Two promises before I get to the book itself.
One. I read a lot (you wanna know why - be my guest, love for books runs in my family). And this is one thing I am not delegating to AI. Ever. Amen ☺️
Two. I solemnly swear that this section will never be "5 books to become a successful investor”, or contain Napoleon Hill, or Psychology of Money. We are better than that.
*Hill, who wrote Think and Grow Rich, by the way became a bankrupt after writing this book, and was accused of fraud multiple times. Not the person I would trust.
The books here will be something else. Like this one.
Dua Lipa and Callum Turner met over this book. They were sitting next to each other at dinner, both reading it, both had just finished chapter one.
He told her they were on the same page. Sweet, isn’t it? 😍
Fast forward to summer 2026 - they got married. A very happy milestone right here.
Why we all needed this book
Anyways, to business… I've spent a while wondering why every serious novel about money has a man as a main character.
Dreiser's Trilogy of Desire - The Financier, The Titan, The Stoic - all Frank Cowperwood. Zola's L'Argent, all Saccard and the Paris Bourse. Trollope's The Way We Live Now, all Melmotte. Galsworthy's Forsytes, a whole saga about property, owned and run by men.
The closer one is to a source of power, the quieter it gets. Authority and money surround themselves with silence, and one can measure the reach of someone’s influence by the thickness of the hush enveloping them.
Trust looks like it's going to do the same thing. A Wall Street tycoon in the 1920s, a fortune, a wife who dies. Three texts, three versions of the same marriage, each one written by someone with a reason to lie.
And then the last one arrives and rearranges everything behind it 💣
No spoilers. Just get to the end.
Diaz did this on purpose. He's said that in both history and fiction, "women have been completely and utterly erased from those narratives" of American wealth. When they do appear, he says, they get one of three parts: the wife, the secretary, or the victim. He wrote the book to take all three and turn them inside out.
Why you will love it
Hernan Diaz was born in Argentina, then moved to Sweden after the military coup. He later returned to Argentina, studied in London, and moved to the United States. He clearly knows both Europe and US really well, you could see it from the book.
Trust won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2023, shared with Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead. Also the Kirkus Prize, and longlisted for the Booker.
The HBO adaptation is in development: Kate Winslet will be starring and producing, along with Diaz himself. Read it before it becomes a series!
The interview — Diaz talking to NPR about the erasure of women from stories about wealth: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/13/1176001701/hernan-diaz-on-his-pulitzer-prize-winning-novel-trust
Hope you enjoy this one as much as I did this summer. Drop a comment below to share your opinion.
With love and curiosity,
Eugenia
Who I am
I'm Eugenia, an investor in 100+ startups and a board director, formerly at Expedia and Meta.
I promised myself: no affiliate links here, no FOMO and no “hey-hey, girls, let's go”. Just what I actually do with my own money, and why.
I am not a financial advisor. I am doing my diligence in public and sharing my experience with you - but I also trust you to build and make your own.
Are we connected on LinkedIn? That's where I write about business, startups and AI.
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