From the Corner of the Oval: A Memoir, by Beck Dorey-Stein

Almost by chance, Beck Dorey-Stein was offered a position as stenographer in the Obama White House in 2012.  Stenographers have a basic assignment: record every word spoken by the president and type up transcripts of the recordings.  One or more stenographers travel everywhere the President goes, whether across town or the other side of the world.  In the White House staff hierarchy, they are close to the bottom.  But because their basic job is to observe, they are present during the most important, and unimportant, events of the presidency.

Beck’s memoir From the Corner of the Oval: A Memoir (2018) recounts her experiences as a White House stenographer.  She is hardly objective.  She is dazzled by the position she holds, by the people she works for and with.  Obama is a heroic figure to her.  She considers herself an observer to history in the making.

We don’t learn that much about the Obama administration.  We do learn a great deal about Dorey-Stein: her relationships, her hopes to be a writer, her family, her nervous anxiety, her susceptibility to histrionics.  To show respect and admiration for people she works with, she gives them copies of what she has written about them. She often seems barely able to keep going, and she frequently loses her composure, especially when her personal life falters.  She has a prolonged relationship with a senior staff member (she changes his name), an incontrovertible jerk, but her love for him (if love it is) causes her repeatedly to overlook his flaws and shortcomings and the sorry ways he treats her.  That on-and-off relationship is really what this memoir is about.

The writer is twenty-six when she takes the job, and past thirty when she leaves it (she works for a few months into the Trump administration, and she doesn’t reveal the circumstances under which she resigned or was fired).  Her memoir is narcissistic, self-infatuated, and shallow.  She writes well enough, but has little of substance to say.  I would be surprised by the fact that this memoir was published, but maybe her casual friendship with New Yorker editor David Remnick, who encouraged her to write, and other connections she made in the White House, had something to do with it. I don’t recommend the memoir.