“Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism” is the memoir Meta (formerly Facebook) tried — and failed — to suppress, a controversy that helped propel the work to The New York Times and Amazon bestseller lists. Yet author Sarah Wynn-Williams remains under a gag order: an arbitration ruling found that promoting her book violates the non-disparagement clause she signed as part of her severance agreement when Facebook fired her in 2017.
Wynn-Williams’s barbed memoir focuses on her six years as global public policy director at Facebook, offering an insider account of the company’s rapid expansion and lack of sound policy-making. Her personal interactions with key executives including Mark Zuckerberg and second-in-command Sheryl Sandberg, paints a picture of an ambitious leadership with a shocking ethical void.
Her accounts are both damning and sometimes surreal. Sandberg, celebrated for “Lean In,” is depicted as calculating and inauthentic. Wynn-Williams quotes her as worrying about drawing attention to the “differences in what we say to the public versus what we do.” Sandberg’s private-jet habits include donning tailored silk pajamas and, strangely, inviting young female assistants to take naps with her in the bedroom cabin during business flights.
Zuckerberg’s odd public image is less surprising, but Wynn-Williams highlights his ego and ambition for power. After a successful international meeting where a few global leaders pursued selfies with him, he subtly launched a vanity political campaign for president. He didn’t officially run, but just a few months ago, Zuckerberg reportedly bought the third most expensive house in Washington D.C. – 10 minutes from the White House.
Wynn-Williams contends that Facebook leadership behaved in ways that were deliberate and cavalier: citing documents that admit the exploitation of vulnerable young users by creating engagement that is “addictive by design.” She also cites Facebook’s catastrophic failure in Myanmar in 2011, allowing hate speech and false reports to culminate in violence without taking urgent action. She argues that these harms were neither accidents nor growing pains, but the result of profit-driven negligence — what she calls Facebook’s “lethal carelessness.”
She opens her aptly titled book with a line — about the damage done by “careless people” — from the just-turned-100-year-old “The Great Gatsby,” a cautionary tale of power without responsibility. As with fiction, Wynn-Williams’s account of Facebook’s rise — relevant to other modern technologies — echos the theme that carelessness has consequences.
In her intimate and unflinching memoir, “Care and Feeding,” Laurie Woolever recounts her years as an assistant to two of the culinary world’s most powerful and infamous figures: Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain. Woolever worked for both men at the height of the “celebrity chef” era, helping to write their books and supporting their high-profile empires — from Batali’s near-impossible-to-book Manhattan Babbo restaurant to Bourdain’s critically-acclaimed food travel series “Parts Unknown.”
Unlike “Careless People,” “Care and Feeding” is not a takedown of the people Woolever worked for. Instead, it is a biting personal indictment of her own foibles and excesses — a brutally honest account of her own addictive episodes, describing her daily pot smoking, pill popping, and alcohol binges (half a bottle of Rosé before noon, bourbon at lunch, capped by evening beers, pills, or weed). You find yourself wondering how she managed to perform at all.
At times, she writes as a funny, self-mocking party girl; at others, the narrative of her binge forays turns dangerous and unsettling. What she called “coping mechanisms” for her punishing work demands, her therapist described as “acting-out behaviors.” The adrenaline-seeking life leads to a failing marriage, reckless infidelities, and occasionally being broke. The food world she inhabited — which included a stint at Wine Spectator magazine, where she could chug both fine and jug wine — merely fueled her habits.
Much of Woolever’s behind-the-scenes experience predates the rise of “#MeToo,” when abusive or bullying behaviors from bosses were considered part of paying one’s dues. She captures the uneasy mix of fear and ambition that kept her tied to Babbo, describing how access to the power — and the hope of learning from it — kept her “on the hook” for years.
In the end, Woolever’s mentors each face their own reckoning, whether a public disgrace or a tragic demise. As with Wynn-Williams, both women stayed in difficult jobs because they felt they couldn’t afford not to. But Woolever does not frame herself as an innocent bystander. Instead, she learns from the example of both men, confronts herself, and “Care and Feeding” becomes her own story of hard-won growth.
