Private Equity: A Memoir

by Carrie Sun

A gripping memoir of one woman’s self-discovery inside a top Wall Street firm, and an urgent indictment of privilege, extreme wealth, and work culture

When we meet Carrie Sun, she can’t shake the feeling that she’s wasting her life. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Carrie excelled in school, graduated early from MIT, and climbed the corporate ladder, all in pursuit of the American dream. But at twenty-nine, she’s left her analyst job, dropped out of an MBA program, and is trapped in an unhappy engagement. So when she gets the rare opportunity to work at one of the most prestigious hedge funds in the world, she knows she can’t say no. Fourteen interviews later, she’s in.

Carrie is the sole assistant to the firm’s billionaire founder. She manages his work life, becoming the right hand to an investor who can move mountains and markets with a single phone call. Eager to impress, she dives headfirst into the firm’s culture, which values return on time above all else. A luxury-laden world opens up for her, and Carrie learns that money can solve nearly everything.

Playing the game at the highest levels, amid the ultimate winners in our winner-take-all economy, Carrie soon finds her identity swallowed whole by work. With her physical and mental health deteriorating, she begins to rethink what it actually means to waste one’s life. A searing examination of our relationship to work, Carrie’s story illuminates the struggle for balance in a world of extremes: efficiency and excess, status and aspiration, power and fortune. Private Equity is a universal tale of self-invention from a dazzling new voice, daring to ask what we’re willing to sacrifice to get to the top—and what it might take to break free and leave it all behind.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Business, Audiobook, Biography, Finance, Biography Memoir

352 pages, Paperback

First published February 13, 2024

Reviews

[Barry Emler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommend. Carrie is a superb writer. As Carrie mentions in the Author’s Note at the end of the book, all the events in the book are true and names have been changed.
Here is a key to understand who everyone is in real life:
• Carbon = Tiger Global
• Argon = Tiger Management
• Boone Prescott = Chase Coleman (founder of Tiger Global)
• Elisabeth Prescott = Stephanie Coleman (Chase’s wife)
• Jay = Anil Crasto (former COO/CFO)
• Bridget = Clara Ferraro (co-head of IR)
• Emma = Lauren DeNatale (former co-head of IR)
• Neil = Feroz Dewan (former head of public investments)
• Sloane = Kate DeLuca (Feroz’s assistant)
• Martin = Julian Robertson (founder of Tiger Management)
• Gabe = Nadi Barash (former analyst)
• Isaac = Caleb Watts (former partner)
• Ari = Neeraj Chandra (former partner)
• Michael = Scott Shleifer (former head of private investments, former head/co-head of public investments)

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a devoted fan of good business journalism or memoir, I opened the pages of Private Equity expecting to be moved in some way—whether by insight, or antipathy or even the salaciousness of the workaday experience at one of the planet’s top performing hedge funds. I’m truly sorry to say I felt…nothing.

It simply defies logic that this clearly brilliant woman went from work as a “quant” at Fidelity Investments to a chief of staff at this 1% investment firm believing she would discover something different there than the transparent, unapologetic desire to make money. In her words, “I put my own needs aside for Carbon and Boone because I had believed that serving my employer meant serving humanity. I had believed in the prestige of Carbon, which, to me, lay not in any zeros after commas but in the moral legitimacy of the enterprise.” Sun knows that the one and only purpose of an investment firm of any type is to achieve the highest return for investors.

Full stop.

She simply traded one end-user investor for another in her move from retail mutual funds to private equity. It’s not credible to think that Sun truly believed supporting Boone could actually be a “day job” in service of pursuing her true professed dream, writing. She had already spent time in the finance trenches and was told time and again throughout the lengthy interview process how grueling the job would be, how high a standard she’d be expected to meet.

Still, the narrative might have been salvageable if the exacting details shared throughout the book delivered any honest insights, or drama or really anything other than the sheer banality of the day to day working for an intense boss, in an intense firm, in an intense industry. Nothing about it seems particularly surprising or illuminating at all. Though the cover copy promised a book that delivered a searing indictment against the pursuit of wealth, in fact it simply gave us exactly what we’d expect, with awkward attempts at cultural/socioeconomic commentary that tried to have it both ways and simply fell flat in the context of the privileged reality Sun seemed unable to quit.

It’s clear that Sun can write; I just hope she can find more honest and true material for her next title.

[Brandice · Rating 3 out of 5]

Carrie Sun leaves her investment banking analyst job at age 29 to serve as an assistant to a hedge fund billionaire, much to her fiancé and parents’ dismay. She is very well-compensated though the work is no less grueling, with high expectations and extreme demands of her time.

I’ve read many corporate culture memoirs and business books. I didn’t feel Sun’s story was revealing of any major surprises. I say this not to diminish her experience, just to share if you’ve read other memoirs in this realm, hers will likely feel familiar too. While in this role, Sun was also dealing with personal challenges – a tense relationship with her immigrant parents, a psychotic on/off fiancé, and past trauma it seems she may not have fully addressed.

I was expecting something different from Private Equity, which may be on me, however, I appreciate Sun sharing her story. While the names have been changed in this book, a quick Google search was informative in identifying some of the main characters.

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m usually of the persuasion that most workplaces and managers and certainly CEOs should be assumed pretty evil until proven otherwise, and I can’t even read the words “hedge fund” without picturing a fiery hellmouth, so when I heard there was a new workplace memoir about an aspiring young writer who went to work as the assistant to a CEO at a hedge fund, I was like SIGN ME UP. My brainfilter was all ready to receive some input to further reinforce my cognitive biases regarding capitalism and patriarchy.

…Did you think I was going to say BUT here? Well, no, at least probably not for the reason you were thinking. My cognitive biases were fed sufficiently, thank you. This particular hedge fund may have featured a rather elegant hellmouth, presided over by a very courtly and, we are informed ad nauseam, nice, Nice, NICE (for a CEO) CEO, but the quiet violence of it all still stands: it’s still a whole (kinder, gentler, NICER) American Psycho/Succession kind of thing at core, and the book thus did not provide me any corrective experiences or information regarding either hedge funds or CEOs.

BUT - there is still a different “but” here to say. This book wasn’t what I was originally hoping for or expecting. It’s a little misadvertised in that its primary purpose or accomplishment isn’t really to be another terrible workplace memoir. I was disappointed at first, BUT gradually came to appreciate the memoir and what I think it achieves, which is something far more subtle and difficult to categorize.

This is a book about overcoming personal tendencies around overachievement, overfunctioning for others, perfectionism, work addiction, approval-seeking, people-pleasing, and external validation, and giving oneself permission to let go of these turbulent, gripping, driving forces in favor of cultivating a greater internal locus of control and connecting with personal guiding values and motivations.

Our first clue is that as the book begins, the author has just left a lucrative but grueling, cutthroat position in the bro-filled bowels of the finance industry only to vie for and accept what is very clearly another equally consuming and demanding role as the assistant to a hedge fund CEO - for the stated reason that she will be able to devote more time and energy to her creative writing?? Obviously this makes no sense, and there must be more to the story.

As expected, the author proceeds to take the new job and labor there for a few years, during which period she remains extremely well remunerated; equally if differently miserable and depleted at the hands of her new company, position, and “Nice” CEO boss; and still with absolutely zero time and energy to dedicate to her writing. It’s all as seemingly masochistic as predicted; the work seems often tiresome, dull, and unrewarding aside from the financial rewards; those rewards don’t seem to be worth the costs, nor does the excessive salary really seem to be strictly needed; and the reader finds themself a bit flummoxed, like why the hell is this person with so many other options willingly subjecting herself to this?

As the book goes on, though, we start to accumulate more tantalizing bits of info and hints the author drops here and there, most significantly details the author sparingly shares regarding her cultural background and her relationships with her immigrant parents and her controlling, I’d say emotionally abusive, on-and-off fiance, all three of whom have stringent expectations of the author. This is NOT a gaping open-wound confessional kind of memoir - these intimate personal glimpses are only very economically dropped in - so when we do come across them, they provide powerful context for understanding the author’s true journey, which among other things is a quest for identity, independence, and self-acceptance.

At times, I found the memoir a bit frustratingly reserved and remote: the author’s background is in quantitative analysis, and it shows. There are a lot of possibly metaphorical financial explanations, and at times I felt like I was reading one of those texts that is about a fascinatingly juicy subject like astronomy, and it’s got a vibrant picture of something like a quasar on the cover, yet when you throw open the book to read all about it, you’re just stymied by a whole bunch of italicized numbers and mathematical symbols.

However, the author’s potential weakness is also her strength: her unique set of skills and knowledge and frame of reference for the world also help create a very unique style and perspective as a writer. I can honestly say I’ve not read a memoir quite like this before, and certainly not one in the Shitty Workplace genre. This was one of those books I reflected on often after finishing it and had to sit on for a long while before I knew how I felt about it - BUT, as I’m sure you’ve surmised by now, I recommend it and found it well worth reading.

[Katherine · Rating 1 out of 5]

I think what happened here is that Carrie Sun lived these experiences, she thought them fascinating (assumed we all would too), and she figured that the story thus wrote itself. She was wrong there on two fronts: (1) her experiences weren’t all that interesting, because we’ve all heard these things (and crazier things) so many times over in media and culture to the point that it’s no longer surprising, any of this; and (2) even if we did buy the content as interesting, it’s not enough for content to be interesting—the telling of it must be interesting too, and Sun does a pretty poor job of crafting and developing this story in an interesting manner. Her stories are boring and completely unsurprising, and her telling of these stories is boring and irritating too. And her writing at a sentence level is completely uninspired.

It’s bad on the level of the storytelling (boring and cliché); it’s bad on the level of the story (predictable and tired); it’s bad on the level of the prose (clunky at best, cringey at worst, particularly in dialogue); it’s bad on the level of the character establishment and development (there is neither logic nor color to Carrie’s motivations as a character); it’s bad on the level of telling instead of showing; and it’s bad on the level of tone: Carrie comes off as a narcissist, one who is problematically out of touch, and who, to boot, encourages a terrible millennial narrative of skinny = healthy. She’s also insufferable in her self-aggrandizement, as well as in her annoyingly naïve worship of Boone, of Carbon, and of the American institution of hedge funds.

[Sharon Orlopp · Rating 3 out of 5]

I listened to Private Equity: A Memoir on audiobook and it is narrated by the author, Carrie Sun. I love it when an author narrates their own work. It adds credibility and a unique dimension to the narration.

I prefer nonfiction over fiction, and memoir is my favorite genre. I dive right in when main protagonists face incredible challenges and overcome huge obstacles with grit, determination, perseverance, and skill.

Sun's tale of hedge fund excess (parties, gifts, work environment, high expectations, favoritism, etc) isn't anything new. The fact that it still goes on and there are blurry areas or downright criminal aspects of ethics and fraud are incredibly troubling.

There were repetitive aspects of the book, such as trying to give receptionists extra work to help with expense vouchers, that bored me and resulted in an average rating.

[brunella]

i gotta say the pull of high finance is almost erotic especially if you're a tightly wound overachiever. devil wears prada x liquidated by Karen ho. another entry in the pragmatism vs idealism question (in the lives of women, especially of marginalized women... not quite a book about class in that there is no class shame, perhaps because it is easier to process this story as one of immigrant assimilation (where there is a cultural script of pride and respect) as opposed to one of class mobility (which remains somewhat unexplored both here and in American fiction at large, though this book is about class in that it is a voyeuristic, epicurean dip into the habits of the ultra-rich. who besides the weekends in the Hamptons are miserable too, but whatever, los ricos tambien lloran etc. she speaks about feeling disgusted at who she has become when she hears herself say to other people that she doesn't have much sympathy for poor people. she raises the questions we all have raised at some point at the mckinsey info session -- no new ground explored, but these are the kinds of questions one solves more by living than by writing, and anyway they are very hard).). the line about boone (who wanted to be a surgeon) and martin (his mentor, who wanted to be a novelist) raises an interesting question tho. if this (mid) book is carried sun living her one beautiful and wild life to the maximum -- does it matter that she chose to wrote a memoir about her time at a hedge fund instead of going the traditional way and opening a hedge fun herself? if martin had become a novelist, would his life have been better or worse? less worthy? less admired, certainly -- but that's no real metric of value. anyway, i think that her answer to the pragmatism vs idealism career that she should do what makes her happy, which is to write her books and live as pleasantly as possible. i.e. opt out. which i have never found fully satisfying as an answer. "it doesn't matter what you do, just be happy! follow your passion! what could we do if we ALL followed our passions... capitalism" i am tired of ivy league yuppies trying to turn their white collar career crises into reflections about the revolutionary potential of the world. but of course we live in a world with a culture industry so overdetermined that literally only ivy league yuppies can publish books to begin with. anyway

the book veers towards (sigh) the didactic near the end, which was inevitable; she wrote this book to get an A in modern-memoir-writing and that's a staple of the genre. performative awareness of social totality. performative acknowledgement of race. "and this is exactly what i learned! and this is how i grew." sorry, i just have never been able to trust strivers, being one myself. i think you have to be a little soulless to live like that, which is conducive to bad art but perhaps a very nice life. i think the best part of this is her relationship with Boone. this is ultimately a book about him! she adores him like a god even as he "works her to the bone." the process of personal growth doesn't matter even if the book is sold under the premise that this book is about the self-discovery of a woman. no, it's a book about her crazy personal/impersonal relationship with her boss. and i will eat it up! it was intoxicating to read. also yes i appreciate how she gets into certain idiosyncracies of this story, both for voyeuristic and humanistic reasons. it's just too much MFA prose for me. maybe three stars

[Ophelia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can’t even.

[Antonia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carrie’s writing made me feel like it’s okay to start over and over and over if you need to. I loved this memoir. Sometimes the technical jargon was a lot for me because I’m not familiar with the finance industry but it wasn’t overwhelming.

[Bonnie E. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Carrie has an interesting story. She grew up as the only child of Chinese immigrants and writes eloquently about her upbringing and relationship with her parents. It was not an easy childhood and it helps to explain many of her life choices. She graduated in three years from MIT and achieved success as an analyst for Fidelity but did not find the work there fulfilling. She dealt with an assault in college and misogyny in the workplace. Her experiences as personal assistant for a hedge fund billionaire seem to be a continuation of the treatment she endured from her parents as well as her fiance.

There are many contradictions. Her fiance was super wealthy and super controlling. She ended the relationship and yet he continued to relentlessly stalk her. So her actions towards him later make no sense. She is clearly a smart woman but the author's belief that her work at a hedge fund would be "serving humanity" seems incredibly naive. Her pay is exactly what she asked for, and she is frequently rewarded with lavish bonuses and perks, but she lacks personal agency. She doesn't speak up for herself for a long time. Her billionaire boss seems like a decent man but has little interest or understanding of her aspirations although she subjugated herself to his needs and worked tirelessly on his behalf. At the end of the book, she editorializes at length about the rich and powerful but the commentary seems gratuitous. She more deftly made those points through her stories.

[Holly Weston Bull · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this in a two-day burst; Carrie Sun has written a very readable memoir. I’m torn on how many stars to give it, because I feel conflicting emotions toward the book. On the one hand, I found the story itself — the factual narrative - really interesting, not least because Carrie’s feelings about working in finance are akin to the feelings I had during my Wall Street stint. At the end, working on Wall Street just wasn’t something she could do any more. No amount of money was going to change that truth. I feel that, intensely.

And there were some beautiful lines in the book, like this one: “Boone gave me things. Things that did not help. I longed to live in a perfect, beautiful world where good intentions would be enough.”

But I rate Private Equity only 3 stars because it could have been so much more. Carrie’s relationship with her parents and with Josh, her rape during college, her disordered eating … all of these aspects of her life could, in my view, have been so much more richly fleshed out. She does, I think, do justice to the culture at Carbon and to her ambivalent feelings toward Boone, but I wish she had put more into the parts of the story that were outside her job. I would have especially liked to know more about her relationship with her parents; she dedicates the book to them at the outset and thanks them quite profusely in the afterward, but what she writes about them in between those pages is pretty intense and trauma-filled. But maybe she’ll write more - maybe we’ll get the chance to learn more about her backstory.

So, I’ve got quibbles with Private Equity, but still it’s quite an interesting story, and I would certainly read more written by Carrie Sun. More power to her for having the gumption to shake off the golden handcuffs as well as the expectations of her parents.

3 stars.

[Diana · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel like a lot of reviewers are letting their dislike of the finance industry influence how empathetic they are towards Sun here. Loads of comments along the lines of, “why didn’t she know better” and “what about (insert low wage occupation here), at least she got paid well”.
It’s the same comments that pop up every time investment banking working conditions are brought up in the news and what any investment banking junior gets to hear from their bosses if they ever dare to voice any discomfort.
Sure, some finance professionals get paid well. Does that mean it’s okay they have to work in these conditions? Just because low wage workers are also exploited, does that mean it’s okay to exploit the high wage workers in return?

…… all that being said……
This book was not good lol.

Carrie Sun at least isn’t a cringy bellend like the guy who wrote the other much hyped banker burnout memoir that came out recently (The Trading Game: A Confession). She actually seems to be a decent person and many of her experiences working in this world were similar to mine, so it’s not that either.
My problem is more with the entire structure of this book. Very few people alive lead interesting enough lives and have interesting enough inner thoughts to warrant writing a whole play-by-play autobiography about themselves. Most of us, and that includes random bankers like Sun and Stevenson, don’t fall in this category.

So in my view, when you do write a memoir, you should do two things to make it a worthwhile reading experience for outsiders: one, take out all the unnecessary detail that might’ve seemed important in your life but means fuck all to any reader (constantly referencing the names of the conference rooms? Really?); and two, instead of walking us through each minute detail of your first day working at the hedge fund, give us some reflection on it. I mean, she’s a massively overqualified woman who applies for a job as some HF manager’s always available secretary. They put her through a gazillion interviews, including a psychological analysis (!), and once she gets the job her boss sends her a bunch of self-help books to read. Come on. This is so ridiculous, there’s no way she didn’t look back on it and had thoughts. What literary benefit does it have to throw all that at us without some critical analysis?

I read an interview with her before picking up the book and was also disappointed to find that the insights she voiced there re the work culture in the finance industry and the intricacies of burnout were basically missing from the actual book. As was a critical look at how misogynistic her entire role was (I kept thinking about that FLDS “keep sweet” saying every time her boss told her to be nice and perfect, blergh); she mentions it but not harshly enough. It also seems like she’s never shaken her hero worship of her boss, which is baffling. She keeps insisting he’s “one of the good ones” and pretends there’s anything deeper to him than what you see on the surface. Spoiler alert, there isn’t. And he isn’t a genius either - HFs like his come and go and no one will remember him in twenty years. There’s a reason there’s only one Warren Buffet.

I’ll admit that much of this you can put down to me just disliking autobiographies as a category (and non-fiction in general to be honest). But I think there’s still a better story hiding in here and I wonder if Sun wouldn’t have done better turning this into a work of fiction rather than being chained to recounting her mundane experiences. There’s lessons you can learn from this, but I never got the sense that Sun herself learned them.

[jasmine sun · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 — i’m probably harsher on memoirists i identify with because i expect them to illuminate something i could not have discovered myself

(anna wiener’s review of the “office novel” genre is very good, however: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the...)

[CatReader · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Carrie Sun's memoir Private Equity, we learn about the consequences of lacking sufficient boundaries, appropriate coping mechanisms, and a modicum self-worth while navigating stressful, dysfunctional, and toxic relationships (both work and personal).

Subject-matter-wise, Sun's story is a cross between Lauren Weisenberger's "loosely based on a true story" novel The Devil Wears Prada (about her time working as an assistant to Anna Wintour at Vogue magazine in the early 00s) and Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker (about his time working as a bond salesman at Saloman Brothers in the late 80s). Though Sun states at the end of the book that she's altered the names of her former boss, coworkers, and company, she paints a vivid picture of a toxic workplace environment where a cadre of high profile men were supported by a too-small army of female assistants who were subject to unrealistic workloads, inappropriate comments, and no work-life balance. Sun crumbles in this environment, given her childhood traumas that she was still working through in her late 20s/early 30s, going above and beyond to exceed expectations at the cost of her own mental, emotional, and physical health. She lasts in the job around three years (making what it sounds like is mid-six figures, between salary, bonuses, and lavish gifts) before turning in her resignation and finally deciding to seriously pursue her writing career.

I really struggled to sympathize with Sun for most of the book. While I've never been an assistant to a billionaire, I've worked in similarly ridiculous environments for pitiful salaries (where hourly pay works out to less than minimum wage) where the expectations are unrealistic, favoritism is rampant, complaints go unheeded, and the goalposts keep shifting. While not all of my coping strategies have been healthy, especially when I was a new college grad, I've survived and even thrived in such environments through firm boundary-setting and investing more in myself than the job invests me in. I'm glad Sun managed to step away from her toxic job (and toxic relationship); it sounds like she is in a much better place now.

[Zibby Owens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Private Equity: A Memoir is an intelligent, sharp, and utterly compelling memoir examination of the author’s time working in one of the most prestigious hedge funds in the world. It’s an urgent indictment of privilege, extreme wealth, and work culture. In it, the author delves into her time at Wharton, a toxic relationship from her past, and the life-threatening culture of New York's financial world.

Fundamentally, Private Equity is a story about self-discovery and the detours we might take to finally get where we want to be. Part of what the author was trying to convey was that her illusion of life in New York didn’t align with reality. She explores the hustle and grind and work, and overwork, culture, especially in the world of high finance and Manhattan hedge funds. But this book has so many different strands. The author also included stories about her own family and the vices that got in her way and jeopardized her health. It's one of those cautionary tales where we see you physically bearing the brunt of the emotional effects of the lack of balance in your life. She tackles work-life balance, extreme burnout, trauma, the challenge of speaking up, and, ultimately, resilience and growth. Private Equity is a coming-of-age through work story that dares to ask what we’re willing to sacrifice to get to the top—and what it might take to break free and begin again.

To listen to my interview with the author, go to my podcast at: https://www.momsdonthavetimetoreadboo...

[Gabriella · Rating 3 out of 5]

This memoir is basically about how much whiplash one person can be subjected to without losing their mind. Our narrator, Carrie, is flung back and forth between her workplace’s ever-increasing and frequently conflicting demands on her time, appearance, and personality. At the same time, she’s also being thrown around by her parents and ex, all of whom are verbally abusive and have set impossible standards for her life. Finally, she is dealing with the moral whiplash caused by the obscene wealth and privilege she is proximate to as a hedge fund employee, and this wealth’s connection to the growing misfortune she sees in the world around her.

It takes her a surprisingly long time to fully connect the dots between this last point, and I definitely was rolling my eyes at her “whoa we really aren’t saving the world” epiphany. However, once Carrie arrives at this seemingly obvious conclusion, she does draw some enjoyable parallels between the inherent insecurity of the hedge fund model, and the manufactured insecurity of the employees who work at these companies. Just as Carrie's employer seeks neverending returns from investments, and struggles to do so given the fluctuating valuations and performance of said investments, Carrie and her coworkers are also evaluated for their performance, and under immense pressure whenever they have a "less optimal moment." This pattern of employee form following company function was perhaps the most novel concept explored in the memoir, with most of the other "takeaways" being things you could've guessed from the first page. If you're seeking a memoir with deeper-than-surface-level indictments of hedge funds, or a book willing to discuss the depravity of private equity investing, definitely keep looking!

Final note is that I did enjoy listening to the audiobook for Private Equity. I felt able to move through the scattered narrative with a bit less annoyance than I would have in the written format. When she jumped to another story midway through a scene or reflection, I just treated it like I had skipped to another podcast episode. However, if you're looking for a coherent sit-down read, this might irritate you much more than it did me.

[Darlene · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this Kindle version ARC up on NetGalley. Thank you.

When I was sent the book, I must have known it was an autobiography. But it was a while before I started the read. I couldn't believe the amount of financial information that showed up around 10% of the book. Remember, by now, I was thinking it was fiction. I couldn't imagine why a person would include all that information that seemed to go on and on. I almost gave up on it. The story was triggering because of my time working in a corporation. Even the friendliest becomes a monster, a vampire to its employees. So again, I nearly gave up.

But about halfway through, I was hooked. I wanted to know what Carrie would do to find her own life again.

The ending was wonderful. Let me just say she does finally find a way.

Now I want a more positive life written so I can enjoy her new life!

Thank you for letting me read this book!

[YW Low 劉耀詠 · Rating 1 out of 5]

It was a rather disappointing read, as somehow it was an anticipated release by a few websites (including Oprah’s, then again, that book club has been having string of misses).

In any case, the book really lacks any core storylines, any messages. It was trying to tell some story of immigrant family, but very 1/2 heartedly. Then at some point, it was trying to give off the “me too” vibe; yet not convincingly. The chapters go in and out of different phases of the authors life, without any sort of congruence.
There are just too many things that aligned, at some point, the company was great, then suddenly it became a toxic place and created burnout. At some point, the boss was extremely nice, then totally ignoring feedback in some chapters. Just seems like a very very poorly edited book.

I finished the book without really understanding what’s the point of the book, I didn’t even learn anything.

[Donia · Rating 3 out of 5]

this book is weird it’s written like fiction but it’s a memoir. i feel a little like carrie sun just takes some sections to trauma dump on her reader. i am surprised she’s a writer bc it seems like she still has trouble processing her emotions deeply.

[Emmet Sullivan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t understand the motivation behind writing this or publishing it. I just kept waiting for the book to actually be about something, but it’s like reading a daily journal about someone’s boring career and relationship troubles. Hard pass.

[Shabab]

Couldn’t finish it. Not sure why she’d take a job as a billionaire’s assistant thinking she’d have time for creative writing. I guess I also don’t find the day to day operations of a hedge fund to be that exciting…which is what the first third of this book was.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought that reading about someone else’s intense job would be satisfying, but I struggled to relate to Carrie. I am sad for her and for the toll that a stressful job can take on one’s mental and physical health.

[Jill · Rating 2 out of 5]

At first, this didn't feel like a memoir, but rather a tell-all/expose of this certain firm. It turned more into a memoir by the end, in my opinion. Overall, this was a tough look at working in the world of finance and how unrelenting it is. I had been thinking it was the business version of the Devil Wears Prada (and I had heard a podcast where the author remarked about it being that way too.)
I don't know, reading it felt really icky. It made me wonder what all of the people she is writing about think. Does her boss/all the people she worked with feel somewhat betrayed? What about her parents? I'm curious about her relationships and how/if they survived. Don't get me wrong, I don't think she owes anyone anything, this is just more of a question I've had about memoirs lately in general, which is how do the people included in the story feel about it. And this memory REALLY made me think about that because most people do not come across as stellar humans.
I also don't know how someone can recall exact dialogue from conversations, unless you have transcripts or took contemporaneous notes. I could barely tell you a conversation I had this morning, let alone several years ago.
Lastly, it seemed like at times the author wanted to remind the readers just how smart she was by throwing in a very obscure big word. So big in fact, that I found myself looking up words a lot during this book. But the words seemed out of place somehow? I don't know.
I'm not sure what I was expecting...I'm sad she had all of the difficult experiences she did and glad she is trying to build the life she wants. But something about this book just made me feel icky all around. I think maybe it is the overall idea of--are there such a thing as good billionaires?

[Lisa S · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating to read, but I think the author spends too much time trying to psycho-analyze her boss, when she really should be spending her time psycho-analyzing herself. For example, why would she ever take such a slave-master type of job to begin with? (Putting the money aside - she could have done a lot of things other than that with her degree.) For someone so book-smart, she was incredibly naive about what working for a hedge fund would be like. Note that she was 29 when she took the hedge fund job (not straight out of college) , and she had already worked at Fidelity (so it wasn’t even her first job). She thought being a perfectionist billionaire’s personal assistant would leave her time to write (her purported reason for taking the job) or even have any life of her own? Come on … something else was and is going on for her to be so delusional, and then to stay in the job as long as she did.

[Ben Richards · Rating 2 out of 5]

mixed feelings

I find Carrie’s reverence for her former boss a little disturbing, and I don’t think she dives into that relationship as much as she should. Instead, she spends inordinate amounts of time diving into her own personal trauma. Which is interesting and probably the point of the book, but my God: Carrie has and had a fantastic life. It’s hard to have sympathy for her at times, although I do understand that she endured a lot of difficult periods in her life. I agree with her position on privilege and the rich, but she hardly disavows the whole system and apologizes little for her role in abetting it.

Still: she takes more responsibility and acknowledges more inequality than anyone else has written about it. And Carrie is a skilled writer.

[Xinyu Tan · Rating 2 out of 5]

In this book Private Equity, we follow the author being an executive assistant to a famous hedge fund owner. Workload is brutal, gifts from the boss luxurious, but the pay is only modest. The author also interleaved her other relationships (mainly with her controlling but super rich ex-boyfriend, her borderline abusive parents) with the main story.

It’s not a book to ponder about, nor is the self-discovery or analysis that interesting. But it does satisfy my gossipy curiosity on how those people at their top live and work and how a good financial company looks like. Well, now I don’t need to try that career to know that it is not for me.

I listened to the free audio book on Spotify. I really like the service. Saved me money on some popular and new books.

[Andi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This memoir of life in the finance, or at least finance adjacent, profession is kind of depressing. I am not sure why anyone would take a job as an assistant that required such complete availability and horrific personal cost and gave so little respect. Also, why aren’t there any male assistants this firm? A self evident question.
Still at the end, there is the possibility of change, real change as the author says: transformation and reinvention
(She also uses the colon as a writing tool .)
Still, I had to look up a few words, which doesn’t happen that often : aptronym, alexithymia, and colophon. Anyone?

[Vic · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5* unfortunately, most of Carrie’s tales and qualms in her memoir were just a byproduct of a very intense boss, firm and industry. Turns out working for a billionaire is incredibly stressful and will cause your health to deteriorate!

BUT Carrie is a great writer and I would read her other books. I found a lot of her stories relatable and above all, admire her for following her gut and pursuing something meaningful to her.

[Annie M.]

🎧. I wanna give her a hug. this isn’t a scandalous exposé of the billionaire class that I thought it might be. and it’s also not a workplace exposé either—the problems aren’t unique to her industry imo. her motivations were slightly confusing, but I gather they were confusing to her too.

thank you PRH audio!!

[Sanford Chee]

Recommended Summer 2024 reading by Wharton Professors
https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/a...