Mistakes I Made at Work

Mistakes I Made at Work: 25 Influential Women Reflect on What They Got Out of Getting It Wrong
Edited by Jessica Bacal (304 pages)
Published by Plume
Bookish rating: 2.5

When your boss hands you a book titled, Mistakes I Made at Work, you read the freaking thing. And, if you're like me, you wonder if she's trying to tell you something.

This collection of 25 essays, each thoughtfully introduced by Bacal, showcase what Important Women have gained from effing up. I love the theme of the book and think it's powerful and spot -on: you WILL mess up in your work life. You just will. So, use those mistakes to learn, learn, learn. Right? To highlight this theme, Bacal ends the book with Carol Dweck and her research on the growth mindset (seeking challenge, learning from mistakes), which is the perfect close.

Now for the not great aspects: Some of the contributors connect to the theme in a very peripheral way that sort of reads like filler. Next, Bacal is employed at Smith College, so Smithies make up too many of pieces. Next, because we're talking about paid work, and because most of us have an actual job, with, like, bosses and photocopiers and stuff, too many novelist/writer contributors took away from the practical aspect of workplace survival that this book could have nailed if not so artsy and idealistic. I mean, I found the career-writers' points of view interesting and all, but I wanted more LEAN IN-type examples. More businesswomen, please. I mean, sure, I'd love to write all day in a beach bungalow with a spaniel keeping my feet warm, but in the meantime, I need to do well in the job I actually have.

My final gripe was a an almost total skipping over MOTHERHOOD. In a book about women and work, this was inexcusable and shocking. I remember one contributor discussing the idea that she had initially thought life in a band was incongruous with being a mom, but none of the others went there. And that's just obnoxious. SURELY there are influential women--even women who graduated from Smith!--who made mistakes at work related to, if applicable, being mothers. What mistakes did they make? How would they advise other working moms? What did they learn? Judging by this book, you can only have lofty, artsy, idealistic, heal-the-world career ambitions if you don't procreate. Well, awesome. And I'm thinking . . . probably not true. I hope.

This isn't a bad book, I enjoyed a lot of it, and I'd probably even recommend it, but this is yet another book about modern women that just misses the mark. I've said this before elsewhere on this blog, but I think part of the problem it's always writerly, journalistic types who take on these book projects and then stay to closely in that academic or creative world in which they're comfortable while Jane Doe is pumping in a broom closet, debating whether she should nudge her husband to handle the baby the next time he's sick, and hoping HR approves a flexible schedule so she can not waste so much precious time commuting. And, come to think about it, what about the recession? How is THAT affecting the choices and mistakes women are making?

Maybe I expect too much out of a book.