Private Equity by Carrie Sun: A tale of corporate burnout

Carrie Sun’s memoir Private Equity is a familiar tale of corporate burnout, unfortunately too familiar. Sun started working as a PA to the founder of a Manhattan hedge fund at the age of 29, despite being, by her own admission, overqualified, with a few years in finance already behind her.

The hedge fund is anonymised as Carbon, and the founder is simply called Boone. People more au fait with the world of finance might guess the true identities but few readers will be able, or indeed motivated, to find out more. Sun starts off enthusiastic about her new position, seemingly unflustered at the prospect of being on call practically around the clock. Most observers of workplace burnout will see what lies in store for her but our narrator has a beatific view of the corporate world — at one point later in the book, she says, with complete seriousness: “I had believed that serving my employer meant serving humanity.” It is a jarringly ingenuous view to hold for someone who has come of age in the wake of the global financial crisis.

The biggest flaw of Private Equity is there is little that surprises, nothing we haven’t already seen from similar accounts, and often a lot less. It doesn’t help either that Sun’s writing is pedestrian at best, with few substantial insights. It is only when relating a traumatic experience from her college days — oddly kept in reserve till the penultimate chapter — and her relationship with her Chinese parents, that her narrative acquires real tension.

Anyone hoping for juicy hedge-fund gossip will also be disappointed. The world of Carbon in Sun’s telling, no doubt because of non-disclosure agreements and the risk of retribution, is shorn of drama, with the events related tedious in the extreme, amounting to arrangements for staff birthday parties and the odd calendar mix-up. The words “world-class” are bandied about a lot. Boone, we are repeatedly told, is a genius, but his character is smoothed of any complexity and is little more than a cypher.

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Given that a memoir is a distillate of its author’s often tumultuous personal experience, one is loath to be too harsh, but you sense Private Equity would have been better as a magazine essay. At book length, it is stretched far too thin.

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