REVIEW: All the Gold Stars by Rainesford Stauffer
Nothing new under the sun AND I'm tired of bemoaning the brokenness of ambitious psyches.
Editor’s Note: (I recognize I’m also the author of this newsletter, but “Editor’s Note” sounds more fun, official, and cool.) I’ve finally finished the Semester of Doom. My personal and professional life have been tumultuous and beyond my personal control. The waters are calming, and therefore, many reviews are forthcoming. I’ll try not to barrage your inboxes with content.
Executive Summary: Stauffer, made prominent for her first book “An Ordinary Age” revisits the same general thesis (that it is, in fact, okay to relax and not be #girlbossing 24/7) but seeks to provide advice and consolation to the widest audience. From GoodReads
All the Gold Stars looks at how the cultural, personal, and societal expectations around ambition are driving the burnout epidemic by funneling our worth into productivity, limiting our imaginations, and pushing us further apart. Through the devastating personal narrative of her own ambition crisis, Stauffer discovers the common factors driving us all, peeling back layers of family expectations, capitalism, and self-esteem that dangerously tie up our worth in our output. Interviews with students, parents, workers, psychologists, labor organizers, and more offer a new definition of ambition and the tools to reframe our lives around true success. All the Gold Stars provides ways for us to reject our current reality and reconceive ambition as more collective, imaginative, and rooted in caring for ourselves and each other.
Star Rating: I gave this three stars on GoodReads. Here’s the review from the same—Wanted to give a preliminary review while this text is fresh in my brain. Rainesford Stauffer wrote "An Ordinary Age" which was published in 2021. I read it fresh after choosing to postpone law school at a medium choice law school to wait out a top choice law school. I was in a pit of self-induced ambition despair. The book was a balm to my soul. This book, published in 2023, was a lesser version of the same general consensus. Truly, this felt like the "from the vault" portion of a Taylor's Version album. Grabbed from a period of time cast in amber, with no deeply revelatory insights to share. The virtue is in the mean, friends. We must strive to feel human -- but our striving is not what makes us human.
Review: Alright, it’s been *checks notes* two months since I finished this book. My review is that almost none of it has stayed with me. Rainesford Stauffer, aged 30 as of my writing this, is a young Millennial with a heart of gold. She is quite knowledgable! Yet, I am unsure she is wise.
I loved An Ordinary Age because it was a book written by a twenty-something, written to twenty-somethings. It was mostly a memoir of Stauffer’s personal experience in understanding that the soul-crushing weight of trying to be exceptional was truly okay to set down. The text felt alive with her confessions of exhaustion and disinterest in being a world-changer and path-maker. It read like a diary entry shared over a split bottle of red wine with your older sister as she let you carefully weep as you whisper that you don’t actually want to pursue [insert personal ambition here].
All the Gold Stars reads like a manifesto. Rather than rooting the text in her lived experiences of living and dying under the weight of ambition, Stauffer writes a splintered narrative that is part history, part sociology, part journalistic reporting. In contrast to the feeling of sharing a bottle of wine with a kindhearted older sister, this feels like a rage against the machine of capitalism. This feels as though she found as many people as were willing to be published railing against that machine alongside her. I don’t disagree with her point, per se. I disagree with how the delivery of said point made me feel.
I felt disquieted and enraged after finishing her book. There was no balm to my soul. There was only simmering rage, existential dread, and a hopelessness about even trying to be better about seeking ambition in such a broken, hopeless world.
If you’re tired and weary and need to feel seen in that weariness, I recommend An Ordinary Age — regardless of your age — but I would leave this one on the shelf. Re-read the executive summary and you understand the point being made by Stauffer.