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Holland describes 'Octet' as 'sculpting through fiction a powerful human presence whose insistent engagement with the reader makes her feel, in her own life, less alone'.
footnote 82. Holland being the author of Succeeding Postmodernism
Through this experience of communal suffering, AA seems to do something that Wallace also regards as one of the main purposes of 'serious fiction', namely: 'giv[ing] access to other selves'. Wallace states: 'Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is [a sort of "generalization" of suffering]. [...] This is nourishing, redemptive; we have become less alone inside'. At that point, we can say, in the words of Camus, that '[we have] conquered solitude'.
I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances.
in an interview
“No, Kristi, it’s not, and you are right to look surprised because it’s fucking insane that every price on this website is set manually by a buyer. So I’m hired to fix it, give buyers their time back to do something more productive. But guess what: every time I turn around I discover some new team of buyers asking, ‘Who is this guy and why the fuck is he here?’ I explain my charter and they freak because they didn’t get to have input into the requirements, because I didn’t know their team fucking existed and vice versa. So they escalate to their director, he throws a fit, and I’m back gathering requirements again while the engineers threaten to abandon the project if I keep making them wait. This is normal to some extent, Kristi. To some extent this is just what a product manager does. But it goes beyond normal at Amazon, because people are like mushrooms here.”
There are so many men here, men from Sloan and the University of Michigan and McKinsey and Deloitte. They’re transitioning to barefoot running. They bought Vibrams last month, and a sous vide machine. They like Big Hairy Audacious Goals, and in college they once saw Modest Mouse five times in a year. They have three kids and a wife with an expired law license because it just made more sense for her to be the stay-at-home parent. They work standing up. They’ve slowly come around on Belgian ales, and Tim Ferriss’s book really made them think. They wish they had more time to read. They like their steak rare and their hot sauce vicious. When they interrupt you at your desk, they’re sorry for the drive-by. When something goes wrong, they’re working on a path to green. They don’t just agree; they violently agree. They’re blocking and tackling and focused on the inputs and not getting distracted by orthogonal matters. Going paleo has been huge for them, and tequila is allowed. Can they just play devil’s advocate for a second? Can they just pressure test your idea? Can they just push back on that a little? These last three are them saying you are wrong. Sometimes they say it in an Amazon way and sometimes in a man way, though already the difference is getting pretty hard to discern.
lol
“I know,” Marnie says. “But he’s done it to everyone. Last year at CES, he took us out to Delmonico’s, and I asked the waiter for a vegetable plate because I just wasn’t in the mood for a steak. After dinner Chuck accused me of ‘sending a signal’ that he wasn’t inclusive of vegetarians. But then it was done, and he’s never mentioned it again.”
“Sure,” I say. “But what’s a Lifeboat Exercise?”
It is as grotesque as it sounds: a meeting where management ranks all the employees in order of whom we’d keep on the aforementioned lifeboat in a dire, business-threatening situation and whom we’d throw overboard first.3 When the day comes, the twenty-odd managers in Chuck’s org gather in a conference room that reeks of onions from some pizza a previous group left behind. It’s windowless except for a panel by the door that HR has covered with blank paper. Handwritten signs reading DO NOT ENTER!!!!!! ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW IN PROGRESS are posted on both doors. By 6:00 p.m., we’re an hour over the scheduled end time and are only halfway through the alphabet. The doughnuts Chuck’s assistant brought have been sitting untouched in the middle of the table—doughnuts don’t really sync with onion fumes—but now people are starting to pick at them, sensing dinner could be a long way off. I wish someone would at least call for a ten-minute break, but it’s not going to be me. If I’ve learned anything this year, it’s that the kinds of people who openly admit to needing food or pee breaks are also the kinds of people who get hurled off lifeboats around here.
lol
“Does Jeff Bezos want you to write a blog?” my mother calls from the living room.
“I deeply doubt it, Mom,” I call back.
“Well, he’ll be begging when he finds out what a beautiful writer you are.”
“Would you do me a huge favor?” I whisper to John. “Would you murder me?” I pour two mugs of decaf and bring them out to my parents. “I don’t really need or want Jeff Bezos to beg me to write a blog,” I say.
“He might even be one of the smartest people in America,” says my dad.
lmao
It would be cruel for me to tell my mother how strangled I feel when she talks like this, how much I don’t want the immediate pressure to dazzle Jeff Bezos. Can’t it be enough for now that I didn’t accidentally spill something on him or freeze up? I know she’s trying to be supportive, but in the moment it’s just one thing too many, like when I started exceeding a 4.0 grade point average and suddenly that became the new standard I was expected to meet. My chest and throat feel tight with the knowledge that it isn’t fair.
girl you just have to let it wash off you
People leave, of course, though we don’t say “leave”; we say they “promoted themselves to customer.” Lashanna leaves to have children. Jacie comes back after her first kid but leaves before her second. Matt leaves to become an Anglican minister. Todd leaves to breed irises. Liza leaves to sail around the world. Kelly leaves for an NGO. Eino, thirty-six, says in his goodbye email that he’s leaving to regain his health. Holly leaves to get some sleep. Amy leaves for Microsoft. Dennis leaves for Microsoft. Hiroshi leaves for Microsoft. Google, LinkedIn, eBay, Airbnb, Facebook, Twitter, Expedia, Tableau. Tim wins big on Jeopardy! and leaves to open a bookstore. Victor leaves for more reading time. Nina goes on medical leave for stress and never returns. Lance leaves to sober up. Noah goes home to Denmark. Anna leaves and starts a firm that helps vendors understand Amazon. Jack leaves and starts one that helps people interview at Amazon. Pat leaves to work on Zune and a year later he boomerangs back. That’s what we call the people who return: boomerangs. Brent leaves for Apple and better work-life balance and boomerangs back when Apple’s work-life balance turns out to be even worse. Anton boomerangs from start-up land. Ira boomerangs from retirement in the South of France. Nathan and Prakash and Eric all boomerang back from Nordstrom corporate, which they call “retirement,” better dressed than we remember them. Pete spends one day at a new company and boomerangs back. I never thought I’d come back, the boomerangs say, grinning and wild-eyed, and when we ask what brought them back, they always say, “The people. I missed the people,” and I know what they mean; I missed some of them even if we hadn’t worked together in ages, missed their camaraderie, their under-eye circles, their gallows jokes, the way they kept showing up for me and I kept showing up for them because no one of us could make it alone, though it’s arguable whether we could make it together, either. As for me, I keep staying, past the point where I’d owe back my signing bonus, past my first seven door desks and four bosses and five reorgs, three U.S. presidents, two unfounded rumors of stock splits, the nonupling of the employee population. Sometimes I take it year by year, sometimes stock vest by stock vest. At one point my staying is a week-to-week thing. I keep a go bag under my desk for the few possessions I can’t see leaving behind. But I don’t use the bag. I stay.
lol