TALES FROM A STENOGRAPHER IN OBAMALAND
From The Corner Of The Oval Office Beck Dorey-Stein Transworld €18.20 ★★★★★
What’s most surprising about this book isn’t that a political memoir has been slapped with a hot pink cover – clearly packaged as chick-lit – or even the many behind-thescenes details that make the White House seem like any other workplace (for example, the revelation that a stenographer – as Beck Dorey-Stein was from 2011 until the end of the Obama presidency – was hired via Craigslist). Nor is it the extent to which history takes a back seat to her dithering over failed love affairs. There, in a blink, go the deaths of the Pulse nightclub shooting victims, the worst such massacre America has ever experienced. No, what’s most surprising about this can-do, sometimes delightful, often maddening retelling is that we haven’t had such a book before. Washington DC is famously a city of eager 20-somethings who work and date within the same
pool. Where has the workplace relationship comedy been this whole time?
In the book’s most successful moments, we get up-close glimpses of Obama: in the gym, preparing for a speech, on the treadmill.
But as history unfolds in the book’s margins, Dorey-Stein’s primary preoccupation is her love life. We follow her relationship with boyfriend Sam, who’s constantly dashing off to work on various political campaigns. The solitude leaves her vulnerable to the attentions of the White House hottie, a more senior staffer named Jason. Each time, DoreyStein declares she will not cheat again, but then – after some winningly wideeyed writing about the charms of Air Force One – there is Jason at her hotel room door again...
At times, Dorey-Stein plays the ingénue so hard she strains credibility. She couldn’t type quickly when hired (not required, she assures us), and she has to be told by Sam that baking heart-shaped cookies for the other stenographers on her first day (as it’s Valentine’s) is not a good idea.
But she does make a game, bumbling, often charming heroine.