The Assistant Economy

[marmar]

from Dissent magazine:


The Assistant Economy
Francesca Mari ▪ Spring 2015


In 1975 Susan Sontag, the American intellectual famous for On Photography and Against Interpretation, was diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer and survived after a radical mastectomy, extensive radiation treatments, and thirty months of debilitating chemotherapy. In the aftermath she needed someone to help her catch up on her correspondence. Her editors at the New York Review of Books recommended a former Review assistant named Sigrid Nunez, who lived near Sontag on the Upper West Side.

Strictly speaking, Nunez was Sontag’s assistant for a very short while. But the psychological fallout was significant. The first time Nunez arrived for work, Sontag grilled her for gossip about the Review. The second time, Nunez met Sontag’s mother. The third time, Nunez was set up with Sontag’s son, the nonfiction writer David Rieff. Soon they began dating, and Sontag invited Nunez to move in because she couldn’t bear the thought of her son moving out.

Nunez was no longer an assistant, but Sontag still expected deference. Nunez, then an aspiring novelist (now an established one), would wake up early to try to snatch the solitude she needed to write, only for Sontag to knock on her door and cajole her into eating breakfast. Sontag wanted to edit Nunez’s fiction, and she was hurt when Nunez didn’t accept her suggestions. Nunez found the whole relationship difficult, perplexing, and at times almost obliterating.

.....(snip).....

Welcome to the main artery into creative or elite work—highly pressurized, poorly recompensed, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes menial secretarial assistance. From the confluence of two grand movements in American history—the continued flight of women out of the home and into the workplace, and the growing population of arts and politically oriented college graduates struggling to survive in urban epicenters that are increasingly ceded to bankers and consultants—the personal assistant is born.

.....(snip).....

As in The Devil Wears Prada, fear of the boss and the ever-present threat of dismissal line the personal assistant’s work with both dread and excitement. Scott Rudin, the superproducer behind so many Oscar-nominated movies every year (in 2008, Rudin’s There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men were nominated for eight Oscars each), is notorious for his temper (revealed on the front pages most recently by the Sony leak, in which he called Angelina Jolie a “minimally talented spoiled brat”). He has four or five assistants at any one time, and his former underlings now fill some of Hollywood’s most prominent positions. But while practically every studio head has once served Rudin, the majority of his assistants don’t survive the fourth month. The Wall Street Journal once quoted an estimate by some of Rudin’s assistants that he had gone through 250 of them in five years. Rudin admitted to 119, excluding the kids who hadn’t survived what he referred to as the two-week “trial period.” Sometimes he fires them all at once. They tramp to the café across the street to await a call from the office manager, who often rehires them. ............(more)

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-assistant-economy