Don't Buy What I'm Selling: On Breaking Up with Advertising and Finally Learning to Love My Whole, Fat Self
Biographical Note: Lu Chekowsky [she/they] is a writer and Emmy Award-winning creative director. In Lu's most recent job in the advertising industry, she was lead creative director for video at Facebook. Before that, Lu was...
|
Biographical Note: "A funny, heart-wrenching, and thought-provoking book that unlocks the secrets of advertising while telling a profoundly human story of finding your voice." -- BooklistReview Quotes: "This is a jaw-dropping memoir of a woman at war with her body while her brilliant creative mind spins the campaigns that sell our dreams back to us. It's also a wildly entertaining exposé of the advertising industry. It's impossible not to root for Lu's escape from the prison we all share--whenever we believe there's something we could consume that would relieve the discomfort of living inside our own skin."-- Leigh Stein, bestselling author of Self Care Review Quotes: "Lu Chekowsky's voice and insight are switchblade keen, and right on time."-- Saeed Jones, poet and author of How We Fight for Our Lives Review Quotes: "A book about advertising has no business being this funny."-- Elissa Bassist, author of Hysterical Review Quotes: "What is the human cost of making our bodies into commodities and letting ads into our minds and hearts? Lu Chekowsky knows all too well. Her riveting and wise story will prompt you to rethink who you are and what made you, from the first jingle to the latest Instagram click."-- Sonya Huber, co-editor of Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O'Connor Means to Us Review Quotes: "Chekowsky knows her way around a sentence and has a sharp eye for the transactional machinery beneath glamour . . . Both an acidic, funny indictment of an industry and a quietly hopeful story of someone finding her way out." -- KirkusPublisher Marketing: Part memoir, part manifesto, this is the "fascinating, smart, and hilarious look" (Christie Tate) of a woman determined to go deep inside advertising so she could save the world--and herself. What could possibly go wrong? As a high-level advertising creative director for 14 years, Lu Chekowsky willed inanimate objects to life and made people want to buy stuff they didn't need. Her colleagues called her "Mary Manifesto" because she could whip up an emotional ad campaign like no one else. Need someone to channel Michael Jordan so people will line up and buy his latest sneaker? That's Lu. Need to convince a cranky teen heartthrob to take his shirt off for an ad designed to get teenage girls across America to swoon? That's her too. It was a regular workday when she made same-day cross-country trips between New York and LA to satisfy the CEOs who counted on her to pump up their profits--ignoring her own voice and using it in service of their company's bottom line. Chekowsky was great at her job because she'd trained for it her whole life. She'd gotten the memo about how worthless her body was at moving products--because she was the one who wrote it. As someone whose body was always far from what the world held up as ideal, Chekowsky grew up trying to find a place where she could fit in. Everywhere she looked, the images she saw were designed to make girls feel terrible. The only person who could make her feel worthy was her larger-than-life mom; but even that was complicated when her mother got sick with cancer when she was just eleven years old. For years, Chekowsky tried to look past what it felt like to be underestimated by her male colleagues, the 14-hour work days spent satisfying the demands of the latest celebrity/boss/pop star/social media app, and her work that required her to, every day, perpetuate unrealistic beauty standards, before she went home and binged alone on bags of takeout. Don't Buy What I'm Selling is a dishy peek behind the curtain of a billion-dollar industry, but it's also the journey of one former ad executive who lived a life of contradictions--until she couldn't anymore. With honesty and heart, interspersed with behind-the-scenes looks at the real-world tactics brands use to prey on consumers, it is perfect for readers of Roxane Gay, Aubrey Gordon, and Lori Gottlieb--and anyone who's bought a product from an Instagram ad and instantly regretted it. Review Citations:
|