Exit interview The life and death of my ambitious career

At first glance, Exit Interview may seem to be the tell-all Amazon exposé we've all not-so-secretly been waiting for, and while readers hoping for an inside peek at the world's largest company will not be disappointed, some may be surprised to find that Coulter's carefully paced memoir is much more about human journeys than digital or economic ones. Writing with concision and thoughtfulness, Coulter's ruminations on her time at Amazon are at once whip-smart and quietly devastating as she navigates her own sense of self and ambition within the whirlpool of gender politics of the modern business world. In some ways, Exit Interview is a familiar story, Shakespearean in its inevitable turn toward tragedy as the author begins to lose herself in her desire to grow, succeed, and belong. But even as a past version of herself crumbles and transforms, Coulter's voice is steady, compelling, and entirely her own.

A firsthand look at the jungle that is Amazon.com. When Coulter began her career at Amazon in 2006, the company was a dynamic upstart, revolutionizing the way that books were marketed and sold. The author's previous job in publishing had been safe but dull, and an offer from Amazon sounded like an opportunity to gain a foothold in an exciting business, with stock options. She soon realized that it was an extremely high-pressure environment, with impossible deadlines, endless streams of meetings, and unintelligible language and directives. It was also a very macho culture, with sexism hiding behind a screen of liberal pieties. Coulter liked the idea of blazing a trail but started to wonder if the enormous personal cost was worth it. As the technology evolved and the company constantly expanded, the demands increased--and then increased again, until Amazon took over her entire existence. At the same time, Amazon was changing from a company that everyone loved to a behemoth that everyone loved to hate. Coulter offers a wide variety of horror stories about working with awful people on ethically questionable projects, but somehow she maintains a humor about the absurdity of it all. She realizes that she was trying to cope with the pressure by drinking too much but managed to stop before going over the edge (she addresses these issues in her 2018 collection of essays Nothing Good Can Come From This). Coulter eventually decided that she had to escape, although breaking the bonds turned out to be more difficult than anticipated. During her time there, she writes, "Amazon supplied me with a high-grade lunacy I didn't know I needed until I touched it and my ambition bloomed like neon ink in water." Thankfully, she eventually got over the fence, 12 years after signing on, and she left with her sanity and her soul largely intact. With wry humor, Coulter provides candid insights about life, love, and gender as well as surviving a toxic workplace. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.