How Starbucks Saved My Life by Michael Gates Gill

How Starbucks Saved My Life: 
A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else

By Michael Gates Gill

We recently began a thematic book club at our library and the first them was “beginnings.” I chose a memoir about starting a new chapter in life.

Michael Gates Gill seemed to be one of the good ol’ boys - the son of New Yorker writer Brendan Gill and a creative director at J. Walter Thompson Advertising for over twenty-five years. Then a new, younger, boss lets him go. Thus begins a lengthy journey of self-discovery that will take him places he’s been many times and yet never seen from his new perspective.

Gill starts his own advertising firm and things go okay at first but he slowly loses clients to bigger firms. He has an affair with a younger woman he meets at the gym. She gets pregnant and his wife divorces him. Now he’s living in a small apartment and trying to drum up business for his independent firm while spending time with his young child. Then he finds out he has a rare tumor affecting his hearing.

Gill is on a financial downward spiral but he loves coffee and the one treat he still allows himself is a latte. One day, in Starbucks, Crystal, a young African American manager jokingly asks “You want a job?”

He responds “yes, I do want a job.”

She’s skeptical but does the interview. She takes all his information and asks him “Would you be willing to work for me?”

He replies, “I would love to work for you.” To tell the truth, he still isn’t sure about this job but he knows he needs a job with a steady paycheck. The deciding factor for him is the full health benefits they offer, even to his children.

A couple weeks pass before she calls him.

For all his privilege at the opening of the book, Gill’s early life isn’t precisely easy. He gets beat up, doesn’t learn to read until he is ten and has lots of trouble with math. His father is very distant. He comes home unexpectedly during Gill’s 7^th birthday party and says “My mother died when I was seven.” It’s the first and last time he mentions it.

Still, Gill goes to Yale and makes connections there that end up getting him job at J. Walter Thompson Advertising.

The writing has a very introspective style. Somewhat simplistic language but I thought it illustrated his simple thinking about how life was for him. Then when his good life falls apart he starts learning new concepts and learning that life isn’t as simple as his privileged life had previously taught him.

Maybe you already know all the concepts that he learns about in this book but I found the journey interesting and there were some good reminders for all of us in it. I would recommend it.