The New Yorker Radio Hour - Gillian Flynn, Akhil Sharma, and Alison Bechdel on Their Most Memorable Jobs

Episode Date: July 13, 2021

The U.S. economy seems to be showing real signs of life, and lots of people are finally returning to the labor force—eight hundred and fifty thousand in the month of June alone. At the same time, job resignations are at a record high, and many workers are changing careers. With work life at top of mind, we asked three writers to tell us about the most memorable jobs they’ve had in the past. Gillian Flynn, the author of novels including “Sharp Objects” and “Gone Girl,” remembers having to wear a frozen-yogurt costume as a teen-ager. Akhil Sharma talks about lying his way into a lucrative gig as a banker, spinning stories that played into ethnic stereotypes, before becoming the author of books such as “Family Life” and “An Obedient Father.” Plus, the cartoonist Alison Bechdel shares how she rewarded herself after her shortest job ever.      This story originally aired on August 25, 2017. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. The economy seems to be showing some real signs of life. And lots of people are finally returning to the labor force, 850,000 in the month of June alone. But at the same time, a lot of people are resigning from their jobs, and some of those people are even changing careers. So maybe it is time to become the ski instructor that you've always wanted to be. With all this job mobility in the air, we asked three writers, to tell us about their most memorable jobs that they've had in the past. Now, I don't mean the jobs that you put on your resume

on the gliding career path to success. But the ones that really stick out, the ones that you're still telling stories about 10, 20, 50 years later. First off, Gillian Flynn, who wrote Gone Girl and many other books. My parents were a very budget-minded couple, so I did not have a lot of extra spending money, so a job was always in the picture. And I went through a whole series of jobs in my high school years.

I first tried being a shop girl, which was absolutely completely pathetic because I was pathologically shy. So I never really talked to people. I would kind of hover near them, which everyone loves to have when they're trying on clothes and feeling vulnerable as some idiot nearby. silently smiling and shrugging their shoulders. So I got fired from that one. That's the only job I've ever been fired from for cause. And I, for years, I would hire on at Honeybaked Ham, especially when they had their big holiday rushes.

And so my job was basically a ham display girl. I was like the Vanna White of Ham. So all these jobs I feel like kind of prepared me to take on the most perfectly 80s job ever, which was to sell frozen yogurt at a mall by my house. And it'd be in the 80s, it was a very fast times at Ridgemont High kind of moment. It was very cool to be in the center of the mall. Frozen yogurt was blowing people's minds. They were like, it's frozen, but it's yogurt.

And you can get it in a waffle coat. or a cup of different sizes? They were going nuts. You know, are you telling me Reese's pieces can be put on this? What? Months into it, I arrived at work one morning

and my manager asked to see me in back. This already felt very ominous. And when I went into this back room, I could see behind him in the dark, some sort of giant white orb, and then a pair of long, slender, wrinkled slacks. And my first thought was, my God, I think he's killed someone. Am I going to be an accessory to murder?

I'm going to have to like, this is such a bummer. I did not sign up for this. But it turned out it was actually much worse than that. It was an actual yogurt costume. He had bought at some sort of flea market. It was clearly used. And that he wanted me to put it on. He thought I would be perfect for this job because every girl at 16,

dreams of wandering around the mall dressed as a formal dairy product. So on went the giant white orb, which made me incredibly top-heavy. And then I put on the strange crumpled black pants, which turned out to be a tuxedo. And I've always wondered ever since that moment, why the tuxedo? Like where did the yogurt think he was going? Was a prom? But he seemed too old for prom. It was like, well, maybe was it a wedding?

Was he jilted at the altar? And now he's doomed to wander the mall, forever looking for his runaway bride and killing young girls on their way to get their ears pierced at Claire's accessories. It's what he looked like because he had a very grim face. There was no smile. He already looked sort of haunting. And as I started wandering around the mall, I only made it more disturbing because, you know, again, I didn't want to talk or interact with anyone.

So I just kind of floated in this top-heavy directionless way carrying a tray of yogurt samples, which no one dared come near me to get. Inside the giant yogurt head was a mini fan that I was very concerned about because it was whirling dangerously close to my beautiful, fantastic Sam spiral perm. So I did my loop around the mall, dumped all my samples into a nearby trash can, and went to report back to the yogurt store. And I was very close to safety. I was almost there when I kind of felt this. this tug and this heard this grinding whir and the smell of Aussie hair spray combined with smoke. And I realized that the minifan had gotten hold of some tendrils of my Fantastic Sam's spiral perm and had caught it up in the motor. I couldn't get it off my head.

And I kind of panicked and I had to decide, you know, Perm or Freedom. And I went for freedom and just yanked that thing off. Left some perm behind. But as I looked in the mirror, I realized that it was nothing, a ton of hair gel and a very carefully placed scrunchy wouldn't fix. And luckily I had a lot of both of those. But the moral of the story for me is to this day,

I am always kind to people dressed as food. Gillian Flynn is the author of The Grown Up, Gone Girl, and other books. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. In the last few years, Akeel Sharma has published quite a few short stories and essays in The New Yorker. His novels include Family Life and an Obedian Father, which won a Penn Hemingway Award. So we should all be thankful that his original plan didn't quite work out. I am a deeply lazy man who is also incredibly greedy. I went to law school and somebody told me that while lawyers make good money,

investment bankers make even more money. And everybody was applying for these jobs because everybody had the same attitude. It was wretched in many ways. They were the very, very, very nice investment banks, you know, the Goldman Sachs and the Morgan Stanley's. And they would have their interviews in at the Charles Hotel, which was a fancy hotel in Cambridge. And then the less prosperous ones

would have their events at the Sharden Commander, which at least back then was sort of decrepit. And we would line up in the hallways of the Shardin Commander because those of us who were not especially good applied for everything, because why not? And so we would line up in the Shardin Commander holding our little resumes waiting to go in for interviews. and even among a group of people who were unqualified,

I felt that I was especially unqualified. I knew nothing about math. I had no background with suggested finance. I wasn't even sure what exactly finance was, what exactly investment bankers did. And I would arrive in these interviews and they would ask me things like, what would you do in this situation or that situation?

And the only phrase that I really knew, was discount cash flow. So I would offer that up for everything. And at some point, they said to me, okay, other than that, how else can you value a company? And then I just became quiet. You know, I knew right away that there was no reason to hire me.

And so I thought the only way that they would hire me was if I could tell a convincing story. And so these guys looked at me. They saw that I was a brown guy, an Indian. And they were very open to the story. stories of me being an immigrant. And at some point, I decided

to start lying. I began telling stories about working at a 7-Eleven, about working at gas stations. And then, because I was telling these stories, and these didn't seem pitiful enough. I also claimed that I worked at a

7-Eleven and a gas station at night. I was always something of a writer, and so I enjoyed making up these details. The kids who would come in Saturday night and begin stealing candy and comic books and bags of potato chips. Or leaving in the morning when my shift was over and smelling like hot dogs. The alcoholics who would show up at 2 in the morning to buy beer or the fat blonde prostitute who would come out and hang out at the gas station.

They loved this stuff. They were great stories because they weren't true. Look, I grew up with nice middle-class parents in Edison, New Jersey. You know, I did not grow up in great deprivation. I was playing right along with their expectations, which frankly, I did not mind, you know. Like, hey, man, if you are willing to see me in this ridiculous way, then I'm happy to take advantage of that. And so I would keep getting, keep moving on and moving on to do these interviews. and usually the people who have no patience for stories

are the people who actually do the work. So the associates and the junior VPs because they're the poor schnooks who are up there late at night, you know, making sure that everything in the Excel model is working. And almost always they were the guys who would ding me who would say, look, come on, this guy knows nothing. He would be terrible. We can't have him around.

What is he going to do? He's going to sit around and tell stories. and I finally did an interview with somebody. I think the junior VP I was supposed to interview with was called into a meeting, and so he couldn't interview me. And I knew right then that I was going to get the job. And a couple of days later, I got a job offer,

and I accepted it on the spot. Because my thinking was, these people could come to their senses. So I said, yes, I'll take it. And the guy seemed quite surprised because I wasn't trying to negotiate. I wasn't trying to, you know, I didn't even say, hey, I'd love to work.

for you, I just said, I'll take it. And then, of course, the next thing I asked was, when do I get my signing bonus? Former investment banker and novelist, Akeel Sharma. I remember later on, when I was a banker, I was great with clients because it was the same thing. You know, the schick I could handle, the actual work was a bit beyond me.

Sharma is a professor at Duke University, and you can find everything he's written for the New Yorker at New Yorker.com. Now, we've got one more story for you today about the shortest job that Alison Bechtel ever had. Bechtel is a cartoonist, the author of Fun Home, and a new book called The Secret to Superhuman Strength. Here she is. It was 1984. I was living in Brooklyn, and one lovely spring evening, my girlfriend and I went for a walk.

And we were walking down one of those long downhill streets in Brooklyn down from the park. And, you know, we were young lesbians in New York City in the early 80s, and we were dressed as such. We were, I'm sure, both wearing Levi's. My girlfriend probably had her denim jacket on. I had very short hair. She had short hair on top and long hair in the back, as people did in those days sometimes. And all of a sudden, this guy on one of the brownstone stoops called out to us. And he said, hey, you fellas want to make five bucks?

So we walked over, and as soon as we got close, he could see that we were not two boys, as he had thought, but two adult women. But he was sort of taken aback, but he didn't flinch. He said, I need someone to carry this desk up to the third floor. And we were both pretty burly. I was in training for my black belt exam then, and my partner had just gotten back from Nicaragua, where she was helping the Sandinistas bring in the coffee harvest. So sure we could carry this desk upstairs. So we picked it up, and there we went.

As we were carrying this heavy desk up the stairs, I remember feeling this great sense of freedom. You know, something about passing for boys made me feel like safe and powerful. You know, as a woman walking down the street, you're always kind of a, you're very vulnerable. So this was a cool sensation of having this kind of mobility. in the world that was really thrilling. When I tell this story now, it makes me think of my mother. The kind of things that my girlfriend and I were doing,

those were not things women in my mother's generation did. And my mother would always say to me, you know, when I was young, I had three options. I could be a teacher. I could be a nurse, or I could go downtown and work at the Sylvania factory. Those were the only options for women to, work. So we carried it all the way up to the top floor of this brownstone, up three flights of stairs with this heavy desk as the guy sort of nervously trailed along behind us. And at the top,

we set it down and he pulled out his wallet and gave us $5. And we walked downstairs, kind of rolling our eyes, very pleased with ourselves, and took the money and got ice cream cones with it. Cartoonist and author Alison Bechtel, whose latest book is called The Secret to superhuman strength. Next week on the show, we'll enjoy a favorite summer pastime, gathering outside, maybe under a little shade, to enjoy a cool, refreshing cocktail or three.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Delish, Michael. Mmm. It tastes like summer. There are no ads on public radio, Michael.

I'll get a crash course in summer mixology with our food writer, Helen. Rosner. Until then, hope you have a great week. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for listening. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by

Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Avae Carrillo, Riannon-Corbi, Cala Leia, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, Annabel Bacon and Stephen Valentino. And we had additional help from Harrison Keithline. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.