How Starbucks Saved My Life – A Book Review
The Endearing Memoir From Michael Gates Gill
How Starbucks Saved My Life (Gotham Books, 2008, ISBN: 9781592404049) was written by Michael Gates Gill, one time advertising executive and now a happy full-time barista at Starbucks. How Starbucks Saved My Life is Michael's inspirational memoir of how he tumbled from his American dream to wearing a Starbucks apron with pride.
Life Before Starbucks for Michael Gates Gill
Michael Gates Gill began his life with privilege as the son of Brendan Gill, well-known writer for the New Yorker. Gill spends a great deal of his memoir detailing his past, but interwoven inside is his story at Starbucks. He went to Yale University before dropping out and snagged a job with J. Walter Thompson advertising agency where he rose to become a very successful executive.
Gill also touches on chance meetings with countless famous figures during his up bringing. A meeting with Ernest Hemmingway in France when Gill was in college is a particularly notable story. Gill starts a family and eventually loses it. After affairs and overworking Gill finds himself virtually alone, alienated from his family. Once J. Walter Thompson un-ceremonially dismisses him, Gill becomes unemployed. On top of it all, Gill discovers he is a new father with a woman he had an affair with and needs to take care of the little girl.
How Starbucks Saved Michael Gates Gill
After a few years of taking odd consulting jobs and desperately trying to get his foot back into an advertising agency, Gill found himself sitting in a Starbucks enjoying a drink. He was trying to keep his emotions in check after a trying day when a young African-American woman asks the suit clad Gill if he wanted a job. Gill quickly says yes, not knowing what he was doing. The young woman, Crystal, turns out to be a Starbucks manager and ends up giving Gill a job.
Gill went from commanding an army of advertising specialists to scrubbing toilets, but scrubbing toilets paid more than being unemployed and the wide medical benefits offered by Starbucks covered him and his new daughter, because Gill explains that he was diagnosed with a small tumor in his head. The tumor wasn’t harmful in the short term, but it was slowly growing limiting his hearing and could grow to be dangerous. It took some time, but Michael Gates Gill starts to appreciate life with the help of his store manager Crystal and his fellow co-workers.
Michael Gates Gill takes the reader on a bit of a journey that is extremely well written. His stories are a bit ostentatious and the repeated theme of working with African-Americans is over done, but well intentioned.
Sometimes it’s hard to feel sorry for Gill considering the majority of what happens to him he did to himself. He’s the one who alienated his children and cheated on his wife, but his words are not self-deprecating. He doesn’t spend page after page making the reader understand how miserable his life was. He spends page after page explaining how the corporate culture of Starbucks transformed his life and the lives of his New York co-workers.
How Starbucks Saved My Life is an endearing story—even if some of Michael Gates Gill’s stories are a little far fetched. His relationships feel real and more complex than many fictional characters that were carefully crafted. At the very least the reader should learn what to expect when they walk into their local Starbucks, which can be priceless.
How Starbucks Saved My Life
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