Still Needs Work: A Novel

When Marianne is abruptly laid off from her tech job during a recession, she’s forced to move back to the seedy Kansas City neighborhood she thought she’d left forever. As she applies for jobs in an industry that doesn’t value the middle-aged, Marianne must rally her inner strength to rebuild her life again.

Marianne gets the call while attending a conference in San Francisco: laid off, department dissolved. Two days later, she’s back home in the dicey Kansas City neighborhood she moved to after a reversal of fortune two years ago. After all this time rebuilding her life, it’s all collapsed.

The daily grind is just that—a grind. Until it isn’t, until it’s gone and taken health insurance, retirement contributions, and the currency to buy food and shelter, never mind the free coffee at the office, along with it. In the aftermath of her layoff, Marianne tries all the usual routes to re-employment, but a middle-aged woman, regardless of experience, has little job cred in the tech world, especially with an address in the heartland. A contract job at a Chicago startup morphs through two acquisitions in eight weeks. And then she’s mugged in her own neighborhood, which frightens her enough to consider a permanent move away.

An irreverent look at the alien denizens of the tech world, the fraught business of mergers and acquisitions, and the parallel universe of job openings, Still Needs Work is a contemporary story of the working world wrapped around a very human story of one person, her dog, and her community.

About the Author

Ellen Barker grew up in Kansas City during a period of demographic upheaval and returns there in her novels. She has a bachelor's degree in urban studies from Washington University in Saint Louis, where she developed a passion for how cities work, and don't. She began her career as an urban planner and then spent many years working for large consulting firms, first as a writer-editor and later managing large data systems, jobs rich in corporate drama large and small. She is the author of East of Troost, which introduced readers to the neighborhood where Still Needs Work takes place. She now lives in Los Altos, California, with her husband and their German shepherd, Boris, who is the inspiration for the dog in this novel.