I had really high hopes for FAKE WORK. I was expecting a scathing, no-holds-barred critique of late-stage capitalism and how we as a society can see through the ensuing hellscape it has created. But that’s not what this is, despite the summaries making it seem like a reasonable expectation. This is definitely a (sometimes meandering) memoir set primarily in 1999 as the author reflects on her experiences in an intense corporate job and culture. And there are some vaguely critical, analytical musings on capitalism and its effects, but it turns out the title is more apt than I initially realized: we get a sense that the author is “beginning to suspect capitalism is a joke,” but we never really reach a fully fleshed-out argument.

I do think the author is on something, and that she provides some good reflections on her experiences in corporate America. And I think, given some different editing, this book could have had some teeth. The way it stands right now, though, it feels like it doesn’t necessarily accomplish what it set out or was marketed to do in a lot of ways. I kept waiting for the energy and passion of a takedown, but it never came. And let’s be honest, capitalism isn’t just a joke. It’s very real and has devastating consequences for most people in our society, save for a very few who benefit from it. We really need that takedown, but Leigh Claire La Barge’s FAKE WORK is not the book that gives it to us.

It was an enjoyable memoir, and, had my expectations been different, I might not feel so disappointed. It’s well written and clearly comes from a place of reflection for the author. I’m glad to have read it, and now I want to read the book I thought this was going to be!

Very helpful, but not as advertised. Would not recommend, 1/5 stars. ⭐️ But it was the only way for the two 2️⃣ star

I was intrigued by the title and cover. I thoroughly enjoyed Exit Interview by Kristi Coulter and was expecting something similar, especially with that tagline... Unfortunately, what I found felt more like someone's journal entries about their job and life in 1999. While I was there and similarly aged (I'm a year or two older), with somewhat similar experience (friends who worked at Andersen and in advertising), I still couldn't find my way into this one... It felt repetitive and like a primer on Y2K more than anything else.

I kept waiting for some snark or eye rollingly-bad behavior but kept finding lengthy expositions on what Y2K was supposed to be and what a flop it turned out to be. It couldn't hold my attention. Honestly, the prologue was the most interesting part - and felt like it gave me the whole story, in like 15 page flips (I read it on kindle). It had more of the tone I was expecting. The rest of the writing was surprisingly dry and felt more like a recitation of information with an occasional interjection of irritation than anything else.

This one wasn't for me.

Thanks to NetGalley and Haymarket Books for the advanced reader copy.

I thought the premise of this book--that the author, who'd worked for a management consulting company that was trying to proactively prevent the negative predictions for Y2K, eventually understood her job to be fake work--sounded like a new take on the personal narrative/business book. Unfortunately, the book felt overwritten and bloated from the first page of the prologue. There were times when it was a slog to get through a sentence and remember what the purpose of the sentence was by the time I got to the end. This felt like a case of not having a thorough enough editor. Too bad.

In Fake Work, Leigh Claire La Berge tells the story of the two years she spent working on a bogus Y2K preparedness team. It was 1998 when she lucked into this plush gig with a global advertising conglomerate. Mind you, she wasn’t amending lines of code or doing anything else to avert a tech apocalypse. Rather, she worked as a quality assurance analyst, endlessly double-checking “the Conglomerate’s” documentation of their Y2K prep. All this documenting and quality assuring was aimed at defending against potential lawsuits should the new millennium interrupt advertising as usual. Working alongside Leigh Claire and her team were consultants from the now defunct Arthur Andersen, the management consulting firm that had sold the Conglomerate this goofy process. From the start, La Berge recognized something phony about the whole endeavor, so she started doing a little documenting of her own, writing about her experiences and the people she worked with. She collected her observations in what she called her Bildungsroman. However, it would only be with the benefit of hindsight, and a Ph.D. involving extensive grounding in Marxist theory, that she would come to see not only her Y2K work as fake, but all “work” done in the name of capitalism.

Fake Work is a fun nostalgia trip for anyone who remembers Y2K fears, and especially for those just starting their corporate work life around the turn of the millennium. I fall into that group, and La Berge’s descriptions of ridiculous training, corporate true believers, and meaningless, instantly forgotten work, really resonated with me. As a memoir, Fake Work is at its best when narrating do-nothing office days and profligate spending during global business travel. La Berge’s observations are sharp, and these concrete moments shine with her humor and cleverness. However, whenever La Berge steps away from describing actual events and starts running her experiences through the Marxist theory machine, the writing goes slack and starts to sag under the weight of its own theoretical heft. Luckily, these theory-dense passages tend to occur more in the first half of the book, so it picks up momentum as it goes along.

I love ‘90s nostalgia, and I’m grateful I got to be among the first to read this one-of-a-kind memoir. My thanks to NetGalley and Haymarket Books for providing me with a copy of Fake Work in exchange for my review.

I want to be clear: I went into this book expecting a sharp, satirical takedown of corporate absurdity and late-stage capitalism. What I got instead felt more like an overly long journal entry from 1999, packed with vague philosophical musings and very little bite.

📉 Why It Missed the Mark:
🛠️ Not a Takedown—More a Ramble – Despite the bold title and comparisons to Bullshit Jobs, this isn’t a critique of capitalism so much as a meandering, memoir-ish account of the author’s time in consulting. It reads more like a lightly annotated diary than an insightful analysis.
📚 Repetitive and Self-Indulgent – The term bildungsroman appears over 50 times (yes, I checked), and yet it never seems to earn its place in the narrative. There are references to personal development, but no clear arc or deeper takeaway that connects the concept to the reader.
💼 Boring Office Culture, But Not in a Fun Way – The absurdity of corporate life is acknowledged, but without the humor or sharpness you might expect. Instead of feeling exposed, the system feels... untouched.

🤷‍♀️ Final Take: This wasn’t so much a takedown of capitalism as it was a long, loosely political meditation with occasional flashes of insight. I don’t necessarily disagree with the politics, but the execution was flat and not nearly as engaging as the synopsis suggested.

Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism is a Joke, by Leigh Claire La Berge, wasn't what I was hoping for but once I adjusted my expectations I enjoyed it.

When I mention adjusting expectations I am not talking about some hierarchical adjustment, no change in what I expect in writing quality. I am talking about what I thought the book was going to be. I expected more of an explicit critique of capitalism, almost academic in nature. Once I realized it was a memoir first and the critique was more by showing than explaining, I could enjoy the book much more. Those of us who have studied and taught such critiques will recognize where the theory is used even if it isn't explicitly stated and explained.

The memoir as such was a mix of funny and horrifying, knowing that what was happening 25 years ago is only more prevalent today puts an element of disgust in a humorous memoir.

The critique is here, and there are places where she explains some of the thinking behind her critique, but if you were wanting a book laying out arguments and coming to a worked-through conclusion, you could be disappointed.

I would recommend this to readers who are looking more for some examples, supported by rational thought, of how dysfunctional our system is. If you want a memoir without commentary on society, or a textbook on Marxist analysis of capitalism, you will need to adjust your expectations, as I did.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

Really interesting account of the author's experience of corporate life. I think many people who have worked in similar corporate environments will recognise much of this!

Hmm.. memoirish, Y2K musings and lots on the world of work. At some points I enjoyed it and at others it felt like a bit of a rant. Not quite my cup of tea. Thank you to the author. Thank you to #netgalley and the publisher for an ARC.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC. This one went a bit too over my head in waxing romantic on early aughts corporate life.

There are some good, skewering observations here, but the author gets a little too wrapped up in the spiral of “The Process” and seems to repeat the same things over and over.

While some will likely appreciate the extreme lengths to philosophize on the non-essential toils of the Y2K prep endeavor, to me it just felt like putting fancy wallpaper on a sparse premise.

I was intrigued by the description and premise but I think the author's dry, rather dense sense of humor is not for me. This might be good for someone who is interested in an anthropological take on corporate America.

It took a while for me to get into this book. The first third felt very repetitive, but maybe that was the point? That said, the story itself is interesting and kind of a hilarious take on how insane our society functions, through the lens of the author's life during the Y2K crisis as a QA analyst.
I picked up this book because of the cover and was hoping it would have covered society as a whole instead of one story, but it was an interesting take on a time I have vivid memories of.

Have you ever wondered what life looks like behind-the-scenes at the mega corporations that run the global economy? Have you pondered what it is “business elites” are really up to in those high rises and in their fancy suits? Well, wonder no more!

Fake Work is an ethnography and memoir of the author’s year as a management consultant in 1999, focused solely on Y2K preparation: i.e. preparing for the end of the world that never came. Leigh Claire La Berge offers a fascinating and truly unique perspective into a strange time in modern history that offers us plenty to reflect on, as we consider that moment in time now, two and a half decades later.

La Berge’s accounts of her year working at Anderson LLC are vivid as she recounts the mundane and the absurd with equal richness and colour. She pulls from her detailed accounts of that year—her Bildungsroman, as she calls it—and it truly does feel like a peek into a moment in history that one might not have otherwise ever gotten to see the inside of.

I loved her attention to detail and how well she fleshed out each of the characters she encountered during her time working there—they seem both utterly absurd and completely believable at the same time, which was quite a delight. One of my favourite lines in the book was this: “She explained that The Process valued consistency over idiomatic accuracy, and she predicted that with more site visits I would find myself transliterating from corporate vernacular into Processor Latin almost unconsciously.” This illustrates how well she’s able to illustrate the absurdity of corporate beige-ness with humour.

It’s worth noting that La Berge is an academic and her prose definitely does read like the work of one. This is not an inherent critique, but rather an observation. Her voice comes through clearly in every paragraph, however the tone and style did feel more academic and like a literary critique than a traditional memoir. As an example, she writes “so obviously symptomatic was I that my presentation wouldn’t have been out of place in Freud’s fin de siècle hysteria investigations.” A line that clearly conveys her strong voice and also can feel a little dizzying for the average memoir reader, if they’re not expecting it. If you go in to this book keeping this in mind, you can still certainly really enjoy her accounts of a truly bizarre moment in time and her specific vantage point, which is well articulated.

This book is a good fit for anyone who’s been disillusioned with corporate life and is looking to feel seen in the pages of a text. Yes, this memoir speaks to a moment in time that seems like forever ago now, but its relevance feels particularly apt today.

I was intrigued by the premise and not sure what to expect, but found myself sucked in by La Berge’s tales of working on the front lines of capitalism at its best/worst. This was an enjoyable read (albeit sometimes a little academic at times) and I’m glad I now better understand what the Y2K panic looked like from within the walls of corporate America at the turn of the millennium.

This was a bit of a dense read, to be honest. I was intrigued by the title and hoped for something ripping capitalism a new one, but that’s not what I got. I usually don’t pick up memoirs or business related reads, but again, the title drew me in. I expected a good roasting of capitalist corporate America. What I got was the philosophical musings about mundane corporate life during Y2K and the dot com bubble. Not that it didn’t have some good quotable moments or interesting perspectives. Ultimately, I could only get through half it before I had to put it down. This book may have an audience out there, but I am not it.

A humorous take on the state of the work/life balance in modern society. La Berge's clever writing makes for a good read. While I have never worked in a corporate job (or a fake corporate job) I related more than I expected.

A funny, fascinating memoir about modern big business and treading water under capitalism. I'm a big fan of highlight the often absurd practices that exist behind the shining gloss of modern corporations so this was a very fun read!

4⭐️

[a copy of this book was provided to me by the publisher from netgalley. thank you!]

an interesting & insightful memoir about modern capitalism & work practices.

Not for me personally but I loved the cover. Thank you for the opportunity to try out the ARC. I would recommend for someone looking for a quirky business memoir.