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1-Page Summary of The Circle
Overall Summary
Mae Holland is a young woman who has just been hired by the Circle. She’s excited about joining the company, which has received rave reviews for its technology and innovative environment. Annie Allerton, Mae’s college roommate and close friend, helped secure her job at the company. Mae gets a tour of the campus from Annie, and she meets many of her new colleagues on her first day at work.
During the tour, Annie tells Mae about The Circle. It is run by three people who are known as the Three Wise Men: Ty Gospodinov, Tom Stenton and Eamon Bailey. All of them have different roles in running The Circle. Ty is in charge of technology; Tom handles “dirty work”; finally, Eamon realizes the company’s vision for global interconnectedness.
Mae is hired by the Circle to work in customer service. She’s not sure how her job fits into the company mission, and it seems like a superficial position that involves throwing parties and social events. At one of those parties, Mae meets Francis Garaventa. He tells her that he was orphaned as a child when his siblings were kidnapped and killed. As a result, he’s working on a project for The Circle designed to track abducted children using cameras called SeeChange.
Mae is impressed by the utopian spirit of the Circle, but she doesn’t spend as much time there because her father needs constant care. Unfortunately, he isn’t getting the painkillers that he needs to feel comfortable. At work, Mae feels pressured to participate in social life at The Circle and build an online presence. She stays up late at night posting statuses and liking other people’s videos.
Around the same time, Mae meets a man named Kalden. He asks her questions about herself and her work, but he won’t tell her his last name or much else about himself. Later on, she goes on a date with Francis and they kiss.
A day after their date, Francis helps demonstrate a dating website to potential investors. He displays personal information about Mae during the presentation and she is furious with him for it. A few days later, her father’s health declines rapidly and she goes home to see him. She also sees Mercer again who expresses his skepticism of her new job in social networking as well as constant texting ruining relationships with friends and family. Around the same time, Mae meets Kalden at a party hosted by Circle and they have sex in one of the rooms there.
At work, Mae learns that she can put her parents on the company’s health insurance plan. She asks Annie for help, and they complete the process together. Meanwhile, The Circle starts to push its idea of being completely transparent by installing cameras everywhere in their campus. In secret, Kalden and Mae meet up in a bathroom (one of the few places without cameras) and have sex.
One night after dinner with her parents, Mae goes out to the beach and sees an unreturned kayak near a kayak store. She decides to take it out, but she’s surprised when police officers arrest her. The next day at work, Mae learns that people saw her “stealing” the kayak on a hidden camera installed by Circle users who reported it online after they saw what happened on their devices. Mae meets with Eamon Bailey and is convinced that everyone should share everything about themselves because secrets are lies. After this meeting, Mae starts sharing every detail of her life online for others to see.
The story moves on to a year later. The Circle has become the world’s main source of information, and Mae has gone transparent. She wears a camera around her chest at all times that allows people in the world to see what she sees and hear her voice. She enjoys being transparent because it makes her honest and energetic at all times: she always needs to be “on” for millions of watchers. In addition, she revives her relationship with Francis but is unable to have sex with him since he suffers from premature ejaculation. However, Mae finds herself growing increasingly distant from Annie who seems overworked and envious about Mae’s popularity at The Circle as well as among its users.
