Career Alternatives for Attorneys: Novelist

Tara Conklin's new novel invokes the subject of slave reparations as the basis for the tale of a house slave and a modern lawyer.

The subject of reparations for slavery has spawned lawsuits, critical inquiry, (affiliate link), and threw a wrench in the Bartlet administration’s plans.

So far, the idea has gained little traction, probably because companies like Aetna really like all that compound interest earned on the backs of treating human beings like chattel, thank you very much.

The subject also sets the stage for a new novel in this week’s look at career alternatives for attorneys, from our friends at Bloomberg Law

Tara Conklin, a former White & Case associate and NYU grad, has published her first book, The House Girl: A Novel (affiliate link), intertwining the lives of a modern Biglaw associate and a nineteenth-century house slave. She tells us more about it in her interview with Spencer Mazyck:

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Conklin’s research using existing slave narratives is fascinating because grounding the characters in the novel with guidance from the voices of those held as slaves is a strategy ignored by authors for too long. Indeed, the genre of slave narratives and the symbolism employed in those stories is itself worthy of critical analysis and I’m interested in seeing the extent to which these symbols are reaffirmed in Conklin’s fictionalized accounts.

If I had any quibble with Conklin’s interview, it’s that the main character is an associate in a Biglaw firm assigned to the plaintiffs’ side of a slavery reparations class action suit. Biglaw seems much more at home defending the banks that financed the slave trade.

Stealth Lawyer: Tara Conklin, Novelist, ‘The House Girl’ [Bloomberg Law via YouTube]
About Tara Conklin [Author Website]

Earlier: Prior ATL coverage of career alternatives for attorneys

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