Then he waited. But exactly how was I supposed to respond? Praise? I acknowledge that compared to killing yourself with drugs and alcohol, making a wallet is a good, maybe even life-affirming act. At the same time, my friend is well educated, engaging, insanely verbal and brilliant at what he does. For him to have spent time making a crappy wallet struck me as sad and pathetic.
I had the same uneasy mix of feelings when I read Michael Gates Gill’s memoir, “How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else.” The story of his life reads like the plot of Lifetime movie. He’s the son of the famous man about town and New Yorker writer Brendan Gill. He rode the escalator of privilege right to the top, stepping easily from Yale to the upper echelons of advertising behemoth J. Walter Thompson, where he ruled, master-of-the-universe-style, for decades. Then, at 53, Gill got fired. Over the next 10 years his consulting business failed; he had an affair that ended his long marriage and got him kicked out of his luxurious suburban home; he went broke, alienated his children, and ended up living in a shabby one-bedroom rental; and, uninsured, he was diagnosed with a slow-growing brain tumor. Then, weeks before his 64th birthday, he got a job, almost accidentally, at Starbucks. There, learning to grind beans, pull cappuccinos and make change, he found structure, self-respect, and, yes, happiness and meaning.
Usually I’m a sucker for such stories. So why do I feel manipulated instead of inspired by this one? Gill (or maybe his editor at Gotham Books) seems fully aware that readers are fascinated by tales of the elite brought low. So there are plenty of details about him wiping the toilet seats at Starbucks while he reminiscences about his former life hobnobbing with the rich and famous. But oddly, for a memoir, there’s an almost total information blackout on Gill’s emotional trajectory. Yes, he feels pain when he recollects the careless way he was parented. He feels abashed at his former assumptions about class and intelligence. He feels pride and relief when he’s able to reestablish contact with his now-adult children. But it’s all as predicable and stale as bad advertising copy, and somehow just as flat. We learn nothing about this man in 265 pages that we couldn’t have surmised from the first chapter.
Instead, he spends pages cheerleading for the kind of brainless corporate customs that circumscribe the lives of frontline workers in any chain store. Gill makes much of the fact that his fellow workers are called “partners,” that customers are called “guests” and that bosses request, not order, their employees around. “I was about to discover that at Starbucks it was not about me—it was about serving others,” he writes. Right. And those guys from Best Buy? I hear they’re going to be nominated for sainthood, right after Mother Teresa.
See? Now I’ve ended up making fun of that wallet. Don’t get me wrong, I feel bad for this guy. I’m glad he has a job he likes. I’m glad he got a book contract. I’m glad Tom Hanks is making it into a movie. I hope Gill is able to bank some money and retire—or not. I wish I could say I liked his story, but I didn’t. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that work is dignity. Unfortunately, in this memoir, work life is what passes for an inner life.
