Addie Prewitt hates her job. She’s a copy editor for the Chicago-based National Association of Libraries, where the beige walls of her workplace simply are not to her taste. She’s disgusted with her demanding, leering boss, Coddles. She’s annoyed by her zombie coworkers. As a matter of fact she’s disgusted and annoyed by just about everything. She goes through life like a younger, female Ignatius J. Reilly, finding fault with everyone in her orbit while all remain stupidly oblivious to her woes. The targets of her derision are many: slackers, yuppies, her hippie parents, even the elderly (maybe especially the elderly). Her roommate Val Wayne Newton plays Deep Purple at high volume, while Addie’s more refined tastes run toward the Ray Conniff Singers and Yanni. The other people in her apartment building don’t like her. She can envision only one escape from her workaday existence: marriage to her unappealing but very rich boyfriend, who at least is tall and virtually odorless.
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Stella left Lumpen a couple years ago, burned-out, to work full-time on her novel. “We were just always struggling to make money at it and keep it going,” she says. “It’s only natural that you kind of fizzle out after a while. It was such a perfect thing to do when you’re in your 20s. Nobody liked their job, nobody liked where they were living, nobody was married. It was why we got up in the morning.”
