"Bond Girl" Author Erin Duffy Recalls Her Baptism By Fire Working on Wall Street

Bond Girl is not Pussy Galore’s autobiography. It is a snappy, buzz-gathering first novel by Erin Duffy about bright, beautiful and quick-witted twenty-something Alex Garrett, who goes to work on Wall Street, aka “the giant sandbox from hell.” Unlike The Devil Wears Prada, with which Bond Girl has been inevitably compared, the story is set in a male-dominated world where the biggest challenge to Alex’s sanity is not an evil boss but a hot house environment marked by high stress, hard work, harder partying and sexual harassment, most of it benign (her boss calls her “girlie”), some of it malignant.

Duffy knows the terrain first-hand. An English major who graduated from Georgetown University in 2000, she got a job at Merrill Lynch, where she worked for nine year until the bottom dropped out in 2008 and she was laid off. Also unlike Prada, Bond Girl was not born of any grudges or scores to settle. “There's a reason they called it ‘Mother Merrill,’ she told Millionaire Corner. “I was very lucky. It was a very familial place to work. For the lion’s share of my time there, it was a wonderful experience. I had great mentors. There are people that I won’t be sending Christmas cards to anytime soon, but that will happen anywhere. For the most part, I’m in touch with my former colleagues. We still have reunion dinners.”

Like Alex, Duffy’s family business was finance. Her father, now retired, worked on Wall Street for four decades. “We watched CNBC on Sundays before the football games,” she said. “I was acclimated to Wall Street fairly young. I got to go with my father to work. It was a lot of fun for a little kid. The younger assistants let you sit on their laps and play with their computers. It was like having 400 babysitters for an afternoon.”

Bond Girl chronicles Alex’s baptism by fire, learning on the job, deftly (and sometimes not so deftly) handling abrasive and abusive personalities, and navigating a clandestine interoffice romance. Duffy makes her an ingratiating character by not making her always the best and brightest in the room. She screws up, often and big time. “I’m a big believer in learning from mistakes,” Duffy said.

Did her father sit her down to give her the Wall Street facts of life? “There were things he was definite about, like never, ever be late to work and never ever be the last to leave the bar,” she laughed. “What he told me about sexual harassment was that it was there, I could handle it, and to be smart about it.”

You don’t have to know about on-the-run repos or range accrual notes to get Bond Girl (“Michael Lewis I am not,” Duffy joked). The story is grounded in Duffy’s experiences and some of the book’s most memorable scenes have a resonant specificity that captures the tenor of the pre-2008 good times. In one, a colleague makes a bet that he can digest one of each of the contents of a vending machine. “That was 100 percent not Merrill-specific,” she laughed. “You can’t find anyone who hasn’t been at any other firm where that wasn’t a bet like that.  There were a million others: Eat 20 Big Macs in 30 minutes; drink a gallon of milk; drink a bottle of hot sauce. The vending machine bet is pretty standard everywhere.”

In another, Alex’s boss makes her literally pay for a transgression by sending her out to buy an entire wheel of cheese. “Partially true,” she said. “It didn’t happen to me, but there was a similar event.”

Duffy sat down to write the book after Merrill Lynch went bankrupt and she was laid off.

Had the firm survived the collapse, she said, the book would not have been written. “Who goes to work on Wall Street and thinks they can write a book just because they studied English in college?” she said. “It wasn't anything I thought would be possible. That said, there were times (on the job) where you think, ‘People wouldn’t believe this if you told them.’ The vending machine incident is a perfect example.

“But when I was laid off, I knew I wouldn’t be able to get another job because no one was hiring. I looked on writing the book as cheap therapy. I figured if not then, then when? So that’s what I did with my unemployment to keep myself from going crazy.”

One of the reasons Duffy wrote the book, she said, was in part to put a human face on Wall Street, whose executives, she said, have been demonized in the press and by the Occupy Wall Street protestors. “I understand the venom and the frustration,” she said. “But the rank and file is not bringing home seven-figure checks. I never had an office. Not everyone there were greedy, insensitive jerks who didn’t give a damn about what was going on. There are a ton of people on Wall Street who lost their jobs. In that regard, we’re not that different from other industries.”

The book has received positive reviews in Entertainment Weekly, USA Today and People magazine, among others. Critics have used The Devil Wears Prada as a point of reference, which Duffy takes as a compliment. “I loved the book, most women did,” she said. “I’ve seen the movie a thousand times. It’s a huge compliment to be compared to something that was so successful.

“The difference is that fashion is a female-driven industry. You can say Wall Street is like working in a frat house and the fashion world is like working in a sorority. And whereas that story is about a girl whose first boss is the worst ever, in Bond Girl, Alex’s boss may be crazy, but he is not a bad person or malicious. It’s the environment that’s insane.”

In a key scene from the book, Alex’s honesty about working on Wall Street dissuades some job candidates from choosing to work at her firm. What advice would Duffy give to women who want to work on the Street?  “The environment now is so different,” she said. “The joking and the fun don’t really happen as much because it’s inappropriate with what has happened to the economy. Firms are struggling, and every three months it seems there are massive layoffs. Not that people don’t crack jokes, but there’s been a definite shift. The vending machine bet would never happen now. People would ask, ‘Why aren’t you working?’

“That said. I feel it s a great place to work. The best piece of advice I could give is to have a thick skin and be able to laugh at yourself. You have to be able to admit your mistakes, to say, ‘Yep, it’s my fault, I’ll fix it, it won’t happen again.’ If you have a problem with criticism, it’s not the right world for you.”

As with Prada, it seems inevitable that Bond Girl will become a movie, or perhaps even a TV series. Talks are underway. Emma Stone would be an ideal Alex. And think Bruce Willis as Rick, one of the firm’s most valuable clients and perhaps the book’s most toxic character.

For now, she is working on a second book (not a sequel, although she said she does want to revisit Alex). And if being a novelist doesn’t work out, she has Wall Street to fall back on. In fact, she had been working in interest rate sales for the Bank of Nova Scotia since 2009, and only left to pursue writing full time two weeks ago. “My licenses are good for two years,” she said. “I don’t want to take the Series 7 exam again.”