When reading about Prozac Nation author Elizabeth Wurtzel’s
self-professed one-night stand of a life in New York magazine last week, I wasn’t
expecting to encounter law office management material. I was just hoping for
a few juicy tidbits about a talented author, not far from my age, who’d had
amazing success, a great body, and plenty of publicity. What becomes the aging ingénue?
Surely, despite the economy, the publishing industry’s inability to monetize
the Internet, and the gloom, this of-the-moment 1990s writer hadn’t suffered
the indignity of being offered 16-bucks-a-post blogging gigs or an unpaid regular
column on a major website she could do for the exposure. Who knew the paean to psychopharmacology for
better living and the author of Bitch had spent some recent quality time at Yale Law
School?
Yet it wasn’t the late-in-life major career change that
intrigued me so much as the self-proclaimed feminist’s approach to an icky
landlord-tenant problem she was experiencing as a renter in Manhattan. What did
the author of two bestsellers, the graduate from Yale, the lifelong New Yorker,
the woman who didn’t need a secure but undoubtedly hellacious life as a wife to
an investment banker, do when her apparently a little-bit-off landlord started
calling her out about the trajectory of Wurtzel’s life? Wurtzel called a man.
She didn’t just call any man. She called the man. She called her boss, who
happens to be David Boies, of pursuing antitrust charges against Microsoft
fame, of loudly losing the Bush v. Gore
contest for the 2000 presidential election notoriety, an undoubtedly intimidating
litigator even if hasn’t won them all.
Elizabeth Wurtzel, feminist, lawyer, bestselling author, in
distress, called a man, her boss, for help with her personal life.
Her claims of independence, her endless self-examination,
her brilliant publishing career, and her top-tier education didn’t provide her
with the tools she’d need to escape a rental and an intrusive landlord. Wurtzel
not only called her boss for help, but, in her words, she let him take over. She
got out of the rental, but did she set the rest of us back?
When you’re in personal trouble, don’t call your boss. Hire
your own attorney, and deal with the problem professionally. Your law firm is not
your personal playground, and managing partners are not your dad. Don’t cry in
the office or in late-night phone calls to your peers.
Interestingly, Wurtzel is not listed in Boies, Schiller
& Flexner’s attorney directory. Rumor-mongers say she was let go, she that
she resigned. I say leave your personal life at home.
—Lori Tripoli
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