The Pathology of Flexibility in Monica Ali’s In the Kitchen

This article considers how Monica Ali’s novel In the Kitchen is informed by and participates in the circulation of ideas about the superior psychology of the flexible self, a self crucial to the ideologies of work manifest in neoliberal management practice and government policy. I argue that, as it refracts Ali’s own controversial career, the novel is a form of the same self-referencing introspection that it positions at the heart of flexible, creative, self-managing work.