Completely typical. Privileged man loses it all and learns much by working in the service industry. Somehow, I never felt that way after 15 years in the service industry. Maybe I just spent too long dealing with some of the worst people ever. Or maybe I just had a bad attitude. ( )

A workaholic "Masters of the Universe" account executive falls from grace. Fired from his job in advertising and also recently divorced after an affair, he finds himself applying for a job at Starbucks. There, as the book title puts it, Starbucks saves his life.

I make it a point to avoid Starbucks (one might consider me a snob of Starbucks) and the book probably did better to warm me up to Starbucks than the author himself. The guy is funny. But sometimes, I was put off by him squeezing his past experiences for example with Ernest Hemingway, James Thurber, and 50 cent. It did show how far from grace he fell but it's hard to really feel sorry for someone who flew so high.

Still, it's a sweet little read for and an inspiration for anyone who feels like they hit rock bottom in their life. ( )

[This was also published at my website, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography.]

So let's make no mistake, the only reason Michael Gill's 2007 memoir How Starbucks Saved My Life is even readable in the first place at all is that he is so relentlessly hard on himself throughout; the very definition of a white upper-class corporate-executive douchebag, he plainly admits here that he was essentially a human monster for reacting to getting laid off in his fifties from his cushy ad-agency job (one he got in the early '60s literally because drinking buddies at Yale pulled some strings for him) by having an affair behind his wife's back, accidentally getting his mistress pregnant, then determining that he's going to "do right" by the child, despite having a 100-percent track record of fucking up the relationships with the three existing grown children he already has, and oh yes, not actually having any health insurance and being essentially homeless.

That's a lot to swallow in the first 20 pages of a supposed feel-good memoir; and to his credit, writing veteran Gill (son of famed New Yorker writer Brendan Gill) pulls it off, basically by being ceaselessly harsh and unusually clear-eyed about his "pre-barista" life as a neolib one-percenter, the same kind of brutal honesty that inspired him to take a coffee-slinging job at the age of 64 at a Starbucks near Harlem where he was the only white employee (after accidentally attending a hiring fair by the company at one of their Manhattan stores without realizing it, having a young manager ask him as a joke, "I don't suppose you're looking for a job, are you?" and he after a moment admitting with candor, "Actually, I am").

It's what tips this book over into minimal readability, his zeal to not cut himself any breaks for his entitled childhood, his handshake-based former career, and the cavalier way he used to treat everyone in life who wasn't a senior corporate executive like him, best seen in his observations about how he himself immediately became invisible to his former co-workers, literally on the sidewalk sometimes when they would walk by him, the moment he put on a polo shirt and a green apron. Unfortunately, though, that still leaves the book with plenty of problems, among the more major being that he sometimes devotes entire chapters to nothing but a detailed, log-like, minute-by-minute breakdown of what a typical day at Starbucks is actually like for an employee, which is the literary equivalent of watching paint dry and had me skipping over huge portions of the manuscript out of pure tedium. (Also, Gill's infinitely upbeat enthusiasm for the empty StarbucksSpeak handed down from faceless marketing employees at the corporate headquarters ["Partners!" "Guests!" "Venti!"] was enough to make me want to claw out my own eyeballs by about two-thirds of the way through.)

It all adds up to an admittedly interesting but still trouble-filled book, one you have to sort of force yourself to like despite the circumstances surrounding the true story, not because of them; and a tale that gets interrupted every time it starts getting good by another reminder of just what a inherent good ol' boy in a good ol' boy network Gill is in, despite him taking a slave-wage job in the service industry. (If you're anything like me, you'll throw your hands in the air in bitter frustration when learning on the last page that Gill managed to get this book optioned to Hollywood for a million dollars, precisely because of all his personal friends from his ad-agency days, and that it currently has Tom Hanks and Gun Van Sant attached to it.) An insightful book but not nearly as insightful as I had hoped it would be, your own mileage with it will profoundly vary based on who you are, your own age and race, and how much tolerance you have for SVP assholes who shrug their shoulders after a disaster and say, "Sowwwwy!" ( )

NYC Starbucks — server — 60+ son of privilege out in street
Pg 232 not waving / drowning
P 236 growing older requires better sense of honor
SB's unique place not home / or work — just relax get away from it all
P. 281 Shattering reality how unhappy I really was — his father depression — New Englander optimistic denial*
P 284 mindful constant effort of will to keep from downing had to fight current each day
P. 321 — Despite everything stupidly done / left undone — my children decent — willing to forgive me
Pg 327 — few friends understand him / a work to do that has real value / mind unafraid to travel + an understanding heart

In his fifties, Michael Gates Gill had it all: a big house in the suburbs, a loving family, and a top job at an ad agency with a six-figure salary. By the time he turned sixty, he had lost everything except his Ivy League education and his sense of entitlement. First, he was downsized at work. Next, an affair ended his twenty-year marriage. Then, he was diagnosed with a slow-growing brain tumor, prognosis undetermined. Around the same time, his girlfriend gave birth to a son. Gill had no money, no health insurance, and no prospects.

One day as Gill sat in a Manhattan Starbucks with his last affordable luxury—a latté—brooding about his misfortune and quickly dwindling list of options, a 28-year-old Starbucks manager named Crystal Thompson approached him, half joking, to offer him a job. With nothing to lose, he took it, and went from drinking coffee in a Brooks Brothers suit to serving it in a green uniform.

Michael Gates Gill, who came from a very wealthy, privileged family learns to be glad for what he has when he is fired from his high paid job and comes to work at Starbucks. He sees the goodness in hard work, people and providing a service. ( )