How Starbucks Saved My Life:
A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else
Michael Gates Gill (Author)
Reader’s review from Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/How-Starbucks-Saved-Life-Privilege/product-reviews/1592402860/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1
This is the story of a wealthy ad executive who is laid off (in a case of blatant ageism) and must then turn to finding an hourly job at Starbucks to make ends meet. He has the classic rich Manhattanite life trajectory: private school, Ivy League, corporate job with lots of income. He does spend a lot of time away from family though, which prefigures events to come later. He is, both through the reader's own instinct and his telling us so, one of those New Yorkers who has never really met middle class people. It's a sheltered life, but comfortable.
Gill tells his story well and doesn't hold back on the self-deprecation, not at all. His divorce came about for the understandable reason that he met a single, 40ish woman into the arts who lived alone. Mysterious enough for you? So, intrigued and feeling emotionally unmoored with no job, he has an affair and fathers a child. His family is understandably devastated, and the scenes in this memoir of them are wrenching.
Thrown out of the house, with no job, his money runs out and he must learn to be middle class from nearly scratch. He decides Starbucks would work when he reflects how he spends times there and when the local manager and him have one of those conversations blacks and whites have that sound mistrustful but are actually seeking closeness and racial harmony.
From there, Gill confronts all the things that he'd never learned to do; like the simple self-satisfaction of work, independent living, how to handle solitude, and getting to know people unlike himself. Time and again, Gill points out how his pre-fall opinion of someone and how wrong he was, and his post-fall new, more mature appreciation of them. He does it in a way that is tender and loving, and he allows for the sizable resentment some readers may feel at hearing someone used to limos talk about not wanting to walk on 96th Street. 96th Street for god's sake! My first day living here I went to 96th Street to people-watch! I once had a girlfriend who got fired from a publishing job and worked at Barnes and Noble for three weeks, until she couldn't deal with being 22 and being so "common." I thought of her as I read this book.
The PW editorial review is totally misleading, by the way. He talks about as much as you'd expect about the Starbucks job. For a book dealing with his new life, that is expected. Plus, for all the talk about how great Starbucks is, you never really hear about how the place works.
One thing - I didn't realize that the baristas are supposed to talk to you and make conversation. My whole lifetime of going to Starbucks, it's happened once, I see in retrospect.
Definitely get this book.
