and offend us so that we would have something to do that day. In fact, we made dozens of excuses not to be. We gave the benefit of the doubt.”

The rhetoric of Ames, Principal Clark, and other men in this book makes women feel crazy and burdensome for complaining about harassment. The book shows how, in actuality, there are countless small moments of abuse that women must ignore in order to move through the world.

“‘Certain girls need to get attention one way or another. I’m not saying that they’re doing it intentionally for that reason. They probably believe, on some level, that’s what’s happening. You know?’ Grace didn’t say anything. ‘I’m always worried that Clark is going to be accused of something he didn’t do.’”

Grace’s sorority friend echoes patriarchal and misogynist platitudes, placing the blame on women for asking for help, rather than on men for making women need to ask for help. The book stresses that the opposite is true—men need to change their behavior, stop being harassers or enabling harassers, so that women do not need to get help.

“In this search for the bogiemen who are supposedly haunting Dallas unchecked, it seems that, just like in Salem, those leading the charge have been allergic to cold, hard facts (likely because there are none or they are too inconvenient to bear repeating), and have instead focused on how those accused are making them feel.”

This report frames the women’s lawsuit as an emotional witch hunt, casting the survivors of sexual assault as hysterical Puritans accusing everyone around them of being witches without any evidence. The mocking tone dismisses legitimate reporting of rape and assault, portraying it as either mercenary or the ramblings of superstitious and unsophisticated people.

“It was as though someone had tapped the terrarium display case in which they were living and the glass walls had cracked. What Ames’s death had done was give everyone permission to come to his defense.”

The book uses the trope of glass walls and ceilings to symbolize the barriers that hold women back in the workplace. The novel’s protagonists hope that by coming together, they can break through the glass ceiling and become stronger. This is why it is such a huge disappointment that when the women do finally come together, Ames is the one to whom people give empathy.

“‘Trouble has a way of multiplying, doesn’t it?’ she said to Rosalita, who didn’t know whether that was true, only that trouble metastasized if it went untreated.”

Rosalita’s framework is intimidating but empowering. In Ardie’s framework, trouble simply happens to people, who have no choice in the matter—like a fungus that “multiplies” by itself. In Rosalita’s view, the way to better a situation is to see the problem and address it—for her, trouble is like cancer, which can “metastasize” but also be “treated” with the right medicine.

“We never understood the tendency to underestimate us, we who had been baptized and delivered through pain, who grinned and bore agonies while managing to draw on wing-tipped eyeliner with a surgically steady hand.”

Women in the office are expected to perform the difficult tasks that are associated with femininity, such as keeping in shape, wearing make-up, having children, etc., while making it look easy. Meanwhile, the men in the book are allowed to have messy emotions and make countless mistakes. Despite this disparity, the women are seen as less capable.

“Those allegations are a distraction meant to keep us from being able to focus on the original issue, which was a company that allowed a man like Ames Garrett to behave with a lack of discretion for years unchecked because no feasible potions for women existed to complain outside of the legal system without fear of retribution.”

This passage succinctly explains how it is possible that Ames harassed at least five women without facing any real consequence: Fear keeps women from coming forward to authorities outside the company, while internally, Truviv HR does its best to simply hide the problem rather than address it.

“‘We’re just trying to say that violence is never the answer.’ ‘Oh, well, that’s good to know. But violence against little girls is more of, what, a gray area? Mostly okay? Fine, as long as we’re all good sports about it? It seems to me you’re mistake about who was being violent and who was acting in self-defense.’”

Abigail’s experience with gendered bullying at school parallels the women’s experiences with gendered harassment in the workplace, effectively showing how women are trained into capitulation. While the principal dismisses the bullying as an isolated incident, Sloane argues that Abigail’s experiences fit into a culture that accepts rape and harassment. 

“Failure was a luxury we couldn’t afford, all chained together as we were, our fates locked up tight […] Because when we failed it was because of our chromosomes, it wasn’t because of a market dip or an ineffective advertising campaign or plain bad luck.”

The women feel intense pressure to perform perfectly at their jobs, as mothers, and in their relationships, because they know that their failures will reflect on women as a gender. The characters process this pressure differently. For example, Grace is unable to process her depression for fear of failure, while Katherine chooses to protect her job over the moral imperative to tell the truth.

“Sloane had read somewhere that it would be impossible to kill someone with a thousand paper cuts, despite the old saying, ‘Death by a thousand paper cuts,’ but that a million might actually do the trick. She probably shouldn’t think about that sort of thing after all that had happened.”

The women in this book often have violent fantasies, which are sharp juxtaposed to the veneer of politeness that they project to the world. The fantasies give the reader the sense that the women are more than capable of committing murder.

“Because she would always wonder what the man saw on her face that night and she guessed it was pity. What in her eyes had been intended as benign sympathy, in his had already metastasized into something mean. She supposed that was because there was already meanness inside him, swimming in his blood like cancer cells waiting to glom onto something. He had an underlying condition. Where would it have gone if hadn’t noticed her seeing him? If he hadn’t already felt the humiliation boiling inside him and acted on that fateful impulse to make his humiliation hers instead.”

Rosalita hypothesizes that Ames raped her because he is an inherently bad man, though she does not know whether this has to do with nature or nurture. She understands that his choice had nothing to do with her—she simply happened to be an available body for him to enact violence on. His actions show how emotionally stunted he was, needing to push his emotions onto other people.

“There was a fascinating tidbit Ardie had once heard: Women walked around the world in constant fear of violence; men’s greatest fear was ridicule.”

This old truism recurs several times in the book, playing out in characters’ motivations and actions. The women try to save one another from violence by whispering, and then talking loudly, while Ames tries to escape ridicule by silencing, gaslighting, and blaming women.