This book too me forever to finish. Maybe it was that it was an Advance Reader Copy (ARC) and I owned it, I’m not sure. Usually the deadline of a library helps me get a book moving along if it’s feeling a bit like work. Either way, there were a thousand other things that interested me more than reading this particular memoir. I can’t blame it all on the content and presentation, though that did have quite a bit to do with the big picture.
Stacy Parker Aab’s (now a contributor for The Huffington Post) recount of her years working in the White House, both as an unpaid and later paid intern, were muffled at best and confusing at worst. Her main message, that I eventually got after about 250 of 300 pages, was honorable – the idea that there is a fine balance between integrity, passion, and power – but most of the other details were lost in non-chronological vignettes of her life. I’m not sure if her story would have been better served told in order, but the jumping around certainly contributed to my inability to pay attention more than 20 pages at a time. The book came out in January and I’m just now finishing, which is, I think, a record for me.
Parker Aab met a lot of famous people, had crushes on a few more, and threw in random stories of boyfriends and missteps with men of power. The crushes really detracted from my ability to take her seriously and the ‘plight’ she encountered as she tried to move up in the world of politics.
I wanted to hear her account of how she overcame struggles the struggle of being young and female in the White House as the title suggests, but instead felt drug along following empty promises of enlightenment. Maybe that is the politician in her coming out? I wanted to connect the dots about what it meant growing up in Detroit, making it out of one trench and into another at Georgetown and then accomplishing everything against all odds. Perhaps I am just dense, but this book felt like a lot of talk and not much meaning.
I did not understand her job succession. I did not understand her supposed underprivileged upbringing, and I most certainly did not understand what her being black had anything to do with anything. The epilogue, a seeming afterthought, touches on the issue of race in DC with the election of Obama, but the message I wanted to hear about her making it against the traditional grain did not come through well. Instead, I felt like she brought up race just to bring it up. I wanted to like this book so much more than I did – it had such potential – which is why I entered a drawing for it in the first place.
And yet, as much as I was eager to wrap it up, the last 50 pages felt rushed. I was left asking myself many questions about her past, present, and future with Washington. A peek at google fixed me up with what I wanted to know, along with a few interesting pictures.
I think I need a break from memoirs.
