Reading Zoe Foster Blake’s new book is hard work

Even if you buy into the premise that finding the ‘holy grail of [hair] texture’ is worth so much personal and financial risk, too often this book reads as though GenAI has been asked to write a series of annual reports in the guise of chick lit.

Zoe Foster Blake: from the founder a multi-million dollar skincare company to the author of a novel about a successful start-up. Picture: Instagram

In explaining why she decided to write Things Will Calm Down Soon, Zoe Foster Blake notes there are three elemental strings to her bow: founding a beauty business (Foster Blake is the founder of the Go-To skincare company, which was sold in August 2021 to the BWX Group for $89m); selling and buying back that business (in December last year); and writing fiction.

The time had come, she resolved, to fuse all that experience and write a novel that might, in a fun and accessible way, empower other women to become founders of their own businesses and take charge of their own dreams.

 

Things Will Calm Down Soon focuses on the fraught rise of haircare brand Second Day from giddy impulse to multi-million dollar company. The vision of Kit Cooper, a stylist working with models and influencers, and star of her own YouTube channel, Second Day begins with a simple ambition: create a product that will bestow on its users “second-day hair, not clean, not dirty, [but] in between”.

Foster Blake’s novels sits squarely in the genre of contemporary women’s fiction – in particular, chick lit – and Things Will Calm Down Soon ticks several of the requisite boxes: a heroine in her mid-20s who always seems to be battling impostor syndrome and who, although not as drop-dead gorgeous as her sister, is attractive enough in her own way to be sleeping with Ari, a luscious younger man “far too … extroverted and pansexual to ever be anything more than a hook-up”.

When Kit becomes pregnant with Ari’s child, she is juggling not only a small baby and a fledgling business but also a useless co-parent, a dying father, a problematic sibling, needy friends and a business manager who is more like an anchor than the wind in her sails.

All of this is leavened by a comprehensive inventory of brand names, hot-button social issues and pop culture references, and writing that, at its best, is sassy and entertaining.

A scene where Kit – who has jumped out of bed naked in a “sleeping-pill-just-woken-up-confusion” – flails about with the technical demands of a crucial online meeting, only to be ultimately sabotaged by her grumpy daughter, is first-class.

Hamish Blake and Zoe Foster Blake at this year’s Logie Awards. Picture: Getty

So, too, the moment where Kit finally reveals to her father how abandoned she felt in the years after her mother’s death.

However, for the better part of the novel, Foster Blake struggles to effectively weave the vagaries of Kit’s personal and professional lives into any sort of satisfying whole.

Even if you buy into the premise that finding the “holy grail of [hair] texture” is worth so much personal and financial risk, reading Things Will Calm Down Soon is hard work. Large swathes of the narrative are given over to the ins and outs of meetings with potential investors (“testing for synergies”) or lamentations about dealing with suppliers and shareholders who don’t quite get what the company is all about.

Too often, it reads as though GenAI has been asked to rewrite a series of annual reports in the guise of chick lit. What results is a humdrum concoction that largely leaves plot and characterisation by the wayside.

Foster Blake is the founder of the Go-To skincare company.

Any obstacles Kit meets on the way to realising her dreams are more speed bumps than barricades, frequently resolved in a matter of pages by someone who knows someone who knows someone, or thanks to a good talking-to by a mentor or friend.

When Kit finds herself faced with a life-changing decision – about whether to give up control of her company – fate saves her. As a result, she’s a heroine without any meaningful agency, even at the novel’s conclusion.

Characters are reduced to propping up Kit’s ego or providing mild resistance to Kit’s aspirations for Second Day. Ari seems to have been conjured for the sole objective of allowing Kit to be a powerhouse single mum (“her solo parent mental load was heavy”). Their daughter, Gretel, serves a corresponding purpose, although where Ari is an enduring source of frustration, Gretel generates in Kit fleeting pangs of guilt. Neither add anything of substance to what is, in effect, an unduly simplistic portrayal of Kit as entrepreneur-mum.

The mandatory love interest in Things Will Calm Down Soon – “a bit of a f..k-knuckle” named, a little too obviously, Max Darling – doesn’t appear until halfway through the novel, and then only in a fugitive sort of way. His two or three subsequent appearances – always accidental meetings – are brief and barely narrated, making it impossible to care whether he and Kit find their way together.

In sketching out Kit’s backstory, Foster Blake describes the teenaged Kit sweeping floors at the local hair salon and saving furiously to drag herself out of her impoverished childhood.

How that young girl becomes hair stylist to the stars, travelling the world and commanding almost 200,000 Instagram followers, might have proffered more fruitful ground for fiction than Kit’s subsequent career moves, for what Foster Blake seems entirely to misjudge is how much readers are likely to care about the faux travails of a woman tossing up between a deal that makes her a millionaire and one that makes her a multi-millionaire.

While Kit may recognise, in the novel’s final throes, the true value and meaning of her life, it’s a recognition that comes, as Kit herself acknowledges, in the context of a “rom-com with an unconvincing and overly contrived ending”.

Foster Blake knows exactly where she needs Kit to be at the end of this novel. Her problem is that she has been unable to fashion a convincing way of getting her there.

Diane Stubbings is a writer and reviewer based in Melbourne.