Jessica Knoll has spent four novels writing women who are not interested in being sympathetic. Helpless, out now from Scribner, is the one where she stops moderating.
The setup is almost polite. Faye Heron is a Hollywood producer, one half of a well-regarded and slightly frustrated partnership with her husband, the sort of couple who get photographed for trade covers and invited to the right after-party without ever landing the film that changes their standing. Twelve years earlier she ended things with Henry Spalding, her college boyfriend and first love, because the intensity of the relationship was starting to swallow her. Henry is now married, a father, and running his family’s business.
They meet again at the funeral of a college professor they both loved. Old feeling comes back, which is the part you can see coming. What follows is not: Henry takes her to an isolated cabin, and the reunion becomes a captivity.
The question the book is actually asking
Knoll is less interested in the abduction than in what Faye finds still alive in herself while it is happening. The novel keeps its narrator’s desire and her situation on screen at the same time and declines to resolve the contradiction on the reader’s behalf. Nobody in Helpless gets a verdict. The title works as a question rather than a description, and the answer keeps moving depending on which of the two of them appears to be in charge, which changes more than once.
That refusal is what the early reviews fixed on. Oprah Daily called the book unapologetically kinky and warned that a book club would need two sessions for the ending alone. The New York Post described it as a sexy new thriller. Library Journal put it in Gone Girl territory, in the specific sense of a book that treats female desire as something shifting rather than something to be diagnosed. It landed on most-anticipated lists at the New York Times, Town & Country, CrimeReads, and BookPage before publication.
Readers who want a content note: this is Knoll’s most sexually explicit writing to date, and the sex is bound up with control and coercion rather than sitting off to one side of it.
The show is already in motion
Universal Global Television is developing Helpless as a series. Knoll is adapting it herself and will executive produce alongside Stacy Sher. Knoll has said she wrote the book she had been wanting to read, and wants to make the show she has been wanting to watch.
She has been through this cycle before. Luckiest Girl Alive, her 2015 debut, became a Netflix film with Mila Kunis. Bright Young Women, in 2023, took the standard serial-killer narrative and moved the camera off the killer. Helpless is a harder sell for adaptation and a more obvious one, in that a two-hander in a cabin is cheap to shoot and difficult to stop watching.
Helpless is available in hardcover, ebook, and audio from Scribner.
