By Jessie Tu
FICTION
The Confidence Woman
Sophie Quick
Allen & Unwin, $32.99
The 2010s was a period marked by our collective fascination with scammers. Several cases of high-profile abuses of trust seemed to mark the quintessential spirit that arrived after the 2008 financial crisis and that would eventually welcome in Trump’s first term in office. Famous fraudsters include Fyre Festival founder Billy McFarland, Anna Delvey aka Soho Grifter, Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes and our very own, Belle Gibson.
The abuse of trust to gain profit for oneself seemed to be the go-to, Millennial tactic towards a pathway to power and influence. Deception was the engine upon which these nimble individuals practised their art. Often, they were young, petite, Instagrammable figures who understood the game — the game being played on the unwavering faith that the fastest way towards success is to scam.
Obviously, we condemn their morally demented actions, but part of us cannot help but admire their audacity, too. For the majority of us, lying — especially when the stakes are as high as those involving investment transactions totalling billions – is extremely uncomfortable.
For Christina Swales, the heroine of Sophie Quick’s debut novel, The Confidence Woman, lying about her identity on the internet is a simple means to an end. Christina has decided to scam her way to financial success because she’s a single mother with no social or institutional support. She’s desperately trying to secure enough money for a down payment to purchase firm foundations.
“Bliss would be my own bricks and mortar,” she tells us — an apartment in the cosmopolitan northern suburbs of Melbourne.
Debut author Sophie QuickCredit: Charlie Kinross
At the beginning of the novel, the 37-year-old is raising her six-year-old son in a granny flat, where she is forced to share a kitchen and laundry with her 60-something landlady. Her attempts to secure stable and affordable housing comes to nothing. She spends hours each day on single-parent house-sharing Facebook communities.
During the pandemic, when human lives were forced to bleed into digital spaces, she decided to invent a new doctor persona who specialises in delivering tailored career coaching to high-performing individuals seeking to optimise their life.
Herein births Dr Ruth Carlisle, executive coach and mindset expert. Everything on Dr Carlisle’s LinkedIn page is invented — Christina forges her credentials, photo-editing academic papers to insert her fake name and falsifying testimonials with professionals she’s never met.
Based in Melbourne, Carlisle is only available over Zoom and does not do referrals or take on local clients (in case of awkward bump-ins!). Her clients are “rich and cheesy morons”, “so stupid” and “so resource-rich” that include yoga-studio owners, influencers and graphic designers.
“They were all so needy, so chaotic … so hungry for value and validation and praise,” Christina says. As Carlise, she sees herself as a “Zoom-based shepherd to a herd of wayward muppets, forever oppressed by their desires and demands and frantic puppetry impulses”.
But judging her clients does not bring in the dough. During her 12-week Zoom sessions (the aptly titled Evolve Package), she reels her clients in by building their trust and getting them to disclose their most intimate and private thoughts. She’s on the hunt for “exploitable information” — waiting for them to “disclose anything juicy”.
Then she blackmails them, making bogus threats to expose said compromising information online for exchange of a payout — usually a few thousand dollars. During a coaching session, one yoga-teacher influencer accidentally lets slip his fat-phobic attitudes. In order for that rant to stay confidential, he must make a large, one-time payout to Carlise. Then, she promises, he will never hear from her again.
The strategy works for Christina. Every few months, she erases an identity and creates a new one.
Previous fake doctors include Dr Anna Schuster and Dr Elizabeth Clune — perfectly agreeable, legitimate sounding professionals — women designed to impress, flatter, and coax. Christina doesn’t think much of this ethically dubious enterprise. She isn’t a bad person. “I didn’t want to hurt anyone,” she justifies. “I just needed the money.”
But one failed attempt at extortion leads her to take on a referral. And this new client is outside the purview of her usual client list — she is younger. Tech-savvy. She’s sceptical about the corporate woo-woo of self-optimisation. Could this be the mistake that finally exposes our heroine?
On the surface, The Confidence Woman appears to be a study of what makes such a figure tick, but at its core, it’s a housing crisis fable, exploring the precarity of existing as a single mother, a cohort punished by the system for not operating within the heteronormative family unit. It’s a sharp, convincing debut that luridly conveys the grit of single parenthood.
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