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    The Receptionist: An Education at The New Yorker (Digital Edition)
    The Receptionist: An Education at The New Yorker (Digital Edition)
    The Receptionist: An Education at The New Yorker (Digital Edition)
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Receptionist: An Education at The New Yorker (Digital Edition)

    Written by Janet Groth

    Narrated by Susanna Burney

    2.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Janet Groth#8217;s seductive and entertaining look back at her 21 years (1957 to 1978-the William Shawn years) of lateral trajectory at America#8217;s most literary of institutions.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateApr 2, 2013
    ISBN9781622311606
    The Receptionist: An Education at The New Yorker (Digital Edition)

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    Reviews for The Receptionist

    2.5/5

    85 ratings11 reviews

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      I generally read one book at a time but as my available reading time is in the late evening I could not continue to read this book at night. I'm generally a fiction reader but was curious to read this title as over the years (particularly during the years I worked in New York) the magazine was frequently part of my browsing/reading times.

      I don't know what I anticipated to read but the book was at first different than expected. For many of the first chapters, it seemed merely a diary shared to impress with name-dropping. This was then complemented by restaurant names and the myriad of gastronomic delights consumed at each. It reminded me of some acquaintances who have to share their precise detailing of menu selection from each restaurant experience. I simply don't care. At this point, I picked up novels to read for my late evening reading and then began treating the book like a magazine where I might read a few pages at various intervals during the day, then pick it up again on another day (but not necessarily a consecutive day) and continue reading a few more pages with another pause of time in-between.

      I am glad that I continued reading Janet Groth's "The Receptionist: An Education at The New Yorker." I agree with The Boston Globe that described it as "A literate, revelatory examination of self." I found the book to be an introspective portrayal of one woman's life within a primarily man's world (at that time) of periodical history. It is insightful and revealing. An important element of the book not to be missed is "A Conversation with Janet Groth" that is a Q&A adapted from an interview conducted by Ellen Birkett Morris with Janet Groth published on Authorlink (authorlink.com). Janet Groth shares her life journey through her years of employment at The New Yorker and discloses behind-the-scenes experiences ~ both professionally and the overflow into her personal life. She shares without hesitancy and unveils her thoughts, actions, and growth as a woman. In that regard, it is a book to be respected and a woman to be held in high esteem for the revelations she shares for others to learn from and perhaps also to be inspired.
    • 1/5
      I was intrigued by this book because it supposedly told the story of a young woman from the Midwest who came to the big city, worked for the New Yorker, got a Ph.D. and taught literature at university. An autobiography of sorts, supplemented with delicious tales of behind the scenes at the best magazine in the country. NOT. That is not at all what this book is about- sadly. The magazine anecdotes are mostly about who was shagging whom in spite of the fact that both parties were married. Mostly, however, it is about a young woman with so little self-worth and self-knowledge that she chooses the wrong men for the wrong reasons- again and again and yet again. I did slog through to the end; I think she does find true love, but by that time I honestly did not care. She annoyed me and the book annoyed me.
    • 3/5
      I wanted this memoir to be so much more than it actually is. The author spent almost 20 years as a receptionist on the "writers' floor" at The New Yorker magazine during the 1960s and 1970s. I had hoped for some entertaining insights into the world of magazine publishing at that time in history, particularly given the stellar reputation of The New Yorker. Instead, we get a few fairly tame anecdotes (anything even remotely likely to be controversial is cloaked in altered names) and entirely too much about the author's active and varied sex life. It isn't until nearly the end of the book that she finally gives the reader information about her childhood growing up in the Midwest and her fraught relationship with her alcoholic father that could have made her endless navel-gazing in the first two-thirds of the book worth reading. Alas, by the time I got there, I no longer cared much.
    • 3/5
      I generally read one book at a time but as my available reading time is in the late evening I could not continue to read this book at night. I'm generally a fiction reader but was curious to read this title as over the years (particularly during the years I worked in New York) the magazine was frequently part of my browsing/reading times.

      I don't know what I anticipated to read but the book was at first different than expected. For many of the first chapters, it seemed merely a diary shared to impress with name-dropping. This was then complemented by restaurant names and the myriad of gastronomic delights consumed at each. It reminded me of some acquaintances who have to share their precise detailing of menu selection from each restaurant experience. I simply don't care. At this point, I picked up novels to read for my late evening reading and then began treating the book like a magazine where I might read a few pages at various intervals during the day, then pick it up again on another day (but not necessarily a consecutive day) and continue reading a few more pages with another pause of time in-between.

      I am glad that I continued reading Janet Groth's "The Receptionist: An Education at The New Yorker." I agree with The Boston Globe that described it as "A literate, revelatory examination of self." I found the book to be an introspective portrayal of one woman's life within a primarily man's world (at that time) of periodical history. It is insightful and revealing. An important element of the book not to be missed is "A Conversation with Janet Groth" that is a Q&A adapted from an interview conducted by Ellen Birkett Morris with Janet Groth published on Authorlink (authorlink.com). Janet Groth shares her life journey through her years of employment at The New Yorker and discloses behind-the-scenes experiences ~ both professionally and the overflow into her personal life. She shares without hesitancy and unveils her thoughts, actions, and growth as a woman. In that regard, it is a book to be respected and a woman to be held in high esteem for the revelations she shares for others to learn from and perhaps also to be inspired.
    • 2/5
      I requested this book from my library thinking it would be an interesting insiders view of The New Yorker magazine in the 50's & 60's. Instead what we got was a water downed memoir about the author's sexipades during the swinging 60's. When she did discuss people from the magazine she often used pseudonyms and even then didn't really give out too much information.
    • 3/5
      I kept wondering why she was insecure, something she doesn't explain until the end of the book. She met well known writers, up and coming writers, cartoonists, and poets while at The New Yorker. Some were eccentric, others bipolar, a professor who committed suicide after he won a prestigious award, while the cartoonist she thought she would marry was just a cad. A poet she went with told her he had no time for a wife and family. Too much of a distraction. I thought what went on in the offices of The New Yorker would be rather staid. Far from it!
    • 2/5
      This is the memoir of a woman not who did amazing things, but who knew intriguing people.
    • 3/5
      I'm sorry to report that this one didn't do much for me. I expected some really interesting New Yorker stories, but the book ended up being much more a tale of personal growth that could have been set just about anywhere (but with a few famous writers thrown into the mix). There are some good scenes (most notably Groth's hiring by E.B. White), but on the whole I just wasn't all that impressed.
    • 1/5
      I love memoirs, love reading about the literary scene in NYC, but found this book unsatisfying. I didn't get a clear picture of the New Yorker writers and their personalities, nor did I get much insight into the author's own life. She speculates that she never made any advancement into the ranks of writers at the New Yorker because of sexism (and that certainly played a role), but this books suggests a different explanation: she's simply not that skilled of a writer. A disappointment.
    • 3/5
      I was instantly put off by the pretentious tone of The Receptionist, by Janet Groth. The subtle references to John Updike or Tom Wolfe, the various high brow culture events that were part of every story, and French infused dialog were almost enough to give up. But remembering that my own pretense was the very reason I chose the book in the first place, I kept going. I’m now quite glad I did.Learning virtually nothing about the New Yorker Magazine, I learned a great deal about Ms. Groth and her raison d'être if you will. My desire to hear about John Updike, Tom Wolfe, et al was replaced with a keen interest in the events in Ms. Groth’s life as she discovered Janet Groth. It was a quite pleasant discovery.
    • 3/5
      There's a certain cache to the New Yorker magazine in the literary world. I remember thinking I was all that and a bag of chips in high school when I first subscribed. I was pretty sure that simply having a subscription to the magazine validated my literary taste. And I know I'm not the only one who has attached such a value to it over the years. Janet Groth, in her new memoir, The Receptionist, takes readers inside the offices of the venerable publication through her own experiences as a receptionist for twenty-one years on the writers' floor from 1957 to 1978.Groth first took the job as a way to break into the publishing business, taking the receptionist role so that she wouldn't be consigned to the typing pool and so that she could eventually become the writer she wanted to be. Strangely enough, she never did leave the receptionist's desk over that twenty-one years, aside from one brief stint elsewhere in the magazine, and she didn't exactly leave to write either, going back to graduate school after her stint at The New Yorker had run its course. In very brief chapters, Groth talks about the well-known personalities at the magazine starting with her initial interview with E.B. White and intersperses the small scenes amongst the writers on the eighteenth floor with tales of her own personal life and growth in the city.Somehow given the title of the memoir, I expected more stories from Groth's tenure at the magazine. Whats she does offer up is actually fairly superficial and scant and often feels more like name dropping than substantive and interesting work tales. The lunches and other encounters she details bleed the personalities out of the folks she includes whether out of a desire to be circumspect or respectful to them or something else entirely. There's just something dry here and while I wouldn't have wanted salacious gossip, breathing life into some of the personalities at the magazine would have added immeasurably to the book. As for Groth's personal life, it never did grab me. And certainly she was searching for the life and the person she wanted to be but there were overly contemplative bits that didn't seem to fit the tone of the rest of the narrative. Ultimately this one didn't work for me, which probably negates any early literary validation my magazine subscription might have afforded me, especially given that so many others seem to be raving about it around the internet.