Book Review: ‘Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career,’ by Kristi Coulter
If anything, Coulter works almost too hard to show how hard she had to work. She frets about failure, promotions, the fear of disappointing everyone, but the reader knows she was a highly paid senior-level employee who kept opting to stay at the company. She describes horror after horror, but she also says “parts of it were astounding and fun.” Some readers may be frustrated by this tension and wish for a better understanding of why she stayed; others who have made similar trade-offs, or who have spent their lives as ambitious people-pleasers, will see themselves reflected in Coulter’s narrative and feel validated by it. This will be especially true for women working in similar corporate cultures, regardless of industry.
Coulter uses two lenses to frame her narrative: one trained specifically on herself and her experiences at Amazon, and another focused more broadly on the experiences women everywhere face in the world. In two separate chapters, both titled “Events in the History of Female Employment,” she weaves historical milestones for women’s rights in the workplace with moments from her own life.
By situating her experience in a larger feminist narrative, Coulter gives her story a more universal application. But with her focus on Amazon, she opens a set of questions that she leaves unanswered: Is Amazon’s sexism unique? If not, then what is it that makes Amazon so uniquely toxic? If companies like Amazon are both wonderful and awful in varying measures, is the point that we will always have to navigate the bad to try to harness the good for our own personal growth and gain?
In such a system, there are very few moments when we truly believe we are successful. Too often there isn’t a triumphant finale. Things don’t end with a bang, but a dawning realization that the personal cost is, at last, too great.
Leah Reich’s writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic and The Verge. She has worked in tech for over a decade, at Instagram, Spotify and Slack, among other companies.
EXIT INTERVIEW: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career | By Kristi Coulter | 368 pp. | MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $29