Po Bronson, Still at Work
Dave Weich, Powells.com
BusinessWeek called Po Bronson's first novel, Bombadiers, "perhaps the most entertaining depiction of greed and dishonesty on Wall Street ever to see print." Reviewing his follow-up, The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest, the New York Times cited Bronson's "savage cynicism" and "infectious enthusiasm for entrepreneurial genius."
Meanwhile, Bronson was also making quite a name for himself as a journalist, reporting on the Internet boom of the late nineties for Wired, Fast Company, and the Wall Street Journal. In 1999, shortly before the bubble burst, he published The Nudist on the Late Shift, hailed by the Village Voice Literary Supplement as "the most complete and empathetic portrait of the Valley so far." Five years down the road, we can safely remove the "so far." Harper's editor Lewis Lapham was moved to call Bronson "a genuine voice of a new generation, the bard of Silicon Valley."
"The book was out and it was selling," the author reflects. "It was doing well, at the bottom of some bestseller lists, and people were saying, 'We want you to write more,' but I just wanted to get out."
Bronson promptly left Silicon Valley, but the workplace remains a primary concern. In What Should I Do with My Life? he investigates the career paths of ordinary—and extraordinary—people across America. Culled from more than nine hundred interviews, here he presents forty-eight personal stories that examine the difficult decisions and sacrifices we make to find fulfilling work.
How do people find their calling? What inspires us to seek one in the first place? A teenager in a refugee camp receives a letter from the Dalai Lama explaining that he is the reincarnation of a great spiritual leader. A model turns her back on the runway and finds happiness in the corporate office of a hardware store. A corporate lawyer turns to long-haul trucking to be closer to his son.
Nine new chapters appear in the paperback edition. "For me, this book began as a conversation," Bronson explains. "I published it, and the conversation didn't end; it intensified. So I've been having this conversation, trying to share the stories and what I've learned."
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"[A]bsorbing....[A] probing, clear-eyed, hopeful narrative of familial problems that many readers will recognize." Publishers Weekly
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"A remarkable social document, raised to the level of literature by Bronson's own deep level of involvement, his candour and compassion." Evening Standard (U.K.)
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"Po Bronson is a genuine voice of a new generation, the bard of Silicon Valley." Lewis Lapham
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"A wise and witty, twisted and satirical send-up of the computer world. A must read." Philadelphia Inquirer
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"Perhaps the most entertaining depiction of greed and dishonesty on Wall Street ever to see print...Bronson is a major talent, able to craft the kind of passages you reread just to revel in prose with a compelling cadence all its own." BusinessWeek
Dave: You note in the introduction that What
Should I Do with My Life? is "a far different book than I originally envisioned."
What had you imagined it would be?
Po Bronson: It's hard even to remember exactly, but I had written three
books before. Each was set in the workplace. I had developed my chops at taking
the experience of work and making it dramatic, making it energetic, making it
worth reading about. That was my original conception: I would paint a wide spectrum
of what these different occupations are like. A reader could go at them like
a box of chocolates: you hang around the box afraid to try anything because
you might end up with something you don't like, so you watch other people nibble
at them—at these vocations. You hope that if they like one that you'll
like it, too.
It turned out that was just facetious. People's experiences of their actual
daily work didn't define them at all compared to what they had overcome
to get there. We're united and defined more by what we have to overcome than
the particular things we do.
I spent some time in the book talking in depth about a charter school teacher
in Boston and a cop in El Monte, California, east of East Los Angeles. It was
absolutely clear that those experiences were rooted in each person's psychology
and personality; theirs wasn't the experience you would have if you did the
same thing.
So that was the first shift: It became about people's journeys and transformations,
their migrations. It was not about x-raying the box of chocolates. So you're not
supposed to read it and think, This guy likes being a trucker. What's that
like? Maybe I'd like to do that. It's more about understanding how to use
hardship, or understanding that the responsibilities of family are important
to you. These issues are more universal. It became about journeys, not destinations.
Dave: Most of the obstacles these people face will be familiar in some
way. Even if readers haven't dealt with them directly, maybe they know a friend
or family member that has.
Entry level jobs, for instance: it's very common that people are reluctant
to start over. Someone identifies an appealing line of work, a possible career
change, but they're not willing to take a pay cut and start in a position of
less responsibility. In so many cases, patience was integral to achieving satisfaction.
Bronson: And we haven't celebrated patience enough in recent years.
We celebrate bullheadedness, a can-do hubris in which individuals are larger
than organizations and can build things in short periods of time. I, myself,
romanticize those types of people and what they accomplish, even though I don't
necessarily like them or agree with them.
One of the things I was trying to do with the language of this book was to
break down the stereotypes—or the crutches—that people employ
to tell their story. They resumé-ize their story according to preexisting stereotypes:
the self-made man, the person who did it all overnight, gifts of God intervening?
By telling these stories in a way that revealed all the idiosyncratic details
of each person's journey, in which you witness their luck, their ghosts, and
their pain, I tried to show that just learning to tell your own story
in a more honest way unlocks access and allows you to discern wisdom from your
own experiences that you've been denying yourself by summarizing your story
according to predefined stereotypes.
When I was working with these people, I would find myself curiously reflecting
upon my own choices and my own past.
I chose people that had this effect on me because my dream was that the book
would have that same effect on a reader. They wouldn't read this book and suddenly
know what they wanted to do; it was a more literary notion. I believe in the
power of language, and I hoped that access to these stories would make
readers think about the changes they'd made in their own life. They would start
to see their own stories in a different light.
A lot of the messages we get tell us that our individual lives really aren't
that interesting. We're not celebrities; we're not famous; we're not worthy.
I wanted to elevate ordinary people to the level of worthiness and in doing
so resurrect their stories.
Dave: The book's success seems to indicate that your point comes across.
Bronson: I've had thousands of people write me, and it's a constant
theme. In the paperback, I include letters from people all over the world. People
start reading the book and maybe they start crying and they can't understand
exactly why. It's a feeling like My life actually counts. Something can happen
to me and my life can matter in a way that didn't feel possible before.
I was very conscious that I didn't want to include people who were well known.
I didn't want friends of mine. I didn't want anyone who had ever talked to a
journalist before because I didn't want people who knew how to spin their story.
That seems to be part of why people respond to it. They might pick it up thinking
that they're going to figure out what do with their life, but really what they
get instead is a sense that their life story is worth telling. Ordinary human
drama is worth talking about.
Dave: You come back again and again to the notion that this question
—what should I do with my life?—transcends class and race and age.
Your subjects reflect that. They're in all sorts of different lines of work
and at different stages of their lives.
Bronson: The book reflects that pretty well. It's not all-encompassing.
It's still skewed and biased by the nature of my personal outreach. I'm not
a sociologist. I didn't make sure that every single grid portion is checked.
I wish I could be that, but I'm not wired that way.
I began this project for the people in my life I'd seen trying to answer this
question. Primarily, these were the educated, professional people I'd been writing
about in the previous books. In my own work experience, going way back, being
an assembly line worker, a janitor, and working in restaurants, I saw some people
for whom the question mattered and others for whom it didn't matter at all,
but I didn't think back on those people until later in the research when I started
to discover that in fact all these great stories were coming to me from people
I never imagined I'd be putting in the book. I'd never imagined they cared,
that it mattered to them.
Early on, I didn't want to be shot down by people saying, "Oh, that's just
an American question." If I bumped into a Swedish woman at a wedding and she
asked what I was working on, I might hedge and say, "Oh, I know it's an American
question. This career-obsessed society?" And she'd say, "Are you kidding? It's
all my friends and I talk about."
We all want a meaningful life. It's a basic philosophical question: what makes
life meaningful? I think that makes it a great thing to write about, but we
don't in everyday life sit around like philosophers thinking, What makes
life meaningful? We're confronted with these questions because we just got
laid off or we just got divorced or you just found out you have cancer. Suddenly
you're confronted with What should I do with my life? That plot-driving
you've-got-to-survive immediacy so often piggybacks on this philosophical question.
Dave: The book's first profile might be the oddest one. A young man
receives a letter from the Dalai Lama saying that he's the reincarnation of
a great spiritual leader. That letter sets his life course.
You interviewed more than nine hundred people, and only about five percent of
are in the book. Do some profiles resonate with you more than the
rest? Do people tend to ask about particular stories?
Bronson: It's a little bit of a Rorschach test. I was on NPR last week,
and the producer was really interested in the story of the Toner Queen of Chicago.
Almost no media person ever asks about her. Readers do, but not media people.
For me, this book began as a conversation. I published it, and the conversation
didn't end; it intensified. So I've been having this conversation, trying to
share the stories and what I've learned.
I've had to retell some stories more than others because people want to hear
about them. Others mean a lot to me because they really helped me personally. I'll give
you an example of each.
A chapter that helps me explain the book is one that is often written up,
the story of the banker who became a catfish farmer. People remember that one.
I'll come to a reading, and people will say, "That was great, but I can't just
quit my job and pursue my dream of being a catfish farmer." And I'm like, "Which
chapter did you just read?!" The guy didn't say, "Take this job and shove
it." He had spent several years in an incredibly unethical business situation
in which he was knowingly screwing clients until he finally protested to his
bosses and resigned over it. That made him taboo in the industry. Nobody would
hire him. The only thing that came along was to manage this catfish farm, which
wasn't remotely his dream. This was a guy who didn't like being an outdoorsman;
he just wanted to practice business.
Dave: And the catfish farm was a family business, right?
Bronson: Right. His in-laws were looking for someone.
He took his skills to the third poorest county in the poorest state
in the country, and he turned that dead-end situation into something he really
loved. He became part of the community, building Eldercare facilities and getting
the local farms to work together, processing their fish and ginning their cotton
and fertilizing their crops. He didn't get what he loved. He learned to love
what he got.
It's exactly that distinction between getting what you love and loving what
you get. A lot of people will read the book and voices will come out. They'll
think, I guess I'm supposed to follow that voice. I'll quit my job and be
a guitarist. Well, sometimes you do need to listen to that voice, but I think people
are misreading the stories if that's the only message they get.
Dave: And a story that matters a lot to you personally...
Bronson:: Anthony Anderson,
the diver who loved to read. Anthony is a guy who always fought back. He was
a hothead. He was angry. Or he ran away—he ran away from his family in
high school. He had this dream of diving and came to the Pacific Northwest,
where he went to dive school, but he couldn't get hired because of his attitude,
primarily. Partly because of how I was raised, I too learned that fight-or-flight
instinct.
People often think that meaningful work begins with what you're good at, where
your talents are, but also I think there's value in being forced to learn something
that doesn't come naturally. Diving slowly taught Anthony how to cope. When
you're diving, you're on a fifteen-by-twenty-foot barge with twelve people in
twelve-hour shifts. Or for four-hour shifts, you're a hundred fifty feet underwater,
surviving off an oxygen tube with a ten thousand degree blowtorch in one hand.
You can't run from your problems in these situations; there's nowhere to run.
And if you fight, everything's going to go wrong. You have to learn to cope.
I get in situations in my life where I feel like I can't handle it, it's too
much pressure for me, my family situation is a lot or work bubbles up and becomes
too pressing, and I think about Anthony, watching him descend into the water.
He learned to cope and not run from his problems, not fight back. That helps
me deal with my own challenges. I often find myself picturing him to help me.
Dave: And you're still interviewing people?
Bronson: A little bit. I would like the book to mature over time. In
the paperback, I've added nine stories. There's no finale to this. A lot of books,
what you write is the word; the word is gospel; it's codified. I felt the other
way around with this: it was very hard to end.
I didn't think I could end the book in a way as if to claim that the question
had been answered. I didn't feel that way. I wanted to keep it open. So I'm
still talking to some people, but I'm working on another book now.
Dave: And that book is about family, right?
Bronson: Right.
Dave: It seems like a natural transition. Questions about family drive
many of the stories in What
Should I Do with My Life? For the next book, you're talking specifically
about which aspects of family?
Bronson: It goes back to a big question: What's a meaningful life?
However people define it—whether it's a family they're creating or
the family they come from or their surrogate family—families are a big
part of what makes life meaningful, but they're a huge source of anguish and
stress, too.
Here it's January. Random House timed this book with New Year's and New Year's
resolutions, a time when people are thinking about How am I going to embrace
truth and meaning in my life? But as I'm saying, the way it really comes
up is that it's Friday, January 2nd, and you're on your bus to work; you've
been off for a week. You find yourself wondering, Crap. Is this
all there is? Meanwhile, you've been with your family all that week, and
you're on that bus shaking your head thinking, Will they ever change?
Family crises drive so many of these plots in our life. They interject themselves.
Geraldine Agee has to fly to Carolina and rescue her crazy mother from poverty;
you discover that your husband is having an affair just like your dad was having
an affair; or you finally broke free from that arranged marriage your parents
made in India, then you come here and find out that you're really no better
at choosing than your parents were. The stories go on and on. These are enormous,
never ending sagas.
My methodology is just to listen to lots of stories and slowly tease out common threads.
I have four hundred fifty files open, with a principal character, a couple secondary
characters, and the overall family. Out of that have been emerging themes, such
as the prevalence of people bringing different cultures into their marriages.
That's just one of many themes reoccurring.
I don't even try to describe what I'm doing in specifics on my
web site. I say, I'm interested in people's family stories. I'm not going
to tell you anything more than that. If you want to share with me, share.
Slowly themes start to emerge; they build up.
Dave: Most of the people you wrote about in The
Nudist on the Late Shift led solitary lives centered entirely around work.
Their jobs left very little time and energy for anything else.
Bronson: No family at all.
Dave: Looking back on that book and the world it describes—the
Silicon Valley during the Internet boom—what do you think of it now?
So much changed so quickly.
Bronson: I wanted to chronicle those times. My inspirations for the
project were Upton
Sinclair chronicling the migration of the oil boom in California, John
Steinbeck chronicling times during the Great Depression when people moved
out to California, and Joan
Didion's Slouching
Towards Bethlehem in which she chronicled the early era of the hippies coming
to San Francisco. That was my call. I was a writer living in California, and there
was a migration going on. Who were the people showing up and doing this?
I was interested in social mobility and the question of whether it really
exists, whether you can remake yourself. In that sense, I felt like I captured
that place and time extremely well, and managed to capture its weirdness without
being distracted by money, never writing about stock prices or anything like
that.
At the same time, I did drink some of the Kool Aid, sure. I was enthusiastic
about it. I didn't think it was going to last forever, but I still thought it
was cool.
The book was published in June or July of 1999, and it was the last thing
I ever wrote about Silicon Valley. There were signs everywhere of it starting
to stink. By the end of the summer, my nose was telling me these parties were
full of poseurs, people playing games? The revelations came in that period of
time between when I gave the book to Random House and when it was published.
Stock prices were still going up, it was exciting for another year, but I was
running from it. I had grown sick of the people inhabiting these fictions. I
went to Hollywood to write because, ironically, it was more pure in Hollywood
than in Silicon Valley. The people were more honest in Hollywood. They were
more real, and they're not by any means very real.
So the book was out and it was selling, it was doing well, at the bottom of
some bestseller lists, and people were saying, "We want you to write more,"
but I just wanted to get out.
I'd wanted to capture the exuberance. I regret that some people
read the book and got on planes and in cars and came to California. They wrote me.
I felt responsible because I did what a media person
does in capturing the exuberance, but I think I failed to do what a basic human being does, which is to
say What do I really think? What I really thought was, I want
to be a writer. I would do anything not to be in that world. In the book,
I never said that. And I think that instinct led me to the next book.
Dave: In the introduction to The
Nudist on the Late Shift, you write, "I'm inexperienced as a journalist
and I'm no good at asking tough questions."
Bronson: I'm really not very good at it. I watch journalists on TV
doing their interviews and they have to ask the Congressman that dirty question
time and again, but I give people a lot of rope and work my way around to the
point.
When writing Nudist
on the Late Shift, I did not say to people, "Come on. Your company can't
possibly be worth $300 million! That's ridiculous. Explain that to me." That
wasn't what I did. Some journalists did that; they're good at it. That wasn't
what I was good at. I just spent a lot of time with people and eventually their
stories came out.
Dave: You do include personal commentary all throughout What
Should I Do With My Life? You're not an absent narrator. The chapter I've
found myself telling people about most often is the one where the guy tells
you that he's going to feel like you're using him if you don't give him feedback
and advice.
Bronson: Tim Bratcher.
Dave: He was so self-abusive. I found myself wanting to slap him.
Bronson: And you do.
In real life, we interact, we judge, we offer advice, and we encourage all
the time. Normally, journalists cut all that out—when they adopt a writing
pose, they put a clinical tone or objectivity upon it—but in the interest of honesty, I wanted to leave in there the fact that
I was sometimes interacting with these people on a different level, in some
cases even forming friendships.
Tim Bratcher was a lawyer who felt he was in a toxic situation in Silicon
Valley. He didn't know what to do. He really needed to leave—it was so
obvious—but he couldn't resist the desire to stay and prove to the people
who'd fired him that they were wrong about him. It was just like, Give up
trying to impress those jerks, Tim. Just go. But you don't get to say that
when you're a journalist. So there I am, it's so clear to me, and he wants me
to say it, but I can't say it because that's not what a journalist is supposed
to do.
I saw Tim early on in the process. It was clear to me that he wanted my take
on what he should do. He wanted the benefit of my interviews. He teased out
of me, in a way, the fiction that I'd been telling myself: that I couldn't give
him my opinion because I was a journalist and it might be too influential; I
might affect the situation. He wanted me not to be a journalist; he wanted me
to be a person.
I love Nudist
on the Late Shift. Probably from a language point of view it's my favorite
—it's more playful—but I end up spending a lot of time trying to
sound smart, showing off what I can do as a writer, being the anthropologist-writer.
In What Should
I Do with My Life? I learned to drop pretenses and be real with people,
be a person and treat them as real people. I got a lot more out of it because
I learned to do that.
It's opened my eyes now. I can see both sides of it in a way that I never
could before: the writer's side and the subject's. It's been a journey towards saying,
Just treat people as people. If I were to write a magazine piece or something
for a newspaper, I would be right back to that journalistic voice. Those are
the rules. You play by the rules. But in a book, those aren't the rules, and
it was nice to be able to let that guard down.
Dave: From your interactions with readers, what do you think we should
be talking about right now? What would they want to hear? If we weren't just
going to volley back and forth.
Bronson: I kind of like just volleying back and forth, but I guess
I come here and I look forward to the chance not to be asked, "So if I have
five hobbies and they all seem interesting to me, how do I know which one to
do?" No disrespect, and I'll talk about
that at the bookstore tonight—I'll be asked a similar question and I'll give
my most sincere answer—but I'm more comfortable talking from the point of view of a writer and a journalist, not of an expert
on people's callings.
Dave: Have you read anything exciting lately?
Bronson: I read four books when I was in Mexico, right before my tour
started. I read a book called Shadow Divers by Robert
Kurson, which is coming out in June from Random House. It's about a story
people might have heard, but it's an incredible book—sort of Into
Thin Air meets The
Perfect Storm. In 1991, two deep-sea exploration divers discovered a lost
Nazi sub sixteen miles off the coast of New Jersey. Deep-sea diving is actually
very harrowing—a lot of people die in the book—but it's more of
an intellectual journey about trying to identify which submarine it was and
to find the relatives of those men who died and let them know what had happened.
I read a book by a woman named Samina
Ali called Madras
on Rainy Days. Samina was raised in Minnesota and at eighteen she was sent
back to India and married off. Then she came back to America and, as it was,
it turned out that her husband was gay. Her novel is a family drama about being
a woman who is forced into an arranged marriage, but it defies a lot of stereotypes
about what you think might happen. The husband isn't as mad as she expected
when he finds out that she's actually had sex before; and it turns out that
his family is very loving, in a way that her family never was. It goes places
you don't think it will.
I read Lies
and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. It was shocking to me. I had bought my
girlfriend, now my wife, Rush
Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, kind of as a joke. She read it, then she bought
me this—again, as a joke. It wasn't funny at all; it was very serious.
It was extremely depressing to read the actual lies and how they're propagated
in the media. I accept as a given that every journalist wants to tell the truth
—they might not get everything right, but they're trying to—so
to see journalists just making up lies and distorting things, it made me rethink
politics and how it has to be played. It made me think that we need to fight
more. It was revealing to me in a way I was not remotely expecting.
And I read a book called Sex,
Time, and Power by Leonard
Schlain, an evolutionary biologist. It was sort of mind blowing to me. He tracks how women evolved
slightly different than men. It explains a lot about sexuality that I hadn't
understood before. Why I feel things, why I think things, the origin of families?when
humans learned forty thousand years ago that a baby is a function of its particular
father and mother. It's a really interesting book. I read all over the spectrum.
The holidays are a nice time to read.
Po Bronson
visited Powell's City of Books on January 15, 2004. Squeezing this interview into a very tight schedule, he managed to consume a quick dinner (two slices of pizza from the Whole Foods on 12th) in the few minutes between our conversation and his reading.
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