“Inside me,” Jennifer Romolini writes, “is a hungry, terrified, security-craving goblin in the presence of whom I feel powerless; an ambitious monster who wants it all….I’m hard-charging toward a life I think I want, in a race to make something of myself, afraid that if I slow down even for a second, I might never be able to start up again.”
As a recovering workaholic I couldn’t resist a memoir about workaholism, though the book wasn’t entirely what I expected. I think that’s the potential problem with all memoir – one’s own life story gets in the way when a book signals the possibility of a hard relate. Romolini grew up in 70s Philadelphia to teenage parents who really weren’t ready to settle down. In consequence, she knew no emotional safety or security, and precious little financial security either. As her parents grew up and got smarter, her father modeled an entrepreneurial relationship to work, founding his own grocery business and never being home. For a long time (and in story-terms, too long a time) Romolini threw her considerable if unfocused energies into hard work, hard partying and the wrong kind of men. So many wrong men. Really, I could have lived without all the wrong men. Having concentrated on a teenage rebellion rather than an education, she was forced into a lot of tedious work, mostly waitressing, until she got a shot at a career-friendly journalism course. She started as a fact checker at Conde Nast and over time moved up the ladder and into digital media, managing fashion and lifestyle sites for Yahoo, HelloGiggles and ShondaLand. Somewhere in the middle of all of this she married and had a daughter.
In her perfectly laudable desire to present a warts-and-all portrait of both herself and her various workplaces, Jennifer Romolini can go a bit too far. It’s not surprising, well not to me. If you are an excessive person, that excess keeps bulging out somewhere. So if you’re not reading too carefully, it can feel like the story is one in which Romolini works every hour God sends, and then takes drugs in bars in every hour that didn’t get sent, and THEN moves to a new company and works even harder! Also, she has a tendency to focus a bit too much on the negative in her workplaces, whether it’s not liking fashion in a Devil Wears Prada part of the story and having to force herself to do so, or being at the mercy of terrible bosses and lazy entitled underlings, or of drowning in her own sense of worthlessness and insecurity. It would be easy to read this book and wonder why on earth she did any of it, when she didn’t seem to enjoy any aspect of what she was doing. Here’s where I found myself failing to relate because if I overworked, it was because I adored my work and couldn’t bring myself to say no. Even at the level of the sentence, Romolini finds it hard to rein the excess in, piling subclause on subclause, just one more double-barrelled adjective, just one more additional prolix thought. Given the excess it’s surprising how readable, and often entertaining, this book is. And if you can see excess – or an inability to know when to stop – as the fundamental driver of addiction, then it all makes a lot more sense.
After reading about the long hard slog to a) get herself into a position that paid more than waitressing with good tips – which is very telling about entry level work and b) find a decent relationship and a job that had a few decent prospects, I went online to look Jennifer Romolini up. The articles I read by her there were enlightening. These articles had more light and shade in them, describing the opportunities she felt she’d been given, and the occasional bursts of mentoring. Here it was possible to connect her with work she loved. Having read them, I found it easier to return to the memoir and see how a feeling that she hadn’t told the whole story, or had been forced to suppress the awfulness of parts of it, had overwhelmed parts of Ambition Monster. Romolini is very hard on herself (too hard, not least because in a memoir, readers will believe you), and doesn’t sugarcoat the mess that workaholism will make of your family life. She wants to insist that it’s a deeply unhealthy compulsion that relentlessly works against your best interests, while dazzling you with some distant and illusory prize. She also wants to show how its roots lie in traumatic instability, and in a fear of never having or being enough. And what we do out of fear, we color with misery. The other hard truth here: if we are lost to ourselves then we’re lost to everyone around us, too. Personally, I’d like to gather together the top executives in a large number of companies and impress some basic psychology upon them. Managing a workforce in the current high expectation, high threat, low reward culture gets you victims, not employees. Ultimately, it couldn’t be more counterproductive.
The best part of this memoir for me was the final third. Partly because Romolini begins to work in start-ups, where Mr Litlove worked for about 15 years and so yes, I know they are every bit as dysfunctional as she describes them to be. I rather loved the boss who refused to make any decision when Mercury was retrograde (I read that bit out to Mr L). I also enjoyed her gradual awakening to sanity. This came about because after too many years of smoking and drinking and flying around America giving keynote speeches at conferences, she developed polyps on her vocal cords. The resulting surgery meant she had to stop talking for several weeks. When all she could do was listen, she suddenly saw the bonkers work culture for what it was. Now isn’t that an intriguing lesson? The introverts of the world would like you to know that life looks very different if you actually listen to what’s going on rather than focus on what your next sentence will be. Ultimately, I would have liked more time spent on the psychopathic nature of the commercial culture because I really think it needs to be called out. Also, more time on her recovery and the changes she had to make. And less time on the wrong men. But hey, when you’re an addict you don’t get to make choices like that, so it is what it is. For all its flaws, this was a book I enjoyed a lot.
