Finding your voice amid an emotional minefield of female identity issues and racial inequality (New York City, present-day): How far would you go to follow your career dreams? In the increasingly digital world, blurring the real one. In a discriminatory workplace that doesn’t value you? In which DEI initiatives – Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion – have left you out? In your personal space, where you’re also wrestling with your individuality?

Make no mistake about Vanessa Lawrence’s immersive debut novel, Ellipses, as being relevant to all women, young and old, despite its character study of a thirty-two-year-old, queer, Asian-American woman – Lily.

Your job may also not be like hers – writing for a women’s magazine covering fashion, beauty, entertainment – but you know what it’s like to be hardworking, reliable, never complaining about last-minute assignments without seeing any rewards. Feeling undervalued in a job that’s “stalled.” You may also not be knee-deep in the cut-throat fiefdoms of New York City, but you know what it’s like to work in a crazy competitive environment where you’re a team player but the inner circle won’t let you in.

Lily is one of the most conflicted female characters in recent memory. As an Asian-American woman, she’s also the most stereotyped and marginalized minority group. Racial “microaggression” is a word that may be new to those of us who are white. Not for Lily, sharply tuned into what may sound like an inconsequential slight but is far from that.

Googling, you don’t have to look far for evidence. “Discrimination against Asian Americans is rampant but ignored,” reports Axios. Asian-American women are “unfairly overlooked” in the workplace, according to the “largest study of its kind” as of 2021. Victims of being stereotyped as the “Model Minority,” says Vietnamese author Viet Thanh Nguyen. Lily, through Lawrence’s Asian-American lens, has this subtler form of racism spot-on.

Lawrence’s microscope lets us intimately into Lily’s contemplative mind, in a city where “reputations can be a nightmare to maintain” – the seductive opening line. Lawrence has crafted fiction that exposes truths without banging them over your head.

The author also her pulse on her native city that “supposedly never slept, an expectation that requires perpetual exhaustion.” Having spent twenty years writing for women’s magazines (Woman’s Wear Daily, W Magazine), she’s well-versed in the business of “glossies,” and likely had similar assignments as her Lily is tasked with.

Something else, though, is going on in Lily’s “self-actualization” journey. Spanning the spectrum of a female’s unsure sense of self, with all the self-psychological terms that come with it, such as self-identity, self-confidence, “self-effacement,” self-worth, Lily’s world is like ours, growing increasing more complicated and changing.

Lily’s story is about finding her voice in a number of spaces: the workplace, her writing, cyberspace, and in her outside personal relationships. Particularly with a white, privileged woman from Connecticut, Alison, whom she loves, yet struggles with what their future might look like. An example is how Alison fancies herself in suburbia whereas Lily needs the city’s energy. A more glaring point of contention is why Lily won’t move in with Alison? Commitment phobia? Or is something else going on Lily can’t or won’t admit? A shout-out to Lawrence for the tenderness she displays for their lesbian love.

A particularly effective, creative element concocts a digital coach who says she “loves saving other women,” and appears to have what Lily aspires to in the workplace: the power to march to her own beat and make her own decisions. Billie, or “B” to her friends, if she actually has any, is willing to do anything to have gotten to the top and to stay there. Another queer woman, older (fifties), who knows her way around as the titan of a major US cosmetics company. With her “Cheshire-cat smile,” a “diva extraordinaire” that has “all the cattiness such a term insinuated.” Puzzling, then, to Lily, why she’d take any interest in her. Lily is both wary of B and entranced by her.

The two met in person at a charity ball, but the rest of their relationship floats in the digital realm. Whether a stroke of luck or beware what you wish for, their text messaging becomes addictive. Lily senses she should stay away from B, but she can’t get enough of what she expects and wants to learn from her. Who turns away a seasoned mentor? What if her punchy, clipped advice is cryptic? Risky?

B is bewitching, so we see Lily finding herself gripped to her phone, anxiously awaiting those three dots to appear indicating B’s writing to her. Ellipses, what a clever electronic title! The phone devolving into a source of troubling distraction, especially for Alison. Deceptive, sly, controlling messages that do offer actionable measures shy Lily could try to stand up for herself in her workplace, which is in the midst of semi-shifting from print-to-digital format. Does digital versus print publishing reflect on the reputation of a writer? Does it mean she’s valued less? How does that fit Lily’s uphill battle to be taken seriously as a writer by being given “meatier stories”? Is magazine writing true journalism? Questions Lily ponders.

Lest you think the women’s magazine world Lily inhabits is superficial, consider how print newspapers have been gobbled up by the digital age or shut down completely, compared to women’s print magazines apparently holding its own. Though not in the minds of employees, worried about being deemed unnecessary.

If you think the cosmetics industry, part of the larger beauty market, is unimportant, consider it’s valued around $300 billion. Putting aside those astronomic numbers, what does that tell us about female influences and desires? For instance, Gloria Steinem’s groundbreaking Ms. magazine is credited as the driver of the feminist movement.

Interestingly, Cosmopolitan, rated either number #1 or among the top selling women’s print magazines, admitted in 2020 it wasn’t living up to its DEI goals.

Ellipses is entertaining but don’t take it too lightly. Lily may prefer “straightforward” atmospheres, but the novel is a bundle of emotional complexities.

What Lily is after has nothing to do with wealth. She yearns to be respected. To be given opportunities to expand, not held back. Valued as a unique individual with much to contribute, not depersonalized. Having relationships that mesh with her values. Being true to oneself.

Does Lily find her voice?

Lorraine