I was active and agile. I was a champion. I was a witch. I was a winner. Christina is a single mother living in the Melbourne suburbs, but to her online clients she is the esteemed Dr Ruth Carlisle, an ‘executive coach and mindset expert, specialising in high-performing individuals’. Dr Ruth gains her clients’ trust through her online coaching business, finds out their secrets and deepest fears, and uses this information to extort them, using the money to save for the ultimate unobtainable Australian dream: a home deposit. But when she uncovers a secret that could set her up with much more than a 2-bedroom apartment in Clifton Hill, suddenly everything is at stake. The Confidence Woman is a novel about more than one kind of confidence game. It explores and hilariously skewers contemporary cults of self-optimisation, while also creating a moving and too-real portrait of the difficulties of striving for success (or just security) in a rigged system.
