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Egos

New in Memoir: Looking for Fulfilling Work in the Gig Economy

Credit...Loren Capelli

Personal stories tend to be thought of as inextricably linked to home, but I’ve always believed some of the best material comes from the workplace. Whereas blood relations tend to share a certain monochromatic tint, professional ties can be kaleidoscopic in their randomness, not to mention intensely Machiavellian and therefore inherently dramatic. For all the comforts and familiarities of the household, it’s the job site, the place where our skills are honed and our labors converted to currency, that truly defines not just our proficiencies but our element.

I was glad, then, to find three new memoirs this summer that make labor the main story. In DIRTY WARS AND POLISHED SILVER: The Life and Times of a War Correspondent Turned Ambassatrix (Melville House, $26.99), the veteran reporter Lynda Schuster takes readers on a nostalgia tour through Journalism as It Used to Be. Growing up brainy and restless in 1960s Detroit, Schuster escapes her chaotic family by fleeing to Israel to work on a kibbutz. Years later in journalism school, she returns to the country for an internship at The Jerusalem Post, which in turn leads to something that would be virtually unthinkable for a young journalist today, a full-time reporting job at The Wall Street Journal.

When Schuster’s adorably naïve announcement that she wishes only to be a foreign correspondent gets her dispatched to the bureau in Dallas, she sulks until she crosses paths with a seasoned foreign correspondent for The Los Angeles Times named Dial Torgerson. “A small, wiry middle-aged” divorced father with minimal hair and “a peculiar, slightly rolling gait,” Torgerson is more than twice Schuster’s age and distinguished enough that she read about him in her coursework at journalism school, an aphrodisiac if there ever was one. The two begin an exhilarating affair and marry within a year. During this time, Schuster’s career, which now has her covering Central America, gains unprecedented momentum. On her wedding day, she sneaks in an interview with representatives of the Nicaraguan contras before racing with Torgerson to City Hall in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. It’s an adrenaline junkie’s best day ever.

Schuster and Torgerson set up household in Mexico City, but ten months later Torgerson is killed while on assignment in Honduras. Amid her grief, Schuster is sent to Beirut to fill in for The Journal’s Middle East correspondent. Though she welcomes the change of scenery (despite Lebanon’s war-ravaged “Dresden-like destruction”) she also begins to question her career choice.

“Whatever the reason, all I can see, stretching before me, are years and years of reporting in places like this,” she writes. “Problem is, I have no Plan B, nothing to fall back on such as masonry or midwifery.”

Schuster would find new ballast the next year in the form of Dennis Jett, an American diplomat who would eventually become the United States ambassador to Mozambique and then Peru. It is this phase that marks the polished silver part of “Dirty Wars and Polished Silver,” and while Schuster’s storytelling is no less lively, the stories themselves can’t quite keep up with the pace and drama of the author’s earlier incarnation. There is a sense in the second half of the book that Schuster is recounting scenes from her life as though they’re from a movie — and glamorized for effect — rather than imprinted on her emotional memory card. We see Jett fend off a tarantula, narrowly avoid being thrown from his sailboat by a pod of hippos and make terrible puns about Christmas that somehow elicit adoration rather than cringes from Schuster. The contrast between Schuster’s old life and new one is never sharper than on the day of her second wedding in Monrovia, Liberia. Instead of sneaking in an interview before racing to City Hall, she yells at a hairdresser for making her wait. Days before the big event, under sudden threat of a rebel incursion, she fusses over the number of chicken breasts ordered for the dinner.

“It’s remarkable how the rest of the world ceases to be important when you’re getting married,” Schuster writes with what is surely irony but doesn’t quite accomplish the necessary self-effacement. “How willing you are to gloss over events that might otherwise trigger alarms . . . just so you can get back to focusing on what truly matters. Like whether to wear nylons in the sweltering tropical heat.”

More than three decades after Schuster was first pounding the pavement (and flying around with expense accounts) as a cub reporter, another aspiring young writer was trying to forge a career under very different conditions. It’s 2007 and the pseudonymous Lynsey G., a flailing 24-year-old with an English degree, is offered the chance to write for a magazine. Upon hearing that said publication is actually a pornography magazine, she indulges a literary fantasy more in line with working at Vanity Fair than reviewing DVDs with titles like “Throat Yogurt.” “There would be parties,” she writes. “Elbow rubbing with sophisticated types, and sexy new friends, surely. I would probably be, within a matter of months, the coolest person I knew.”

It’s not everyone’s idea of a lucky first break, but as Lynsey G. tells it in WATCHING PORN: And Other Confessions of an Adult Entertainment Journalist (Overlook, $27.95), it turns out to be an ideal fit. This is due in part to her own porn viewing propensities, which she describes as “my greatest source of shame and satisfaction.” Reviewing pornography, she reasons, would be “a way out of my nasty habit,” not to mention “sanctioned by the income it would bring.” She also harbors the notion that what she’s been consuming online is “the work of bottom-feeding amateurs” rather than professionals. “‘Real’ porn,” G. writes, “would be fancier, I imagined, and look prettier than my internet porn.” As it turns out, the slightly shabby looking fare G. had been watching online “was just your standard, ho-hum American porn of the day,” illegally copied and posted online for free. The pornography business has suffered under the digital revolution as much as any other media industry.

G., whose journalism career led to a regular McSweeney’s column called The Conflicted Existence of the Female Porn Writer, positions her book in part as cultural analysis of pornography’s complicated but inextricable relationship to social movements like feminism and queer (not to be confused with gay) visibility. We learn about her cofounding of Whack!, an alternative porn magazine that managed to satirize and critique the industry even as it remained affectionately aligned with it. We get an apologia for mislabeling nonbinary performers in a 2010 review. We also get marvelous bits of erotic trivia, for instance the news that sex toys date back at least to the Paleolithic era and that 3D printing technology has “vaulted the sex toy design field forward” by allowing quick, inexpensive production of extremely niche products.

But as much as “Watching Porn” is about bodies and sex, its core subject is work and money, specifically in the gig economy. Most adult film performers operate as independent contractors and few, if any, get royalties. “It’s hard to support yourself in porn unless you’re willing to take almost every job that comes along,” a performer named Mandy Morbid tells the author. She’s talking about having sex on camera, but she may as well be talking about any profession — from providing tax services to reporting on wars — that’s found itself splintered by what’s known in the business world as disruptive innovation.

The über-example of disruptive innovation is, of course, Uber itself, which is what led the former financial executive P.M. White to spend a summer piloting his Mercedes around Chicago as a driver for one of the world’s largest ride share companies. In BUZZ RIDE: Driven to Disruption: Memoirs of an Uber Driver (Lake Claremont, paper, $12.95), White, who, like G., writes under a pen name, shares the kinds of stories most readers could probably imagine on their own; drunken passengers who can’t remember where they live, couples fighting in the back seat, eye-opening forays into crime-ridden neighborhoods.

It’s all engaging enough, but it never gets to the heart of the more urgent questions that, for me, were looming over all three of these books; namely how do we measure “fulfillment” in work, and where do we find it when the traditional channels have given way to a round-the-clock hustle? Are we to find inspiration in the porn actors whose only common trait, as G. observes, is “a genius for finding a way forward — toward the money — through technology, media and the marriage of the two”? Or should we wait for some version of a dashing diplomat, like an old-style corporation, to come along and offer us a pair of golden handcuffs for the sake of our own solvency?

That’s a romantic notion in a sort of soothing, paralytic way, but I wouldn’t advise waiting around all day. Even though the economic jig may be up, the gigs go on. If we’re lucky.

Meghan Daum’s latest book is “The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion.” Her column appears every eight weeks.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 27 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Memoirs. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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