BEST BOOKS ABOUT
LOSING YOUR JOB
THE author and broadcaster suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life TWO years ago I was in a very bad place. I had been forced to leave the company I’d set up ten years earlier. As I packed up my desk and announced to my staff that I would no longer be around, I felt as if my life was over. I went home, got into bed and pulled the duvet over my head. For the first time in my life I didn’t have an office, a diary — or a reason to get up in the morning.
But the next day I found instead of feeling bleak, I felt relieved. Now I have a career as a screenwriter and am enjoying the success of my first TV series, Victoria.
Like Jim Dixon, the university lecturer in Kingsley Amis’s comic masterpiece Lucky Jim, who is fired after delivering a public lecture when drunk, only to be offered his ideal job by a passing millionaire who likes his style, it took a disaster to reveal where my real talents lay.
Jim Dixon would never have had the courage to leave his safe job to pursue his dreams. It took losing his job to propel him to the place he wanted to be.
In Lisa Owens’ hilarious novel, Not Working, twentysomething Claire quits her job in marketing in an effort to discover what she really wants to do in life. But things don’t go according to plan.
‘If I can just digest enough TED talks, selfimprovement podcasts, overviews on the Aristotelian sense of purpose and firsthand accounts of former City workers who set up artisan businesses from their kitchen tables, then surely the answer will reveal itself?’ she asks herself.
But trying to ‘find yourself’ doesn’t deliver the same shock to the system as being forced to discover another direction, as I was, and Claire spends most of the novel doing very little.
Self help manuals always tell you to have a running-away fund for emergencies, but I think it’s just as important to have a dream bank in your head, where you store up all your dream jobs, the things you would do if only the opportunity one day presented itself.
When I was lying under that duvet, I read Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day by Winifred Watson, about a governess who discovers a talent for talent management when she is sent to look after a nightclub singer by mistake. It’s a charming, life-affirming book and put me onto the road to recovery.