#2: Private Equity by Carrie Sun: Thoughts

When work consumes everything

Late *last year*, I read this memoir by Carrie Sun. She chronicles her time as personal assistant to a reclusive hedge fund manager (according to her Wikipedia page, this is Chase Coleman III of Tiger Global!), how she got there and her subsequent burnout.

If you are looking for a book recommendation, I’ll make it quick and tell you this is worth a read. Carrie is a decent writer, this is her first book and she does a good job. While the portions where she tackles the moral arguments around working for a hedge fund can be a bit drab and redundant, her narrative skills are riveting when she details her day-to-day work life as well as the experience of growing up as a Chinese immigrant in the US.

Now for my more complex thoughts.

An essential part of a memoir or an account such as this, is getting to know the writer up close. Although I get why the writer would want to be selective in what they reveal, my grouse is this deficiency does a disservice to Carrie’s character development in the reader’s eye.

While we get a direct line into what she is thinking in a situation at any moment, it fails in forming a full-fledged picture of Carrie the person. What she likes or dislikes. What are her boundaries? Because while people transgress them, we are dependent on the narrator telling us so rather than seeing it as readers.

And in my opinion this is a reflection of bad editing and narrative structure than bad writing. The pieces are all there. Just jumbled up.

For example, Carrie is evidently guilt-ridden about working for a hedge fund given her own immigrant background and the extreme inequality around her. While this is admirable, it does not demand the very apologetic tone she adopts multiple times in the book.

It feels like it was anticipated that the excesses of wealth and the appalling waste described in the book would draw criticism, and therefore it became imperative for Carrie to critique it. As if this is meant to preempt that. And it almost comes across as insincere.

And this is a liability because THIS IS A GOOD BOOK! Our narrator is a smart (she went to MIT!), resourceful woman who is succeeding at a very difficult job. She is a a self-made person, who is exceedingly humble hard on herself. She has excelled from a young age facing many hardships. And, I want to treat this with the utmost respect and delicacy - she is a survivor of a horrific campus rape.

The issue is that the book does not choose a lane. It tries to do everything. With all that we learn about Carrie, I would bucket this as a Personal Memoir, rather than a limited account of her time at Tiger Global. And that should mean grappling more with how her various ticks and traumas may have contributed in both her excelling and undoing. Rather than lots and lots of paragraphs about systemic inequality and propagation of wealth via old-money networks. I believe, what she has or would have had to say on the former adds a lot more value.