Even the founders of the startup felt familiar describing one of them, Wiener writes, ‘He had gone to an art school on the East Coast and wore jeans that were so tight, I felt I already knew him: he was like my friends from college, but successful.’ If this is where the book trade is going, Wiener wants to be part of it: the startup offers a way for her to change everything while holding on to what is familiar to her, that is, books. She writes to them because she’s interested, impressed, and feels she could contribute using her background in publishing and love of literature, while participating in the contemporary economy.

Wiener’s career in the technology industry begins somewhere familiar for her: one day at her desk in the literary agency, she reads about a startup dedicated to reading, whose founders had raised three million dollars (she didn’t know then that that was not a lot of money in startup terms). Of these desires, Silicon Valley could give her one: the money. I wanted to make money, because I wanted to feel affirmed, confident, and valued. I wanted to find my place in the world, and be independent, useful, and good. At this stage in her career, Wiener writes, ‘my desires were generic. This is the tenth page of the book and Wiener seems unconvinced as well: her descriptions of the uniform aesthetic of a publishing career – wrap dresses, sad salads for lunch at your desk, parties where you only talk to the people you already know – are funny, but also expose an existential uncertainty that Wiener will replicate when she moves to San Francisco. She’s asking where Wiener’s career is going, if anywhere. She isn’t asking her daughter for a structural explanation about the recession and job prospects for Wiener’s generation, nor how Wiener imagines a future within the publishing industry’s idiosyncratic hierarchies and ‘shabby, nostalgic glamour’.

Her mother is wondering why she’s still taking coats and serving coffee. At the beginning of Uncanny Valley, her memoir about working in Silicon Valley in the middle of the 2010s, Wiener is 25 and working as a publishing assistant in New York. Anna Wiener found herself in the right place at the right time.

Uncanny valley wiener