She is eleven. The house has run out of almost everything, so she goes down the garden to the neighbour’s coop and takes four eggs, leaving the rest. She cuts the mould off the bread instead of picking it out. She scrambles them in olive oil because there is no butter, puts half on the toast and saves half for her own dinner, then decides the plate needs more. And she clears the good tray, adds a linen napkin from the drawer reserved for company, and goes out with scissors to cut blue plumbago for a jar. She carries it upstairs to a mother who has been in bed for days. Her mother looks at the tray and says she is not hungry, and then tells her she should not be seeing her father at all. Nothing in The Many Private Lives of Missy Cooke by Jane Green is better than that tray, and the novel can be read as a long attempt to understand the girl who made it.
What The Many Private Lives of Missy Cooke Knows About Ambition
The plot is a corporate one. Missy Cooke is twenty-nine, a Harvard graduate with four years inside her father’s privacy-software company, and when he is diagnosed with terminal cancer and leaves for a clinic abroad he makes her his stand-in. At first this looks like a competence story.
It becomes something more interesting. The Many Private Lives of Missy Cooke by Jane Green is genuinely curious about what ambition is for, and puts two answers in the room. One belongs to the woman who has mentored Missy since childhood, a founding employee who has spent two decades making herself indispensable and believes, as her slogan has it, in thinking like a man. The other belongs to a young Indian executive Missy meets by accident at a vodka launch, who runs the family firm her brother fronts.
Their partnership survives a mauling in the press, and the speech that saves it states the book’s position: ambition that wants everybody to succeed comes from a sense of plenty, and ambition that needs somebody else to lose comes from fear, which only makes more of itself. It is not subtle. It is the argument the novel then tests, and a group will find it easy to disagree with.
The Men Who Feed Her Things She Does Not Want
The sharpest pattern in The Many Private Lives of Missy Cooke by Jane Green runs underneath all of that.
Missy gives up pork after an afternoon with a friend’s miniature pig. Her boyfriend cooks breakfast, hears the story, agrees it is charming, then holds a rasher to her mouth and tells her to taste how good it is. She opens her mouth, swallows, and tastes the pig. Her father does the same with octopus, speared and held an inch from her lips. At twelve she announced she was vegetarian; he nodded seriously, then served a steak she ate to keep him happy and vomited up later.
The boyfriend is a decent man. He is also her father’s protégé, furnished by her father’s decorator, eating her father’s breakfast, and the novel is quietly merciless about how completely she has chosen a copy. He waits up for her. And he phones to check she is safe. He talks about her optics. When he objects to her new friendship on the grounds that mixing business with affection is unwise, she tells him he sounds like her father, and he takes it as a compliment.
Missy Cooke, Jane Green, and the Mine Outside Nashik
The third act sends her to India, and this is where a reading group will divide hardest.
Her childhood neighbour, the woman upstairs who kept the chicken coop and was in practice her second mother, now runs a small nonprofit in Maharashtra. She takes Missy to a crafts centre where village women weave and embroider, and one of them tries urgently to tell her something that has to be translated: her seven-year-old went into a mine shaft with three friends and none came out. Then they drive to the pits, where children are small enough for the tunnels and earn a few rupees a sack.
What she finds is that the batteries for her company’s new product are cheap because the cobalt is bought straight off those children. It is the strongest plot turn in The Many Private Lives of Missy Cooke by Jane Green and its riskiest chapter. The book knows it: when Missy asks helplessly what she can do, her neighbour says plainly that nobody needs a saviour, and what helps is the spotlight and the schools. That line does a lot of work. It does not dissolve the problem of a dead Indian child powering an American heiress’s self-discovery, and a group should ask whether the novel’s awareness of that is enough.
Where The Many Private Lives of Missy Cooke by Jane Green gives ground:
- The antagonist has no stated motive, and her corruption is signalled by cosmetic changes: new highlights, new cheekbones, shorter hems, a different perfume.
- The company mechanics do not stand up. A minority stake is called a majority one, and a chief executive is installed by a show of hands from the floor.
- The romance is one scene at the worst possible moment, then an unsent text. The rest is a childhood crush described very well and left alone.
- A sedative does a great deal of narrative work and is never really examined.
For the Group
The Many Private Lives of Missy Cooke by Jane Green gives a group four arguments and one good question.
Start with the mother, the character most likely to be underrated on a first read. A bipolar writer who has abandoned every medication prescribed to her, because the flat grey of the drugs costs her what makes life bearable. She is monstrous about her ex-husband in front of a child, and also the one who takes that child out of school on a fake doctor’s appointment for lunch, a manicure and three paperbacks, and the one who, two decades later, shows up and stays. Ask whether the novel forgives her too easily, or the father too easily, or neither.
Then the friendships. Missy has a best friend of twenty-five years whose wardrobe is public property and whose cowboy boot is full of pill bottles, and a new friend who becomes a business partner, and the book insists, against the boyfriend’s advice, that this is a strength and not a liability. Test that: most of us have had the opposite advice at work.
Content notes: a parent’s terminal illness and death, with hospital scenes; a mother’s bipolar illness and long depressive episodes; child labour and a child’s death in a mining accident; heavy use of a prescription sedative; sex the narrator cannot clearly remember; a controlling partner; drug use; and constant profanity, including a slur used affectionately between women.
More for the group: When We Were Friends by Jane Green is the one of hers to read next and better on what friends do to each other, The Satisfaction Café by Kathy Wang puts a woman inside Californian tech money for decades, The Verifiers by Jane Pek is the sharper novel about what privacy products do, and Adaptation Anxiety is worth a look, because this one will be filmed.
What It Leaves Behind
The mining in The Many Private Lives of Missy Cooke by Jane Green is real enough as a phenomenon: the informal, unregulated digging known as artisanal mining accounts for a large share of hand-dug cobalt, and the reason it is cheap is the reason it is dangerous.
Two things stay. One is a password. Locked out of her dead father’s computer and out of guesses, Missy calls the ex-wife who has spent thirty years furious with him, and her mother remembers the string he used for everything, back before the second family and the third wife. It is her own childhood nickname with a number in it. He never changed it.
The other is a six-year-old at the mine who reaches up to touch the shell necklace Missy is wearing and is given it. In the epilogue she is at a desk in a schoolroom with an underwater mural, in a uniform of limited colours so no child can be identified by their clothes, still wearing the necklace, with drawings saved up to hand over. The Many Private Lives of Missy Cooke by Jane Green does not overplay it, and it has earned the moment, which is more than can be said for the boardroom it came out of.