My tequila hangovers and trysts in the West Wing
THIS bright pink book, zinging with energy and sparkle, tells a true story to give hope to all despairing job-seekers.
When the tale begins, in 2011, Beck Dorey-stein, a 25-year-old graduate living in Washington DC, has reached the point where she’s no longer hoping for actual interviews — ‘just generic acknowledgements that my applications have been received, so i know i haven’t actually disappeared from the universe’.
Then comes an email from her employment agency: ‘There’s a job at the White house...you’d be travelling with the President on his domestic and international trips.’ it’s a lowly job as a stenographer, but she jumps at it, being a diehard fan of President Obama.
The next thing you know, she’s having the time of her life, part of ‘the bubble’ — the group of staff who follow Obama wherever he goes: his team of ‘professional stalkers’, as she puts it.
she writes of her colleagues: ‘We’re swimming in this same punch-drunk delirium . . . we’ve found ourselves, shockingly, amazingly, how-the-f***-did-this-happen crazily, flying half-way round the world on Air Force One.’
On Air Force One there are no safety videos and you don’t have to buckle-up for take-off. On the way home from long trips, the camaraderie in the cabin is ‘like the best sleepover party ever’; everyone watching Love Actually with bowls of popcorn and Air Force One M&Ms.
she soon discovers that ‘living the dream’ often means looking a mess, feeling exhausted, being soaked with rain, hungover after too many tequilas, running to catch the motorcade which ‘waits for one person, and that person is not me’.
On one occasion she accidentally sends her suitcase off in advance with all her underwear packed in it, so she has to wear no underwear for that day.
it’s so busy in the Obama-era gym that there’s a ‘cardio rush-hour’. sometimes she steps off the running machine drenched in sweat, just as the President steps on to the one next to her. he says: ‘i thought you’d be faster than that!’
DC is a place of hyper-competitiveness where, when you’re having lunch, someone at the table will count your calories aloud.
What makes this book stand out among fly-on-the-wall accounts of White house
life is Beck’s honesty about the roller-coaster love affair she embarks on with a senior staffer called Jason. ‘This isn’t good, is it?’ she writes. ‘Texting Jason, who is ten years older than I am and 100 times more important and works where I work?’
No, it’s not good — but she can’t resist him, and nor can we. With amazing vividness she describes the thrill of ‘the triangle of light’ on the hotel room ceilings, when Jason comes in to her room after midnight and leaves again at dawn.
He already has a glamorous girlfriend and is, at various moments, three-timing Beck. He’s a grade-one, Jilly-Cooper-novel rotter. But I’m afraid the other two nice, kind boyfriends Beck tries to have just don’t zing with Jason’s sex appeal.
I longed for her to end it with Jason once and for all, then surrendered with her every time she succumbed.
What she and we are all too aware of is that the clock is ticking on the presidency. POTUS himself refers to the White House as ‘the rental’. Everyone’s certain that his successor will be Hillary Clinton.
The Trump era dawns. Beck describes how, on her first trip on Air Force One to Mar-a-Lago with President Trump, he somehow gets lost while giving Melania a tour of the plane. This does not bode well for his grip on geography.
Beck can’t stand it for long, working in the ‘waking nightmare’ of the Trump administration. She soon leaves, missing Obama’s gentle wisdom and good manners too much.
This book beautifully recaptures those vanished days.