Review: Suits by Nina Godiwalla

Title: Suits: A Woman on Wall Street
Author: Nina Godiwalla
Released: February 28, 2011
Publisher: Atlas & Co.
Pages/Format: 352 (Hardcover)
Genre: Nonfiction, Memoir
Source: Publisher

No class can prepare anyone for a career on Wall Street. While others in Nina Godiwalla’s Persian-Indian immigrant community were content to fulfill their parent’s dreams, Nina’s fierce ambition pulled her from Houston to New York to become a banker. The rarified taste of power left her hungry for more.

Showered with Broadway tickets and ferried around in sleek black town cars, Morgan Stanley recruits led a fast and flashy lifestyle, but at a steep cost. In a world where strip clubs took the place of conference rooms, Nina was driven to fit the mold of her fellow recruits: wealthy, white, and male. But would she have to lose her Southern accent and suppress her family’s heritage to prove her worth on the trading floor?

Nina Godiwalla offers a behind-the-scenes look at the recklessness that ruled Wall Street during the dot-com boom days. But Suits is also a story of the family Nina left behind: a story of fathers and daughters, the pursuit of honor, swapping your grandmother’s shrimp curry for takeout sushi and cocktails. A snapshot of an immigrant family with big dreams, Suits reveals how much we’ve been conditioned to trade for success.

One Sentence Review: Suits is a compelling, eye-opening, and sometimes graphic depiction of life on Wall Street that should be read by any college student looking to work in this grueling environment.

In-Depth Review

Suits is a small, thick book divided into thirteen medium length chapters which alternate between chronicling the author’s time working as an analyst in the corporate finance division of Morgan Stanley and giving readers a glimpse of her childhood and teen years growing up in a Persian-Indian immigrant family. Specifically, chapters 1, 3, 5, 7, 9-11, and 13 focus on her Wall Street experience and chapters 2, 4, 6, 8, and 12 explore her family and home life.

Reading about Nina’s experiences at Morgan Stanley was both eye-opening and shocking. I had no idea that Wall Street is so brutal, nor did I think that companies could get away with treating their employees so poorly. It surprised me that the undisguised greed, racism, sexism, and immorality portrayed by Hollywood as the norm on Wall Street is actually so close to reality. At one point Nina’s co-worker, on the verge of a breakdown, comes to her for advice…

“Even when I do go home,” he continued, shifting his eyes around the room quickly, “I’m too stressed to sleep. I’ve hardly even seen my roommates since we started working. And I have four of them!” he said, raising his hands and shaking them. “I even called a psychiatrist because I’m really starting to scare myself. I had to tell my associate. But this place sucks, because even though I told him, they don’t always let me out to go to my appointments.” {Suits, page 142}

I like that Nina broke up the narrative with chapters about her family and growing-up years. The chapters depicting the harsh Wall Street environment were stressful to read just by virtue of what she went through at her job, so I appreciated the break from the intense narrative. And the family background she revealed–in particular her relationship with her father–helped me to understand her work drive better. I also enjoyed learning about the Persian-Indian immigrant culture that she was raised in.

I was expecting a certain amount of profanity in this book, but I didn’t think there would be anywhere near as much as there was. I’m not necessarily citing this as a bad thing; I think Nina was simply telling it like it is, but I would have appreciated it if she had been a little less explicit in some places, especially chapter nine. (Call me naive, but I really wasn’t expecting the chapter entitled ‘Naked Ambition’ to contain so much nudity.)

My biggest complaint is that there was no afterward, and I definitely think one was warranted here. Godiwalla leaves us hanging with her looking to transfer from corporate finance to capital markets. We never find out if she successfully transferred, or what happened in the ten years after that before she wrote the book. This was a big letdown for me. Still, Suits was compelling and educational–a memoir I think any college student looking to work on Wall Street should read as a cautionary tale.

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About Nina Godiwalla:

Nina Godiwalla has written for the Washington Post and other periodicals. Before founding MindWorks, which teaches professionals meditation and stress management, she worked for Morgan Stanley and Johnson & Johnson. A Graduate of the University of Texas, Dartmouth College, and the Wharton School of Business, she lives in Austin, Texas.