It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a young woman graduating college these days is going to receive one of these three books. There's even a version of LEAN IN marketed specifically for graduates; I don't know if it's any different from the original version, nor do I think it should be, but someone with some marketing savvy at Knopf saw an inch of desirable shelf space and slid it in. Luckily, I graduated years ago, but as nightmares of being in college and on the hook for a final in a class I forgot I signed up for are still on a primetime slot in my subconscious, it feels as though it were yesterday.
(For the record, college graduation: it rained, a sweet trouble-making boy in my dorm stayed up all night and then kissed every girl on the hall before we walked over, I brought a paperback of PSYCHO and read it while they called all the thousands of CS major names; graduate school graduation everyone got sunburned, my parents and dog and boyfriend all came and got along, we had an afterparty with cake at my apartment where guests included our cat, dog, and three baby raccoons we were fostering.)
I read LEAN IN as soon as it came out; I could have read it before it came out if I had realized that Walden Pond Books in Oakland is a stand-up institution that puts books on the shelves as soon as they arrive, regardless of their supposed release dates. I was invited to a women's leadership seminar last year at which Sheryl Sandberg spoke. She seems like an enjoyable, ambitious, and kind person to work with. (Remember how "ambitious" used to be an insult? Like in Julius Caesar, "there are those who say that Caesar was ambitious...ambition should be made of sterner stuff!" I love that speech; I've never thought of "ambitious" as an insult). I understand and agree with a lot of the criticism of LEAN IN that has been written about extensively, and well, in other venues; it doesn't offer much actionable advice for low-income or uneducated women, it doesn't touch upon the institutionalized sexism and racism that contribute to keeping women out of leadership positions, and it assumes a lot of support structures (like child care and maternity leave and bosses who are interested in your success) that many women don't have. It also assumes that the type of success you're looking for in your life is career-based and will happen within the structures of contemporary capitalism.
Keeping these limitations in mind, LEAN IN still has a lot to offer a certain type of graduate. She may have majored in business, she's fairly traditional and a go-getter, and she would love to work at one of the largest and most well-known companies in her industry. There are a lot of these women, and sometimes it helps for them to hear stories similar to their own. Sandberg was pulled along, in her career, by friends and colleagues who recognized her work ethic and her chances for success. It's success in a fairly traditional sense, but there are a lot of young people entering jobs where answering emails that come in until midnight is acceptable, and where role models in the office who have young children still travel four nights a week. Sandberg's advice to fake it till you make it and always aim for improvement and rapid growth is useful in any industry, but telling someone who is already unsatisfied with the always-on demands of work to "not be afraid to do more" and take on more responsibility is going to fall flat. There are a lot of things I love doing, and nothing I want to be forced to do for 12 hours a day five days a week. I support any book in favor of self confidence, of taking a chance, of doing something you may not feel fully qualified to do. On the other hand, LEAN IN leaves a lot of the working woman's discontents unexamined, leaving room for #GIRLBOSS.
Amoruso references LEAN IN in her own book; their search results recommend one another. I found #GIRLBOSS a reaction to LEAN IN at times, and one of the most honest business memoir's I've ever read. This is partly because Amuroso doesn't have a lot to lose; she built her online retail empire from the ground up on her own, while working as a security guard at the Academy of Art, and she can't really be fired from it. The statute of limitations is presumably up on her early shoplifting adventures, and it's refreshing to read a life story that leaves the unflattering parts in--the stealing, the hitch-hiking, getting fired from a boutique when her heart wasn't in it, and her initial forays into ebay selling through technically disallowed advertising on myspace. Even more recent examples, stories of firing employees and making fun of interview candidates, stay in the book to show the budding girl entrepreneur that she doesn't have to sand down her judgmental personality to succeed in business, she just has to be committed to doing whatever will make that business bigger. While Amuroso also advocates a boot-strappy personal-responsibility take on success, she backs it up by having a business that started from almost nothing, didn't require loans or angel investors, and now employs hundreds of people. Her path isn't fool-proof success, but it's more accessible than Sandberg's.
Amuroso goes into interesting detail on the origins of her style and business choices, from how she styled photoshoots to how she packaged items ready to ship. That kind of hands-on tip tends to be polished out of more "corporate" memoirs--I can't point to a concrete example of a business decision Sandberg had to make at Google, or how she evaluates changes to Facebook policies, for example--but they can be the most helpful to businesses starting out. 'Details matter,' says the new-business primer, but that can be vague--does it mean we have to choose the same style of black-ink pen for everyone, or does it just mean that the logo should be the same on every page of the website?--'don't put the mailing label on crooked, and no one will know it's just you in your studio apartment printing the mailing labels on an inkjet' suggests Amuroso, and it becomes a little bit clearer. A lot of any advice book is common sense, including Sandberg ('say yes to a tough project to show you're responsible and capable') and Amuroso ('make sure your LinkedIn and Facebook profiles are professional') but an advice memoir should be showing us someone to emulate implicitly, rather than explicitly, and Amuroso comes off more relatable to the young graduate.
Finally, the lowest bar of advice memoir is set by ADULTING, in which Brown spends a fair amount of time advising readers how to get along at work and an equal amount of time on how to clean and furnish one's apartment. The conceit of the book, born of Brown's blog of the same name, is charming: hundreds of little "do this, don't do that" tips that range from 'clean the pans under your stove's burners' to 'keep in touch with extended family regularly'. The audience is pretty clearly the 21-to-27-year-old who is living on her own and ready to get more serious about it. However, beyond age (which we can discern both from references to 32-year-olds as older and established professionals and from advice about how to cook basic food items), other aspects of the target audience change from chapter to chapter. Is the same reader who is told to contribute to her 401(k) also told to put a $100 bill in an envelope under her bed as an emergency fund for veterinary bills? Is the same graduate who has to be reminded to wipe up the things she spills the one also being told how to care for a grieving friend who has miscarried? Why is it reasonable that the reader will change her car's oil herself, but won't tailor her own clothes? I assume a lot of this advice comes from Brown's personal experience, which is why it's frustrating that there are so few specific anecdotes in the book (the two that come to mind are of having a debit card declined at Popeye's, and dealing with a mean coworker at a holiday party). I would be interested in hearing more about Brown's life as a reporter, but in an effort to be as generalizable as possible, she rarely goes beyond mentioning 'this happened to me.'
Writing this type of manners guide is a very Southern thing to do, so it made sense to me that the author started her reporting career in Louisiana and Mississippi. Traditional advice topics covered in ADULTING include writing thank-you letters, hosting dinner parties, and being a guest at your in-laws'. Some entries were useful (some appetizer and salad recipes), many more were less useful (no one needs to be told to pay bills on time; many people need advice on how to get the money to pay those bills on time). When I think of tips on how to be an adult that my friends have offered (and I have a number of friends whose advice on these topics I delight in) it's along less obvious lines (what to pack in your emergency preparedness kit, and where to put it, for example, as we live in earthquake-prone areas; which herbs and vegetables grow easily in pots indoors and which are always going to be so much cheaper to just buy at Trader Joe's. For the record, basil is easy to grow). I know there are some graduates just starting out who need this ABC guide to living alone and not dying, but I hope there aren't many (ADULTING made the NYT bestseller list, but perhaps young women like to read these types of guides to reassure themselves that they knew it all already).
Your graduate may need hand-me-down furniture or a gas gift card more than she needs a book of advice. But how else can you tell her what to do without sounding overbearing? Give her Sandberg if she wears a lot of button-downs, and Amuroso if she wears a lot of black; give her ADULTING if she sometimes wears a bathing suit as a shirt and starts fires in the microwave, and remember you probably won't get that furniture back intact.
