“A unique and brilliant book—I found myself reading passages aloud to anyone who’d listen.””
About EXIT INTERVIEW
A candid, intensely funny memoir of ambition, gender, and a grueling decade inside Amazon.com, from the author of Nothing Good Can Come from This.
What would you sacrifice for your career? All your free time? Your sense of self-worth? Your sanity?
In 2006, Kristi Coulter left her cozy but dull job for a promising new position at the fast-growing Amazon.com, but she never expected the soul-crushing pressure that came with it.
In no time she finds the challenge and excitement she'd been craving—along with seven-day workweeks, lifeboat exercises, widespread burnout, and a culture driven largely by fear. But the chase, the visibility, and, let's face it, the stock options, proved intoxicating, and so, for twelve years, she stayed—until she no longer recognized the face in the mirror or the mission she'd signed up for.
Unsparing, absurd, and wickedly funny, Exit Interview is a rare journey inside the crucible that is Amazon. An intimate, surprisingly relatable look at the work life of a driven woman in a world that loves the idea of female ambition but balks at the reality.
Raves for EXIT INTERVIEW
“Anyone looking for the inside scoop on Amazon will be in luck. Maddening stories and details about the company are abundant...[and] by situating her experience in a larger feminist narrative, Coulter gives her story a more universal application.”
“Kristi Coulter has given us the most vivid account yet of Amazon’s chaotic, mercurial, dignity-crushing office culture. Exit Interview is also a very funny and intensely personal depiction of what it’s like to be female in the oppressively male world of technology.”
“Enlightening and often wincingly funny...books like EXIT INTERVIEW offer us a chance to look back and ask ourselves, “What did we just do to our lives?” ”
“Exit Interview is pure joy from beginning to end. Kristi Coulter’s voice is truly inimitable: vibrantly intelligent, tender, occasionally furious, and always funny. A brilliant and surprisingly moving tour of the outer reaches of corporate madness.”
“I couldn’t put EXIT INTERVIEW down, even when my kids begged me to, even when my heart rate was so elevated my fitness ring thought I was going for a “moderate walk. I read this workplace memoir like my life depended on it, maybe because every woman I know has felt what Kristi Coulter illustrates with laser-like precision. A brilliant portrait of stifled ambition that should be required reading for every under-funded woman at every organization that “values female employees” and has exactly one woman in their C-suite.”
“You’ll never look at the Amazon “smile” logo with a smile after reading Coulter’s unputdownable memoir about her time in the trenches of one of the world’s most cutthroat companies—a place where femininity and feminism is positioned as something to grow out of. EXIT INTERVIEW made me want to rage against the machine as a woman and a human. Take my advice and press BUY NOW.”
“Whether you’re here for some juicy inside dirt on Amazon or an astute analysis of gender politics, Kristi Coulter’s Exit Interview delivers the goods with wit, insight, and—in lieu of free shipping—a deep dive into the heavy taxation on being an ambitious woman.”