When I meet author and mental health activist Dorothy Herson, she is smiling and visibly relaxed. However, had I met Herson eight years ago, the person sitting opposite me would have been quite different.
Herson, 32, left the world of corporate law after the pressure she felt during her training contract at one of the “Magic Circle”—a group of elite law firms—drove her to destructive coping mechanisms, including alcohol and medication abuse.
Back then, she was burnt out, covered in rashes from stress, surviving on a cocktail of pills to keep her focused for longer periods of time, and drank alcohol instead of eating meals.
Yet even after she became an inpatient on a ward, she was still not ready to let go of law.
“When I was in the hospital, I interviewed at another Magic Circle law firm. I left the hospital on day release, interviewed there, and they gave me the job,” she tells me over our breakfast Zoom call.
“Everyone around me was saying, ‘that’s a really bad idea,’ but I was like ‘there’s absolutely no way I’m leaving. I’ve worked this hard,’” she says. Another two gruelling years of corporate law followed before she finally quit.
Her debut novel, The Rag Doll Contract, published in December 2024, draws on her harrowing experiences in elite law firms that preceded her breakdown, and through four characters explores the personality types that choose to enter into such an unrelenting environment.
“I was interested in how these workplaces benefit from people who are willing to go to any length to prove themselves,” she tells me. “Like what type of person chooses to willingly put themselves through something that they know will be so strenuous and difficult?”
The protagonist, Olivia, is what Herson calls an “insecure overachiever”. The term was coined by Professor Laura Empson, who researched high-flying professionals in elite firms. As Olivia’s work becomes more and more mundane and relentless, her mental health unravels. Yet she keeps going to work each day.
The hours are long and the expectations from senior management are that work comes first, before friends and family. When Olivia is put on a team closing an important deal for a high-profile client, she works until 4am, then gets a taxi home to sleep for two hours before she goes back to the office.
“She has no sense of self,” Herson explains. “She has no values. No sense of right or wrong. No passions. The only thing that fuels her is this obsession with success and achievement because of her upbringing.
“The work is empty, sterile, boring. The only thing that drives her and motivates her is this desire to be validated.”
While the book is set nearly a decade ago, things have only got worse since then. A study of 2,000 trainees and junior lawyers across the top 142 firms in the UK last year found that nearly two-thirds of firms have an average working day of over 10 hours.
It is especially pertinent in post-Covid Britain, where young people at the start of their careers are faced with a new crisis every day—be it a cost-of-living crisis, an employment crisis, or a mental health crisis.
Herson’s narrative forces us to look at the reality of the modern working world and consider the dangers of placing young, insecure overachievers within a corporate structure.
“We do live in a really hungry, aggressively capitalist society in London. It’s so competitive because of the cost of living, and there are still not enough jobs [considering] how many people have good degrees and qualifications,” Herson says.
“The onus is on the individual to find a sense of self outside of the workplace, but it’s also really hard for people to have a sense of, ‘I am okay without a job.’”
We end the call discussing a slightly lighter, unexpected topic. It’s one of the hobbies Herson picked up in life after law and, incidentally, the inspiration for her second book, which she has begun to research—urban exploring.
Dorothy Herson’s book “The Rag Doll Contract” is available to buy online and in paperback at selected retailers.
