This All-at-Onceness

Starred review from August 15, 2019
Youthful, left-wing idealism subsides into pragmatic careerism before returning in unexpected ways in this memoir. At the start of this book, Schlack, the founder of market-research firm C Space, thinks back to growing up in a Jewish neighborhood in suburban Montreal and in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the 1960s. To her, it was an idyllic time despite the political and countercultural chaos around her. She recalls vacations at her family's Quebec lake house, long evenings shooting the breeze with friends about possible UFO sightings, and youthful romance at a progressive summer camp. In high school and college, she got caught up in the anti-war movement, and she "went from flower child to anti-imperialist to ambivalent Maoist a few years later," she says. She also wrestled with radical feminist stances on makeup, shaving, and traditional marriage. The author carried her political commitments into the 1970s and '80s when, married with kids, she worked at factories while trying to sway workers to her militant leftism--an effort that fizzled in the Reagan era. The narrative then skips ahead to the 2000s and Schlack's career in tech startups and marketing--a milieu of moral ambiguity and hope. She felt heartened by the Occupy movement, appalled by Donald Trump, and conflicted over her role in a capitalist society that might be "ready to sacrifice the planet and the lives of younger generations to satisfy...limitless greed." Schlack recounts her ideological journey with humor and nuance throughout this sometimes-wry, sometimes-lyrical memoir. She riffs on what she sees as foibles of progressive dogma as well as absurdities of corporate culture, including a darkly hilarious incident in which a con woman almost financially destroyed the company where she worked. Schlack's graceful prose balances cleareyed reflection with luminous passages that celebrate past passions, such as this one about the aforementioned summer camp: "As I try to summon up how I felt being there, what gets revived is the shocking carnality of my first French kiss, the energy stoked by being part of a group and feeling myself to be a pulsing cell in a larger organism." A thoughtful, witty, and evocative recollection of a life and the convictions that energized it.

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