CultureWatch Review: The Receptionist: An Education at the New Yorker

In This Issue

Jill Norgren reviews a tell-all autobiography that has the ability to be “satisfyingly scandalous,” with remembrances of friends, colleagues, and lovers “somewhere between mash note and carpet-bombing.” In her years with The New Yorker, she went, she saw, she conquered … and was conquered.

The Receptionist: An Education at The New Yorker
By Janet Groth; © 2012
Published by Algonquin Books; Hardback; ebook;  229 pp.

 An education, yes; in journalism, well not entirely. Make no mistake, Janet Groth’s The Receptionist: An Education at The New Yorker is a “kiss & tell” memoir. Readers, undoubtedly to be culled from longtime and loyal fans of this venerable magazine, will either love or hate Groth’s lively story telling. There is little room for fence sitting. Those who do not object to “oversharing” will be delighted at a new peek inside the halls and offices of The New Yorker. Other readers will have reservations.

Tell-all autobiography has the ability to be, as Ada Calhoun wrote recently of Frank Langella’s Dropped Names “satisfyingly scandalous,” with remembrances of friends, colleagues, and lovers “somewhere between mash note and carpet-bombing.” Groth meets the “satisfying” test. In her years with The New Yorker, she went, she saw, she conquered … and was conquered.

Janet Groth, later in life a professor of English, joined The New Yorker in 1957. Raised in Iowa, she arrived in New York City fresh from earning a BA degree at the University of Minnesota. She interviewed with E.B. White, telling him that her typing skills were “not at a professional level” to avoid assignment to the office typing pool. Handed off to the manager in charge of secretarial personnel, Groth ended up snagging a position at the reception desk on the eighteenth (the writers’s) floor.  She stayed at that post from 1957 to 1978. She did not follow the path of “countless trainees … moving either into the checking department or to a job as a Talk of  the Town reporter.” 

Groth never became a regular contributor. Were her life a game of Monopoly, as far as The New Yorker was concerned, it would be necessary to say that Groth did not pass “GO.” In his memoir,  About the New Yorker and Me, E.J. Kahn, Jr. described Groth as one of the magazine’s “authentic oddities.” Yet, in these twenty-one years, she completed a Ph.D and began teaching college courses part-time. In the pre-feminist fifties and sixties, Groth was feeling her way along in a professional world where there were few role models.

Why she did not advance at the magazine frames part of her story. Groth argues, first, that she entered the work world before the feminist era when women did not thrive professionally because they were used and, at the same time, overlooked. She also admits to “a prolonged identity crisis” that constantly provoked the question of whether or not she, an aspiring writer always near creative people, was or was not “one of them.”