FROM THE DUST JACKET:

The devastating documentary of fifteen women who have the best of everything...

You may think you recognize the girls?

You may think you recognize the company?

But it doesn't matter. They are all the girls who come to get a superjob in the big city. They are liberated, bright, attractive, well-paid, employed in one of the most internationally famous, prestigious and enviable corporations, single, on the make.

Jack Olsen has interviewed them in depth and recorded their candid, bitter assessments of themselves and each other, their intimate observations on the men they work for, sleep with, cover for, despise.

He has encouraged them to talk freely about their pasts, their families, their ambitions, sex during and after hours, female chauvinism, professional ethics, and their desperate entrapment -- tenaciously holding on to their jobs despite strong, conflicting feelings about the lives they lead.

What keeps them here? Why do they stay? Is it the belief that New York is still the Big Apple and that anything here is better than home? How are they affected by the new currents in women's lives, women's lib, "sisterhood," the determination to be treated as equals in work and play?

They pour out their frank opinions on marriage, on careers, on wives strung out in suburbia while husbands carry on in Manhattan pieds-à-terre, on who gets picked in the office ... and why.

Jack Olsen has gotten it all together in a rollicking, poignant, powerful indictment of the quality of life-in-the-big-city that reads like a novel but is real life as actually told by fifteen very different, talented women who share to varying extents common despair at what their "advanced status" has brought...

... and what it really costs to have the best of everything.

THE BACK COVER:

Some of the Girls in the Office

Alexandra Oats, 38. Boss of the staff: tough, solid, smart. Very conscious of Women's Lib. Reluctantly admired by many of the girls.

Samantha Havercroft, 37. English import, top-notch secretary who's promoted and becomes disenchanted with the job. Violently overcritical about almost everything.

Gloria Rolstin, 38. Complicated and fascinating affair with a top executive. Generally liked by the girls.

Bettye McCluin, 25. Well-to-do family, spoiled, got good job without training through Daddy's connections and so is heartily resented. Overskilled, sexy, aloof.

Phyllis Brown, 35. New York native, strict father, Catholic. Hates idea of sex but indulges. Suicidal tendencies.

Stephanie Grant, 28. Secretive and strange. Lived with Indians in Latin America and now enjoys her solitary home life in New York. A maverick to the other girls and thought of as weird, but decent and rather lovely.

Corey Ann Simkens, 25. Southern belle, great office efficiency but by far the wildest of all the girls. Village bars and stud bartenders after hours, back at her desk

Mary Adams, 27. Thinks New York men are the worst -- emasculated and plastic -- and New York the most vile city imaginable.

Callia Bartucci, 50. Fading jetset cosmopolite. Absolutely petrified about aging and being frozen out.

Stacy Krupp, 41. Farm girl, originally very enthusiastic about New York and the office, but lands in a job working for the bastard of all time. Surmounts the experience and looks forward optimistically to a new professionalism in the office.