Inside the Cult of Kibu and Other Tales of the Millennial Gold Ruth By Lori Gottlieb and Jesse Jacobs - Perseus 256 pp.; $ 26
Lori Gottlieb beat anorexia, but found herself stymied by the vapid, indulged world of a dot.com on steroids
Sheli Teitelbaum Los Angeles
At the wizened old age of 35, Lori Gottlieb is the author of not one, but two, personal memoirs. The first, published two years ago by Simon & Schuster, is called "Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self."
The story behind the story? After a short but successful career as a development director for prolific producer Ed Pressman, and later as a primetime series development executive for NBC, a 30-year-old Gottlieb decides to chuck the ersatz glitter of Hollywood - "high school with money" - for the dedication and drudgery of Stanford Medical School.
Sifting through her high-school chemistry notebooks, she uncovers and decides to publish a series of forgotten diaries she kept as an 11-year-old. The diaries vividly recount her transformation from a figure evocative of a pre-adolescent Holden Caulfield, replete with caustic observations on parents, family and schoolmates, into a raging anorexic who has somehow been entrapped by the very values she claims to despise. Set against the backdrop of Jewish Beverly Hills, this "Catcher in the Rye Bread" becomes a bestseller, and is optioned by filmmaker Martin Scorsese.
Fade to Stanford, and the origins of Memoir II, "Inside the Cult of Kibu and Other Tales of the Millennial Gold Rush," in which Lori discovers that even at Stanford, an institution deservedly renowned for its high academic standing, the life of a relatively mature medical student could frequently take unexpectedly bizarre turns.
For two years, our perennial fish-out-of-water swims against a tide of barely socialized 22-year-old biochemistry majors (one of whom expresses wonderment that Gottlieb will be "almost menopausal" by the time she can begin her medical practice). Lured by the dot.com boom, she answers the siren call not only of the quick millions some were making, but of the excitement and "revolutionary" nature of the emergent Internet.
Heading for Silicon Valley, she joins a fledgling Internet startup interested in her services as content editor-in-chief. Ostensibly dedicated to the empowerment of teenage girls, Kibu.com (Kibu is Japanese for "foundation") boasts $ 22 million in first-round funding and the backing of various Bay Area movers and shakers.
Seduced by a six-figure salary, stock options and an arsenal of alluring catch-phrases like "venturing into uncharted territory," "breaking away from conventional paradigms" and - deadliest of all - "an opportunity to make a difference," Gottlieb initially overlooks some bothersome details. For one, the company lacks a proper business model. Indeed, it is bereft of any business plan at all. Secondly, Gottlieb, one of only two identifiably Jewish women in the company, finds that it is run by what she describes as a coterie of lipstick-smacking, designer-nails-clacking Britney Spears clones clamoring to give American girls, in all their diversity, a cultural makeover.
Gottlieb and the other Jewish VP turn out to be two of the few hires with the experience and expertise needed to bring the company's hyperbolic press releases and hyperventilating self-image into alignment with reality. A reality, unfortunately, headed by a former secretary she describes as "Britney Spears with crow's feet," and assorted interactive forum, or "channel," producers - women culled from the boss's beauty parlor or from chance meetings on airplanes - seemingly incapable of writing two consecutive English sentences that didn't include the word "luscious."
Questioning the reigning vapidity and increasingly cult-like behavior engulfing Kibu - all-hands meetings are held to sing "Happy Birthday" to staffers, none of whom is close to cracking 30; cheer the latest slogan; and urge or even compel colleagues to divulge their most embarrassing moments - Gottlieb and her fellow Jew find themselves cast in the unenviable roles of the children who feel compelled to announce that the emperor appears to be buck naked.
Despite her uncommon beauty and hip Hollywood background, Gottlieb quickly senses she has again become the unwanted nerd in a sorority of increasingly stressed-out pom-pom girls. Indeed, within three months of arriving, Gottlieb finds herself summarily "unhired." Rather than return to medical school with her pom-pom between her legs, however, she writes a slice-and-dice expose for The Industry Standard, of a company that the Wall Street Journal itself has christened the "poster child for mismanaged Web startups." That piece leads to a partnership with Jesse Jacobs, a 26-year-old former vice president for content with the Los Angeles-based Ifilm.com, with whom she writes "Inside the Cult of Kibu," a book that Wired magazine describes as a "web of hilarity."
The offspring of a well-to-do stockbroker father and travel-agent mother, Gottlieb talked with The Jerusalem Report about an adolescence spent straddling the mercilessly opposed Beverly Hills in-crowd and an inverse community of outcasts, the ranks of both of which were comprised almost exclusively of Jews.
On the one hand, she says she never saw herself as unattractive or nerdy, even by the superior standards of Beverly Hills. On the other, she was smart, outspoken and interested in matters that, in that context in 1978 - when she was keeping her diary - marked one for exclusion.
"I played chess," she recalled. "I liked math. I had no interest in clothes or makeup. Shopping, which was my mother's passion, was an ordeal. In my own narcissistic 11-year-old way, though, I thought I was sort of interesting. So why was I being ostracized?
"The irony, I suppose, is that while rejecting what people were telling me about how one was supposed to look and act and be, I ended up doing exactly what they were doing, which was dieting."
Lori, however, went overboard, eating less than 200 calories a day, until her parents finally had her hospitalized. At one point during her hospitalization, Gottlieb was found holding a scissors, in anticipation of trimming whatever fat she perceived remained on her stomach.
"Obviously part of that was that I wanted to harm myself, that I wanted to die. I realized that I had become, over time, this person that I wasn't. When they threatened to force-feed me, I decided to try returning to normalcy."
Gottlieb attributes part of her ordeal to the twisted messages imparted by a popular culture that remains uncompromising in its narrow vision of what constituted ideal female physicality. That vision did not include otherwise pretty Jewish girls with tight ringlets and other than pert noses - even if they, like Gottlieb, were thin.
"Anorexia gave me this sense of superiority," she recalls. "You had this willpower others didn't. Women would comment that you have this admirable ability to resist things that they can't. The irony is that most of these women weren't overweight to begin with.
"In my diaries, I had written about my mother taking me to the doctor's, hoping he'd talk some sense into me. I had been reading Bon Appetit magazine in the waiting room, and observing that the magazines Mom read all have these great articles like '12 Great Cookie Ideas,' but on the next page, you've got '12 Great Dieting Ideas,' telling you not to eat what you just baked.
"Even today, you'll read a magazine with one of my articles about a girl with a distorted self-image, and the next page features a model who clearly has an eating disorder."
Part of her predicament, however, Gottlieb attributes to a brand of familial dysfunction she believes was traditionally endemic to the matriarchs of many American Jewish families. "Like a lot of women of that generation, their bailiwick was the home. They didn't have a life of their own or careers. They wanted to exert control somewhere, and often where they did it was the home." Gottlieb believes this applies to her mother even though she worked part-time as a travel agent.
"Anorexia is about control in the same sense: You find a niche in which to exert control. It's about feeling you have no control over other areas of your life but the one area in which you do have control is the food you intake. My anorexia ended up being a battle of wills far more than anything to do with aesthetics. It became a game of 'Who's going to win this?'"
But the thinner Gottlieb got, the unhappier she became. And that wouldn't do, so Gottlieb changed her behavior. "Because it happened at such a young age, I got over it quickly," she said.
Luckily for Gottlieb, she had worked out her issues about social exclusion before arriving at Kibu, where, she discovered, just as in high school, there were those who were cool and those who never would be.
"At Kibu," she recounts in the book, "there were also two cliques, composed of those who tried to be responsible and keep the business on track (the studious kids) and those who just wanted to rebel and have fun (the popular kids)."
Initially, Gottlieb took steps to ensure her membership in the latter clique, which in the main involved straightening her hair with a flat iron so she too might resemble a cast member of "Dawson's Creek."
"If there's one thing I learned from high school," she writes, "it was that if you wanted to exert any power, you had to be in the popular crowd."
But while her colleagues indulged themselves in company-funded lavender toenail polish, regular massages, waxes and facials, Gottlieb says she "worked 80-hour weeks, broke out in stress acne, stopped exercising and let my curly hair air-dry."
"When people made remarks about how much I and the other Jewish VP looked alike, I interpreted that as ignorance. In a room full of Jews, no one would ever have suggested she and I could be sisters. But among gentiles, we looked more like each other than anyone else in the company.
"The fact is that the whole Silicon Valley scene was about as un-Jewish as Hollywood was completely Jewish. I know this is a stereotype, but when I think of technology, I wouldn't expect the guy who comes to fix my PC to be a Jew. In college, the boy who sat up till 3:00 a.m. cutting code (programming computers) was not a 'David Goldstein.' The David Goldsteins were up all night preparing for their LSATs or MCATs," the law and medical school entrance exams.
"And of course, you would never think of the Apple or Microsoft campuses as fortresses of Yiddishkeit. The fact is that Silicon Valley, and that whole Bay Area, Palo Alto scene is as white bread, homogeneous and Waspy as you can get. One of the nice things about the bursting of the dot.com bubble is that at least I got out of it."