A wickedly smart, deceptively powerful novel about the uneasy intersection of love and commerce. Winner of the Fiction Attic Press Debut Novel Prize.
When recent grad Laura hires herself out as a human breast pump in Chicago, she is unprepared for the devotion she inspires in new moms desperate to be relieved of the machinery of lactation. Soon, the situation at her job goes sour, and she devises a plan to work less and earn more. A dreamer at best and a steamroller at worst, Laurie hopes to prove to the world that there is employment beyond the nine to five. Her imaginative scheme draws a young housekeeper, a male bachelorette party babysitter, and a data entry clerk into the business of manufactured intimacy–a business more dangerous than Laurie is willing to admit.
Sharp, darkly funny, and insightful, RETURN ON INVESTMENT will appeal to fans of Maria Semple, Jess Walter, Jami Attenberg, and Lena Dunham. A must-read for anyone who knows what it means to seek fulfillment through work and love.
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Praise for Return on Investment
“Waz’s darkly comic first novel reads like the birth of a brand-new genre—call it literature of the dystopian present—wherein a lost generation of post-college twentysomethings struggle against debt, doubt, the loneliness of a constantly-connected world, and an out-of-control gig economy . . . Return on Investment is an audacious, ambitious debut.” –Joseph Bates, author of Tomorrowland: Stories
Return on Investment is a coming-of-age tale unlike any I have ever read…Swiftly told, at turns hilarious and poignant, Return on Investment is worth every second you put into it. David McGlynn, author of A Door in the Ocean
In Return on Investment, Magdalena Waz brings to vivid life the mighty struggles and Millennial triumphs of a group of young Chicagoans graduating into the Great Recession. Waz’s writing is slyly ironic, her characters’ delightfully inappropriate first jobs, including human breast pump, are shrewdly presented, and their stories are irresistible..superb. –Eric Goodman, author of Child of My Right Hand and Twelfth and Race
