Overall, I'm glad I read this book and found it to be immensely entertaining. As someone who worked many years in the service industry, the d3.5 stars
Overall, I'm glad I read this book and found it to be immensely entertaining. As someone who worked many years in the service industry, the descriptions of the FOH/BOH felt comfortingly familiar. I feel like Cecchi-Azzolina captured the crazy adrenaline and high that is a dinner service. It's the worst feeling being in the weeds, you dread coming into work, you hate almost everyone you work with, and you're addicted to it. I started to get flashbacks to terrible services I had worked (please do not try and go to restaurant on Mother's Day) and I even had a dream about bartending again after I finished reading the book!
That being said, there was a LOT of drug use (NYC in the 80's), casual alcoholism, and shocking sexual situations that were described frankly but explicitly in this book. Because of that, I can't recommend this book widely to my friends and family. ...more
This book came at a very opportune time for me! I was just telling my husband today that I felt like a failure because I hadn’t been mopping our floorThis book came at a very opportune time for me! I was just telling my husband today that I felt like a failure because I hadn’t been mopping our floors frequently enough. That a “real adult” would have been able to keep up with cleaning a small townhouse. That I was overwhelmed and ashamed that it wasn’t as easy for me to keep up with cleaning as my peers. I was super grateful when this book was available from my local library and hopeful that it would be a paradigm shifting read!
This was a super easy read, only took a couple hours. K.C. writes with a lot of humor and it feels like I would want to grab a cup of coffee with her!
A key takeaway from the book was that cleanliness is morally neutral. As a society, we’ve somehow equated cleanliness and organization with being a good person. A lot of wonderful lovely smart people are crap at doing laundry. Being overwhelmed or leaving dishes in the sink for a couple days does not make me a bad person. However, when I shame spiral it becomes even harder to do care tasks (a better word for chores).
I can already see how shifting this mentality will make a huge difference! Dirty dishes in the sink? How amazing that I made dinner for my family. I didn’t workout for 30 minutes? Okay, that goal was not realistic for me. Let’s try to workout for 10 minutes tomorrow.
Productivity ≠ Value
All that to say, K.C. gives a lot of helpful tools to help you think through how to make care tasks seem more manageable. I’m excited to try and reshape my relationship with care tasks over the next few months!...more
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