What Should I Do with my Life?

by Po Bronson

Mr. Bronson was recently voted San Francisco’s sexiest writer. I hesitate to challenge that claim (I’d rather let history speak for me), especially when faced with his icy blue eyes and fashionable stubble. But this book mostly led me to decide his eyes must be even more blue in person.

I suppose the book is all it claimed it would be. Bronson does interview a couple dozen people who have made the hard decisions and struck out to find their happiness. Finding that many who have examined their lives so thoroughly is impressive enough. The fact that he found enough of them who were able and willing to talk about it is more so. And the book is designed to satisfy an honest need—so many San Franciscans, out of jobs and stumbling around like headless poultry, now feel entitled to their dreams even if they aren’t sure exactly what they are. A methodical approach to elucidating the mysterious turns and twists into what makes a life ‘happy’ — not in a literary sense, but in a real way that helps people plan their lives — would be well received.

That’s the book Bronson set out to write. And to his credit, he finds perfect interviewees, from the investment banker turned catfish farmer to the woman who gave up everything to be a doctor and discovered she didn’t like it as well as the occasional tycoon-turned-burger-flipper who is miserable, for candor’s sake. (I think he’s trying to avoid a perceived responsibility like that that followed his book Nudist on the Late Shift, which some have credited as being the reason they hitched their wagons to the internet star.)

Their stories are valuable. But what he fails to do is synthesize. He says in the foreword and other places that he can’t do that work for the reader, and of course he’s right: this isn’t, couldn’t be, a tutorial. It’s a valuable collection of data, the result of months spent interviewing and examining lives. It’s a useful sort of reference, a perspective tool.

Still, after months and dozens of interviews, Bronson should have some more opinions (and maybe a little less about Po). Instead of sounding wise, he sounds like a variety show host introducing the next act when he comes up with chirpy, folksy transitions to the next interview.

In the end, I have to applaud Bronson for asking a hard question and demanding that there be a methodical approach to the answer. But I can’t say this book did a great job of elucidation. It’s worth reading for the anecdotes—there’s plenty of raw material for a reader to make his own judgements. But it’s not the place of a writer to collect anecdotes and stitch them together. Bronson did a great job assembling a cast of characters to interview, but this reader at least put it down disappointed. I learned that others have made mistakes I’ve made, and I even saw a few mistakes I haven’t yet gotten around to and might now be spared. But mostly I was frustrated I didn’t have the subjects of the book in front of me so I could ask them the questions Bronson apparently didn’t.

Bottom line—read it at the bookstore before you drop any cash on a (used) copy.