What I’m Reading

How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else
By Michael Gates Gill

1. If your office has a community bookshelf, use it as an opportunity to read something you wouldn’t normally read. I found one of my favorite books that way.
2. Keep your expectations low.

Full disclosure: I don’t care for Starbucks coffee. It tastes like they burned the beans. Also I don’t go for fancy whippacinolatta stuff, so it’s not a business that really appeals to me.

I am a speed-reader. I can’t always stop myself from blowing through books and articles (especially if the language is fairly basic), and sometimes I think I lose something. I often read books over again, so I can kick back and enjoy the way that writers play with language. I don’t need to read this one again.

Michael Gates Gill grew up rich and a child of the rich, went to an Ivy League university, used his secret-society connections to land a high-powered, high-paying advertising job, meet loads of famous people, moved whenever his company told him to, and then he got old. Then he got fired. Then his consulting business dried up. Then he knocked up a woman he met at a gym. Then his wife left him. Then he discovered he had a (minor) brain tumor that causing him to lose his hearing.

Did you get all of that? I know it’s kind of involved. This is an autobiography, and there’s little motivation to skimp on details when you’re writing an autobiography. (unless you were President.) That’s why a book about working at Starbucks also includes a story about tea with the Queen. And one about meeting Frank Sinatra. And one about running with bulls in Pamplona because he wants to impress Hemingway. And one about how his dad’s archenemy is the guy that wrote The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

Still with me?

This book is bad. It’s not terrible (though the never-ending BJs to Starbucks are pretty ridic. And he can’t write dialogue to save his life, every character, regardless of age, ethnicity or educational background, sounds exactly like him, and nobody ever uses contractions), but it’s bad. I hate to say this, because Michael Gates Gill clearly needs a hug. He’s a very emotional man, and he has some legitimate regrets about the way he lived his life (Even though he did what he was raised to do. We are all screwed in some way), and he’s working really hard to repair that damage. It’s just…the man is fighting so hard for perspective and making so little progress and I kinda want to shake him. Also I don't care about his famous people encounters, and they seem really out of place in the narrative.

He’s sitting in Starbucks at the end of his rope (and in a very expensive suit), when a woman jokingly asks him if he wants a job. He says yes, without thinking. She says, “are you sure you can work for me?” and then he tells us about how much he loved his black nanny and how lonely she was when he left. Since his prospective boss is also black, this is relevant. Because this is how many black people he knows.(did I mention he lives in NYC?)

So he stumbles horribly through the interview and gets hired to work a month later. He’s not hired to work in the Starbucks he was sitting in, and this is a problem because he’s one of those people that only goes so far north and so far east or something (I don’t know New York, but I am familiar with this sort because they’re all over the Detroit suburbs). So this causes a panic, and he has to learn to ride the bus. MGG is always learning things.

He learned to clean the bathroom, and work the cash register, and talk to customers, and speak to his coworkers with respect, and carry trash bags and he’s the happiest he’s been in his life. He also realized that in his past life he’d purposely destroyed the career of woman much like his boss because she didn’t look like him. And he’s very sorry.

And I’m very irritated. It’s not that I don’t sympathize with the guy. I mean, I don’t sympathize A LOT, but I do sympathize. I just…he revels in his new life like it’s a hobby. I never read Eat, Pray, Love because I thought it would be like this. Except this is full-time.

So I recommend skipping this one, but if my review is a bit too vague, just read these lyrics instead.