The Startup Wife by Tahmima Anam

 

The Startup Wife by Tahmima Anam.

Published 3rd June 2021 by Canongate.

From the cover of the book:

Halfway through her PhD and already dreaming of running her own lab, computer scientist Asha has her future all mapped out. Then a chance meeting and whirlwind romance with her old high-school crush, Cyrus, changes everything.

Dreaming big, together with their friend Jules they come up with a revolutionary idea: to build a social networking app that could bring meaning to millions of lives. While Asha creates an ingenious algorithm, Cyrus’ charismatic appeal throws him into the spotlight.

When the app explodes into the next big thing, Asha should be happy, shouldn’t she? But why does she feel invisible in the boardroom of her own company? Why are decisions being made without her? 

Gripping, witty and razor-sharp, The Startup Wife is a blistering novel about big ambitions, speaking out and standing up for what you believe in.

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Asha is a young woman who seems to have her life mapped out, following a calm and orderly path in the sphere of academia, but a chance meeting with her high school crush, Cyrus, sets her on quite a different path. Knocked off her feet by the strength of her feelings for Cyrus, a whirlwind marriage follows, and the two set up a somewhat unorthodox home life with Cyrus' gay best friend Jules. 

With Asha devoting less and less time to her academic pursuits, and more and more to her unexpectedly compelling personal life, she becomes intrigued with the idea of using the ingenious algorithm she has created for quite a different purpose than the one she originally intended -  to establish an App that offers the opportunity to incorporate rituals into your life, even if you are non-religious, based around Cyrus' intriguing obsessions. Cyrus is unsure, eschewing anything that pertains to the commercial world, but Asha and Jules become convinced there is something in the idea.

When a highly desirable startup incubator in New York, called Utopia, offers them the chance to develop their idea, they grab the chance, even though Cyrus needs some persuading to go along with their plans. With lots of hard work from Asha and Jules the new platform, WAI, takes off and becomes an instant success, even though things inevitably start to revolve around Cyrus as some sort of guru figure. But with success, comes change of an unwelcome kind - change that finds Asha being sidelined in both her own company, and her marriage. 

Tahmima Anam uses her own experiences of being an executive director of a startup founded by her husband to take us on a journey into the fiercely competitive world of the startup. There is so much to delve into here, and Anam explores a myriad of subjects with intelligence, whip smart humour and a sharp eye. She lays bare this strange, almost surreal, world where everything is cutting edge and super hip, as entrepreneurs battle it out to bring the next big thing to the masses, and in doing so she looks at the battle of the sexes, powerplays in relationships and the board room, and the innate nature of humans to crave love and connection.

There is so much humour in the way she pokes fun at the weird and wonderful ideas that get thrown into the ring of the startup arena, and the absurdity of the workplaces that are so fixated on the notion of the 'fun' environment. But the magic of this book lies in the canny poignant way she explores the experience of women in the world of business, through Asha and her female colleagues. There are some absolute gems of scenes here - offices where trampolines and swimming pools form the corridors, and childlike CEOs spew teenage fantasies of annihilating the opposition, with their eyes fixed firmly to the bottom line, while common sense and empathy are derided - and while women are forced to retreat to toilet cubicles to express breastmilk. Feel the burn!

Asha is the brains behind this outfit, but the double whammy of being both of immigrant descent and female finds her being pushed to the side, even though you can see almost from the very start that this is the way the story is going to go. At every turn, Asha is given a plausible reason why she cannot be the one to pitch her ideas, tender for funds etc. and she accepts it all at face value, even though she can see the signs, sure that Cyrus will remain the man she thinks she knows and save her from this breeding ground of toxic masculinity. At times, with my blood boiling, I wanted to give Asha a shake, but this does serve to build the tension brilliantly across the piece - all the way to the triumphant ending, where she finds her mettle.

Yes, it made me seethe with righteous indignation, but Anam also makes us think about how much the experience of women in business is wholly a product of its age-old patriarchal framework, and how much comes from the way women are driven to play the game, rather than stick two fingers up to the status quo and work at changing the rules instead. There is no doubt that Asha is sometimes complicit in what happens, blinded by her love for Cyrus and unable to see the male entitlement that lies at his heart, but there is also a whole bevy of wonderful strong female warriors too - both in and out of the workplace. In keeping with a subject that has no easy answers, she leaves it up to us to make up our own minds, which I found intriguing. 

This is a corker of a powerful book, and one which I absorbed in one delicious sitting. This is the kind of must read book that would set tongues wagging at the water cooler - if such things were still common place. I loved it!

The Startup Wife is available to buy now from your favourite book retailer in hardcover, e-book and audio formats.

Thank you to Lucy Zhou at Canongate for sending me a proof of this book in return for an honest review.

About the author:

Tahmima Anam is the recipient of a Commonwealth Writers' Prize and an O. Henry Award, and has been named one of Granta's best young British novelists. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and was recently elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, she was educated at Mount Holyoke College and Harvard University, and now lives in London, where she is on the board of ROLI, a music tech company founded by her husband.