I'll admit, I put off buying #Girlboss for a while, mostly because of my seething hate for any use of hashtags that's not strictly useful. I can manage #journorequest, and I can manage #bbloggers and #lbloggers for twitter chats, but that's my limit. I instantly unfollow anyone who uploads a selfie followed by #girl #selfie #london #pretty #like4like #no filter #hair #lipstick #follow4follow #iphoneonly #blueeyes ... you get the jist (that's a rant for another day). So when everyone's talking about a best selling book entitled #GirlBoss? Well you can understand my hesitation.
Also, I'm not sure how I feel about being dubbed a Girl Boss? Why not a Woman Boss? Or a Female Boss? Or why not just Boss? I'm not really sure why my gender should effect how good I am at kicking ass at what I do? I may be going off on a tangent again...
BACK TO THE ACTUAL BOOK. Now, there's no denying that Amoruso has done well for herself, she turned essentially selling unwanted old clothes from her flat into an incredibly successful business. But does she have to be so aware of it? My problem with this book is that it basically feels like Sophia's love letter to herself, and, to quote a very good review by The Guardian, it's about as shallow as a teaspoon.
This book isn't going to give you secrets to breaking through the glass ceiling, it's not going to tell you how to better your business or how to start your own company. The closest it gets is telling you to 'be a nice person at work'. Groundbreaking.
This book just kind of feels like an ode to her own success, I mean, the woman quotes herself on a title page at the beginning of a chapter. Throughout the whole book I just kinda felt like she was saying 'look at me, I'm such a badass and now I have millions of dollars, be a badass and you can have it too'. The book is littered with selfies that don't really make sense in the context of the text around it, it kinda feels like she just picked a load of pictures of herself she liked and put them in wherever they would fit. There's a fine line between telling your story and boasting, and this definitely felt like the latter.
I didn't really get the hype around this book, maybe because Amoruso and I couldn't be further apart if we tried, she rode the miscreant road, dropping out of school, shoplifting and taking jobs for the money, whereas I love to learn, and I love working and what I do, I always have. Maybe my whole view of the book was biased by the bloody hashtag in the title (in thirty years time I feel like she'll regret that choice), but I struggled to get any real message from this book.
Or maybe it's just because I'm too busy right now creating my own story to be inspired by someone constantly trying to hashtag me.
Have you read GirlBoss? What did you think?
