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WORK TITLE: From the Corner of the Oval
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.beckdoreystein.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES: Author’s name is Beck, not Becky.
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Wesleyan University, graduated.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. White House, Washington, DC, stenographer, 2012-17. Previously, taught English is Hightstown, NJ, Washington, DC, and Seoul, South Korea.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Beck Dorey-Stein is a writer and former educator. She has taught English at schools in Seoul, South Korea, Washington, DC, and Hightstown, NJ. From 2012 to 2017, Dorey-Stein worked as a stenographer at the White House, primarily for the Obama Administration.
In 2018, Dorey-Stein released her memoir about her time as a White House stenographer called From the Corner of the Oval. She explains that she nearly turned down the job before she even knew what it would entail. Dorey-Stein told Lisa O’Kelly, contributor to the London Guardian Online: “I texted the woman who’d asked me for the interview and told her I already had too many jobs and I was withdrawing my application. … She replied: ‘Hi Rebecca, I understand you’re busy. This is actually a job at the White House and you would be travelling with the president on his domestic and international trips. Let me know if this changes things’.” In the book, she recalls bits of interactions with President Obama, highlighting his sense of humor. In an interview with Tessa Berenson, writer on Time Online, Dorey-Stein remarked: “My first day walking to the White House, I was so nervous. I stopped dead in my tracks and thought, Oh my God, what if he’s not that great? And then within a week of when I first got to see him, I was like: ‘He’s so much better than I expected.'” Dorey-Stein told O’Kelly: “We had this mutual respect for early morning workouts. … The first time he ever spoke to me was in a hotel gym in Colorado, at 7:30 in the morning. I had just run seven miles and was feeling pleased with myself, when he stepped on to the treadmill next to mine and said: ‘I thought you’d be faster than that.’ It kind of set the tone for our whole relationship going forward. I loved this playful, trash-talking side to him.” Dorey-Stein describes the close ties that formed between herself and her colleagues. In the same interview with O’Kelly, she called it “like college but on steroids, because the people you are working with are the same people you have dinner with on a Saturday night and the same people you hang out with on a Sunday morning, and when you have to check your phone every thirty seconds they are the only people who understand why.” During her time traveling with President Obama, her romantic life became turbulent. She cheated on her boyfriend with someone who worked with her. That man, in turn, cheated on her. Dorey-Stein goes on to describe the atmosphere at the White House after Donald Trump was elected. She told O’Kelly: “It felt like the world was officially turning upside down. … It was surreal. Everyone was walking around fighting back tears all the time.” She quit her job not long after Trump took office.
A Kirkus Reviews critic commented: “Even readers who enjoy a mix of romance and politics may tire of the countless I’m-so-lucky, how-is-this-my-life exclamations.” The critic added: “Gossipy books can be fun; if only this one had been better written.” Matt Damsker, writer in USA Today, asserted: “Dorey-Stein is a lively writer, and her tale makes for fizzy beach reading—evaporating, alas, like many a White House gig after election day.” Other assessments of From the Corner of the Oval were more favorable. “Dorey-Stein offers a generous, vivid portrait of what it’s like to work at the epicenter of power when your job is to stay out of the spotlight,” suggested Amy Scribner in BookPage. A Publishers Weekly reviewer remarked: “Dorey-Stein writes with honesty and panache about her fun job and her eventual heartbreak.” The same reviewer concluded: “Beltway gossip hounds will hope to hear more from Dorey-Stein.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
BookPage, July, 2018, Amy Scribner, review of From the Corner of the Oval, p. 24.
Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2018, review of From the Corner of the Oval.
Publishers Weekly, April 30, 2018, review of From the Corner of the Oval, p. 49.
USA Today, July 19, 2018, Matt Damsker, “Fizzy Chick Lit Invades the Oval Office,” review of From the Corner of the Oval, p. 6D.
ONLINE
Beck Dorey-Stein website, https://www.beckdoreystein.com/ (September 10, 2018).
London Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (July 14, 2018), Lisa O’Kelly, author interview.
Time Online, http://time.com/ (July 16, 2018), Tessa Berenson, author interview.
Vanity Fair Online, https://www.vanityfair.com/ (July 6, 2018), Julia Vitale, review of From the Corner of the Oval.
A graduate of Wesleyan University, BECK DOREY-STEIN worked as a White House stenographer from 2012 to 2017. Previously she worked as a high school English teacher in Hightstown, New Jersey, Washington, DC, and Seoul, South Korea. This is her first book.
QUOTED: "I texted the woman who’d asked me for the interview and told her I already had too many jobs and I was withdrawing my application. ... She replied: 'Hi Rebecca, I understand you’re busy. This is actually a job at the White House and you would be travelling with the president on his domestic and international trips. Let me know if this changes things’."
"We had this mutual respect for early morning workouts. ... The first time he ever spoke to me was in a hotel gym in Colorado, at 7.30 in the morning. I had just run seven miles and was feeling pleased with myself, when he stepped on to the treadmill next to mine and said: 'I thought you’d be faster than that.' It kind of set the tone for our whole relationship going forward. I loved this playful, trash-talking side to him."
"like college but on steroids, because the people you are working with are the same people you have dinner with on a Saturday night and the same people you hang out with on a Sunday morning, and when you have to check your phone every thirty seconds they are the only people who understand why."
"It felt like the world was officially turning upside down. ... It was surreal. Everyone was walking around fighting back tears all the time."
‘President Obama is sitting not even four feet away’: my life working in the White House
For five years, Beck Dorey-Stein was a stenographer in the White House, allowing her a front-row seat as political history was made. Now her memoir – extracted below – is being turned into a film
Lisa O'Kelly
Sat 14 Jul 2018 13.00 EDT
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Beck Dorey-Stein at home in Philadelphia earlier this month.
A job at the White House. Perhaps it doesn’t sound the most appealing of prospects under the current occupant. But Barack Obama’s White House? For most go-getting graduates heading to Washington DC during the Obama presidency, landing a position at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would have been the stuff of dreams. Not for Beck Dorey-Stein, who arrived there in 2011 nursing an innate suspicion of the US capital and its “DC creatures”, and with no desire whatsoever to work in politics.
She intended to stay just a few months: “The city seemed too buttoned up for me, too obsessed with politics.” Yet within a year, aged just 25, she found herself at its epicentre, working as an aide to President Obama. As one of five stenographers responsible for recording and transcribing his speeches, briefings and official statements, both for the press office and the presidential archives, Dorey-Stein joined the elite team who accompanied the president wherever he went. Travelling the world at his side, she visited 45 countries, becoming “a front-row witness to history”.
Now 32, she has written a memoir about her five years at the White House called From the Corner of the Oval Office, which earned her a seven-figure advance. Universal Pictures has optioned the film rights, and Michael Sugar, who won an Oscar for Spotlight in 2016, is in line to produce. “It feels kind of insane,” she says, speaking on the phone from her home in Philadelphia.
The people who make the president look good on these trips often look terrible and feel even worse
Despite having little interest in politics and even less in joining the DC “ego-swamp”, Dorey-Stein had quietly admired Obama since her teens. He influenced her original career choice when he gave the commencement speech to her graduating class at Wesleyan University in 2008. Having listened to him encouraging them to “give back”, she decided to go into teaching instead of advertising and worked for two years as an English teacher in New Jersey, and then Seoul. Returning from South Korea, she was offered a maternity-cover job at Sidwell Friends, an exclusive Quaker private school in Washington, whose alumni include Teddy Roosevelt’s son, Richard Nixon’s daughter, Al Gore’s son and Chelsea Clinton. Sasha and Malia Obama were pupils there when Dorey-Stein joined.
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She had planned to stay in the city only for the duration of the job – “to build my résumé” – but fell in love with a young political speechwriter who worked for a public relations firm. As the months went by, she found herself doing five part-time jobs, from waitressing to tutoring, which kept her busy but barely out of debt. Despite applying for full-time posts every day, she got nowhere until she saw an advert on Craigslist for a stenographer at a law firm. After completing some initial tests for the recruiting agency, Dorey-Stein failed to turn up for a follow-up interview because she was kept late at one of her shifts. “I texted the woman who’d asked me for the interview and told her I already had too many jobs and I was withdrawing my application,” she says. “She replied: ‘Hi Rebecca, I understand you’re busy. This is actually a job at the White House and you would be travelling with the president on his domestic and international trips. Let me know if this changes things’.”
No prizes for guessing that it did. Dorey-Stein turned up on time for the rescheduled interview and got the job, partly because her position at Sidwell Friends meant she had already been background-checked by the FBI and cleared to be around the Obama girls.
She found her first time in the Oval Office overwhelming. “My hands start to shake uncontrollably,” she writes. “President Obama is sitting not even four feet away and gives me a quick nod and tight-lipped smile before beginning his remarks to reporters.” However, she quickly got used to quietly taking her appointed place “behind the big lamp on the side table, between the president’s chair and the tan sofa”.
In the Oval Office and at official briefings, Dorey-Stein was expected to say nothing and be as inconspicuous as possible. The place where she got to talk the most to Potus – as White House staff referred to him (it stands for president of the United States) – was in the gym. “We had this mutual respect for early morning workouts,” she says. “The first time he ever spoke to me was in a hotel gym in Colorado, at 7.30 in the morning. I had just run seven miles and was feeling pleased with myself, when he stepped on to the treadmill next to mine and said: ‘I thought you’d be faster than that.’ It kind of set the tone for our whole relationship going forward. I loved this playful, trash-talking side to him.”
Michelle Obama announces memoir will be called Becoming
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Before long, Dorey-Stein was working out regularly alongside Obama. “It’s weird how normal it is to say hi to the president in the gym now,” she writes. Even so, she remained starstruck by him till the end. Her memoir is in many ways a love letter to him and what he stands for. On her way to the White House on her first day, she worried he might be “a politician who comes across great on TV yet is quite greasy in person. But actually he is so much better in real life. He is warmer, even more kind, even funnier. He has this reputation that he is aloof and it just isn’t true at all.”
The job was all-consuming. “I basically had to sign my life over to it, 100%,” she says. While senior staffers were older, the junior aides were mainly in their 20s, “because who else can afford to give up their whole life and drop everything at a moment’s notice?” She describes life at the White House and on the road as “like college but on steroids, because the people you are working with are the same people you have dinner with on a Saturday night and the same people you hang out with on a Sunday morning, and when you have to check your phone every 30 seconds they are the only people who understand why”.
Beck Dorey-Stein walks from Air Force One with members of the White House press pool in Laos in 2016.
Beck Dorey-Stein walks from Air Force One with members of the White House press pool in Laos in 2016. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
She was on the road almost continuously, both around America and internationally, on diplomatic visits to Burma, Peru, Greece, France, Vietnam, China, Japan and Cuba, where she watched Obama make history as the first sitting US president to visit the country in almost a century. Sometimes she flew on Air Force One with the president, at others she was on the press charter, dubbed the “party plane”. She was there for the first family’s summer vacation at Martha’s Vineyard and their Christmas holiday in Hawaii.
“I never thought I’d find myself casually chit-chatting with the president of the United States on the North Shore of Oahu, while his daughters read in a nearby hammock and Flotus [Michelle Obama, first lady of the United States] holds court with her friends, cracking jokes and sipping fun drinks through straws,” she writes.
On a flight to Seattle for a Democratic party fundraiser, Dorey-Stein met one of her heroes: David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker. He told her: “You have an interesting perspective here. Keep notes.” Did she take his advice? “I was already taking a ton of notes in my journal, all the time. I’d wanted to be a writer since I was six years old,” she says.
As well as state visits and family holidays, she was by necessity present at some of the darkest moments in Obama’s presidency, typing up his quietly furious responses to tragedies such as the shootings at Sandy Hook elementary school, Pulse nightclub in Orlando, the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, and Isis’s beheading of the journalist Jim Foley. On that occasion, the president made his statement the following morning, after allowing the family time to grieve. “No one in that room can deny the power and sincerity of the president’s address,” Dorey-Stein writes. “But even more remarkable than the president’s palpable anger is the sound that follows his words: unprecedented silence. Only the clicks of a dozen camera shutters break through the thick, deliberate quiet.”
Not surprisingly, the pace of life took its toll on everyone in Obama’s entourage. “The people who make the president look good on these trips often look terrible and feel even worse,” she writes. Exhausted by the constant travel, late nights and lack of sleep, she and her colleagues survived mostly on junk food, sleeping pills and copious amounts of alcohol.
Perhaps inevitably, in such a hothouse atmosphere, Dorey-Stein fell in love with a fellow staffer – an older, more senior aide close to the president whom she calls Jason (not his real name) – and embarked on an on-off affair that lasted for much of her time at the White House, despite both having partners at home. Does she think this element of the story might have helped pique Hollywood’s interest? “Probably,” she admits.
The day after the [2017] inauguration there was this palpable arrogance walking into the East Wing. It was very disturbing
Jason eventually broke Dorey-Stein’s heart by deciding to marry his long-term girlfriend shortly after Hillary Clinton’s shock defeat in the 2016 presidential election. She found it hard to know which piece of news was the more devastating. “It felt like the world was officially turning upside down,” she says now. “It was surreal. Everyone was walking around fighting back tears all the time.” Since most of her friends were political appointees, they left the White House straight away. The stenographers were not, so her job continued. Having been excited at the prospect of working for the first female president, she says, “it became this feeling of, I’ve got to get out of here”. She stayed on “in part just to witness it, and in part because I hadn’t figured out my next step yet. I couldn’t just quit.”
After swapping duties with a colleague to avoid recording Donald Trump’s first meeting with Obama at the Oval Office – “I could not stomach the reality of what was happening” – it took just one day working in the new president’s White House to convince her she needed an exit strategy. “The day after the inauguration there was this palpable arrogance walking into the East Wing,” she says. “It was very disturbing. They had no idea what they were doing, yet they were the victors and now occupied the throne. It felt like Game of Thrones, in one of the darker episodes.”
Dorey-Stein began conversations with the book world and got herself a literary agent. “I was in the middle of typing up a Sean Spicer press briefing when my agent called to say I had a book deal.” She walked out straight away.
Having entered the White House with an aversion for “political creatures”, she is now very much one herself – “in the sense that we all owe it to each other to be political. As upsetting as so much of the news is now, I think it is really cool how much activism it has inspired and it is really important to exercise our right as citizens to know what’s going on, to be active and to fight for what we believe in.”
Her DC days are behind her now, though. She has moved back to Philadelphia, where she lives close to her family and plans to write full-time. What’s next? More notes from the White House? “Goodness no! It will be fiction. Writing the memoir was therapeutic in lots of ways, but I don’t want to write about my personal life again. I’m going to be making up stories from now on.”
President Barack Obama on Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, in 2012.
President Barack Obama on Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, in 2012. Photograph: Cliff Owen/AP
‘This isn’t too bad, right?’: an extract from From the Corner of the Oval Office
In the first of two extracts, Dorey-Stein gets to fly in the presidential helicopter on her 28th birthday
On a staffer’s last day at the White House, they may get to fly on the president’s helicopter as the ultimate parting gift, but no one in my office has ever flown on Marine One.
Josh Earnest, the press secretary, pats the empty seat next to him, and my heart stops as I see I’ll be sitting across from Potus, who is looking out the window. As the helicopter lifts off I notice how quiet Marine One is compared with the press charter, and how if I straightened my arm I could touch the sleeve of the leader of the free world. Jason leans forward from his seat in the back, and tells Potus: “Sir, we’ve got a birthday girl with us today. It’s Beck’s birthday.”
Potus turns to me and cocks his head. “Is that so? Well, happy birthday! This isn’t too bad, right?”
“No, sir, this is pretty magical.” I’m aware of Pete Souza taking photos from the back of the helicopter. I sit on my shaking hands to conceal how nervous I am. My insides are tangled as the president asks me how old I am.
“I think 28 is a good age,” he says when I tell him. The president gazes out of Marine One’s large square window that is probably six inches thick, bombproof and bulletproof. I assume we won’t speak for the rest of the flight.
But just a few seconds later, Potus is thinking aloud. “28, 28… I was just starting law school in the fall,” he says, “which means it was this summer that I met Michelle.” He nods to himself. “It might have been this week, or even today, that we met for the first time 24 years ago.”
He looks at me, and I feel compelled to say something. “24 years ago! We should have champagne!”
“Well, you sure got comfortable quick,” Potus teases, his eyes glimmering with mischief. “You sit down all nervous and now you’re already trying to drink champagne on Marine One!”
Potus then goes on to tell me the story of the day he met Michelle, how he didn’t own a suit but had an internship at a corporate law firm, and how the day before he’d bought two suits, feeling like a complete sellout. It was raining on his first day, and en route his umbrella broke, and he had already got mixed up on the subway so he was running behind schedule. When he walked in the door, the receptionist scowled at him, and sent him back to the office of Michelle Robinson, who was going to be his supervisor for the summer.
“She was taller than I expected, long legs, and I thought…” He says nothing here, but instead shrugs and gives a sly grin. “The first thing she said to me was: ‘You’re late.’ I responded with ‘…and wet’.”
Potus continues, telling us how he asked her out multiple times before she finally said yes. After Michelle tried to pawn him off on her friends, he finally got her to just go get ice-cream with him. “Very low-key, very casual – she didn’t even see it coming,” he says, grinning. “Like shooting fish in a barrel.”
President Trump boards Air Force One.
President Trump boards Air Force One. Photograph: Eric Thayer/Reuters
‘Trump takes a step forward, into my personal space’
Dorey-Stein recalls her first days working for the Trump administration
I’m now a stenographer in the Trump administration. Remember that pit of snakes in Indiana Jones? I work in that pit now. At a pool spray [photo call] in the East Room, I feel a cold draught behind me and turn to see Steve Bannon lurking in the corner. The parking lot is no longer filled with Priuses but with Porsches and Maseratis. The black frames that line the West Wing no longer display photographs of Potus shaking hands with world leaders, little kids, and wounded warriors; instead, it’s a pathetic display of inauguration day crowd shots, cropped tight in order to establish yet another “alternative fact”.
The deputy communications director tells us they don’t need stenographers or transcripts of interviews because “there’s video”. They don’t realise that print and radio interviews will not have video. After a few weeks they decide they do want us, “But, like, only some of the time.”
In the Oval Office during the first pool spray I attend with Trump, I notice that the table behind the Resolute desk, once crowded with Obama family photographs, is now empty except for one framed picture of Trump’s father. There isn’t a single photo of Barron, or Melania, or even Ivanka. If only Fred Trump had told his son he loved him – maybe none of this would have happened.
When I fly to Mar-a-Lago with the new president, I hear Fox News blasting from every cabin so loudly I can’t hear the whoosh of the wings. After takeoff, Trump gets lost while giving Melania a tour of the plane. I don’t know how he gets lost. Air Force One is a beautiful bird, but it’s no different from any other commercial 747 in that there’s one narrow hallway that takes you from the front to the back. Nevertheless, Trump ends up standing over my seat. I stand up because he is, after all, the president.
“Hello,” he says.
“Hi, sir,” I say, taking a step back, just as I’ve learned to do with President Obama. Give the most powerful man in the world room to breathe. But when I take a step back, Trump takes a step forward, into my personal space.
“Hello,” he says again, with a smile he must consider charming pasted on his face. It looks like he’s spent the last decade staring into the light of a tanning bed. I look to Melania behind him but she stares at the ground. On the TV screen is footage of Michael Flynn and the new allegations against him. In front of the screen is Flynn himself, talking with Trump’s body guy as he retrieves documents from his briefcase.
Trump is still in my face when a staffer touches his arm.
“Right this way, sir,” she says, directing him back toward the aisle.
• From the Corner of the Oval Office by Beck Dorey-Stein is published by Bantam Press (£14.99). To order it for £12.74 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
QUOTED: "My first day walking to the White House, I was so nervous. I stopped dead in my tracks and thought, Oh my God, what if he’s not that great? And then within a week of when I first got to see him, I was like: 'He’s so much better than I expected.'"
‘I Knew Everything About Him.’ An Obama White House Staffer on What It Was Like to Work For the Former President
Lawrence Jackson
By TESSA BERENSON Updated: July 16, 2018 10:56 AM ET | Originally published: July 12, 2018
In 2012, Beck Dorey-Stein answered a cryptic Craigslist ad for a job in Washington. It turned out that the White House was looking to hire a stenographer. After landing the job, Dorey-Stein spent five years traveling the world with President Obama, transcribing his every word. She logged countless hours on Air Force One, peeked behind the curtain of power in the West Wing and got her heart smashed by a ne’er-do-well fellow staffer–all of which she details in her memoir, From the Corner of the Oval.
What was the best thing about working for President Obama?
My first day walking to the White House, I was so nervous. I stopped dead in my tracks and thought, Oh my God, what if he’s not that great? And then within a week of when I first got to see him, I was like, “He’s so much better than I expected.” And that went on for five years. I used to joke that I was like his professional creeper or his stalker, because I was always around. It was sort of like being a freshman in high school, and he was the ultra-cool senior, so of course I knew everything about him.
The worst thing?
Your whole life becomes about his life. Even though I was a stenographer, I wasn’t going to my friends’ birthday parties or able to plan anything the whole time I was there.
Why do you call D.C. happy hours “the eighth circle of hell”?
Don’t tell me you love D.C. happy hours. When I first decided to move there permanently, I was unemployed. Happy hours are such a contest of who’s important, who’s not important and measuring up. And I had nothing to measure. No one wanted to talk to me.
You blast President Trump and call it a “waking nightmare” to work for his Administration. What made you finally decide to leave?
The moment happened when he was elected in November. I thought, I’ve been writing this whole time, and Trump just won, so if I’m not going to take myself seriously as a writer now, when am I going to do it? Anything can happen. I got a call from my agent in the middle of a Sean Spicer briefing that I was typing, and she was like, “Go outside. You have a book deal. You can leave now.”
Any words for the career folks still working there?
Godspeed and best of luck, and thank you for what you’re doing.
What’s the most valuable lesson you learned in the White House?
Be kind to people. It’s funny, because it’s the epicenter of power, but it’s the same lesson you learn when you’re in preschool.
Correction July 16
An earlier version of this story included an incorrect credit for the photograph of Beck Dorey-Stein. The photographer is Lawrence Jackson, not Lawrence Johnson.
This appears in the July 23, 2018 issue of TIME.
QUOTED: "Dorey-Stein offers a generous, vivid portrait of what it's like to work at the epicenter of power when your job is to stay out of the spotlight."
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Print Marked Items
FROM THE CORNER OF THE OVAL
Amy Scribner
BookPage.
(July 2018): p24.
COPYRIGHT 2018 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
FROM THE CORNER OF THE OVAL By Beck Dorey-Stein Spiegel & Grau $28, 352 pages ISBN
9780525509127 Audio, eBook available
MEMOIR
Recent Wesleyan grad Beck Dorey-Stein swore she would spend no more than three months in Washington,
D.C, a place she calls "an ego swamp of a city." Then she lands a job as a White House stenographer, a
position she didn't even realize existed.
From the Corner of the Oval is Dorey-Stein's effervescent memoir that recounts spending five wide-eyed
years traveling the world on Air Force One, producing transcripts of President Barack Obama's press
conferences and speeches. She joins a team of D.C. insiders who hopscotch the globe, from Senegal to
Tanzania to Stonehenge, all in service to their country and to the man they call POTUS.
"The people who make the president look good on these trips often look terrible and feel even worse,"
Dorey-Stein writes. "It is degrading and embarrassing and awkward when a twenty-two-year-old advance
person scolds you for disappearing to the bathroom, and when you're so hungry you eat three bags of stale
cookies in front of a vanful of trigger-happy photographers. Civility takes a backseat to survival as you chug
water, throw elbows and down half a bottle of Advil. You work through the pain to keep up with the action.
Ballets are full of bloody slippers."
Yet the few chosen to serve the president also form intense bonds, and they get a front seat to history.
Dorey-Stein and her colleagues bear witness to the White House response to the tragedy of the Sandy Hook
Elementary School shooting and the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. She forms a tight band of friends within
"the Bubble"--her name for the president's cliquish traveling entourage--and she begins an ill-fated romance
with a magnetic yet noncommittal senior staffer.
Dorey-Stein offers a generous, vivid portrait of what it's like to work at the epicenter of power when your
job is to stay out of the spotlight. She navigates heartbreak, career indecision and friendship like virtually
every 20-something. But unlike other young women, she does it all in the shadow of the White House.
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Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Scribner, Amy. "FROM THE CORNER OF THE OVAL." BookPage, July 2018, p. 24. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A544601894/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=784b110a.
Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A544601894
QUOTED: "Even readers who enjoy a mix of romance and politics may tire of the countless I'm-so-lucky, how-is-this-my-life exclamations."
"Gossipy books can be fun; if only this one had been better written."
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Dorey-Stein, Beck: FROM THE
CORNER OF THE OVAL
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Dorey-Stein, Beck FROM THE CORNER OF THE OVAL Spiegel & Grau (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 7, 10
ISBN: 978-0-525-50912-7
Politics and romance among Barack Obama's staffers.
In 2011, 25-year-old Dorey-Stein moved to Washington, D.C., to spend a semester teaching at Sidwell
Friends, the school to which presidents and Congress members send their children. Her job was "to help
those hormonally charged stressballs chill out." She suspected she wouldn't live in "this ego swamp of a
city" for long, however, even after she fell in love with Sam, a Californian who worked on the Obama
campaign in 2008. Then she responded to a Craigslist ad for a stenographer position that turned out to be a
job at the White House. For the next five years, she traveled the world with Obama, recording his speeches
and interviews and releasing official transcripts. The author's focus, however, is not politics but
relationships, most notably her romance with Jason, a senior staff member she initially referred to as Jim
Carrey's doppelganger. Jason cheated on his girlfriend with Dorey-Stein, and Dorey-Stein felt guilty about
cheating on Sam. Before long, Jason cheated on the author, the author confided in female colleagues, a
couple of whom Jason subsequently pursued, and on it went. Much of the book reads more like commercial
fiction than political memoir, with lines such as, "my chest clenches as though my ribs are biting down on
my heart." Even readers who enjoy a mix of romance and politics may tire of the countless I'm-so-lucky,
how-is-this-my-life exclamations and the effusive dialogue. ("We should hang out!" Dorey-Stein told Jason
shortly after they met. "Definitely!" he replied.) The author does provide some interesting behind-thescenes
glimpses: jogging next to Obama on adjacent treadmills; Obama's reminiscing aboard Marine One
about the day he met Michelle; and a genuinely touching section on the 2015 shooting at the Emanuel AME
Church in Charleston, South Carolina, when, after the service, an emotionally drained Obama walked
through Air Force One and uncharacteristically didn't talk to anyone.
Gossipy books can be fun; if only this one had been better written.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Dorey-Stein, Beck: FROM THE CORNER OF THE OVAL." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2018. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536571016/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4f6e2dc2. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536571016
QUOTED: "Dorey-Stein writes with honesty and panache about her fun job and her eventual heartbreak."
"Beltway gossip hounds will hope to hear more from Dorey-Stein."
8/13/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1534214669662 4/4
From the Corner of the Oval
Publishers Weekly.
265.18 (Apr. 30, 2018): p49.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
From the Corner of the Oval
Beck Dorey-Stein. Random/Spiegel & Grau, $28 (352p) ISBN 978-0-525-50912-7
In this hilarious memoir, Dorey-Stein gives an insider's glimpse into the White House from her perch as
Barack Obama's stenographer. In 2012, 25-year-old Stein responded to a Craigslist advertisement to be a
stenographer at a law firm; the "law firm" was the White House. On her first day on the job, she overpacked
and needed to empty the contents of her bag to find her recorder while flying on Air Force One: "Oh, dear
God, my travel-sized hair straightener in its little travel-sized hot pink silk bag looks like a vibrator! Jay
Carney thought I was talking to him, on Air Force One, with a vibrator in my hand." When she forgets her
underwear for another overnight, she notes, "Today, I'll be traveling commando with the commander in
chief." Dorey-Stein traveled with the president's envoy across the world--to Cuba, Mexico, India, and Saudi
Arabia--and to all corners of the U.S. As Dorey-Stein became accustomed to living aboard Air Force One,
she began an affair with a man in the president's inner circle. What follows is pure tragicomedy, and DoreyStein
writes with honesty and panache about her fun job and her eventual heartbreak. It's thrilling to get a
front-row seat to the Obama White House, and she has stayed on with the Trump administration, where the
"West Exec parking lot is no longer filled with Priuses and Chevys but with Porsches and Maseratis."
Beltway gossip hounds will hope to hear more from Dorey-Stein. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"From the Corner of the Oval." Publishers Weekly, 30 Apr. 2018, p. 49. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537852282/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=90c0662c.
Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A537852282
QUOTED: "Dorey-Stein is a lively writer, and her tale makes for fizzy beach reading—evaporating, alas, like many a White House gig after election day."
Fizzy chick lit invades the Oval Office
Matt Damsker
USA Today. (July 19, 2018): Lifestyle: p06D.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Matt Damsker, Special to USA TODAY
An oval office has no corners, logically, and so the title of Beck Dorey-Stein's new memoir, "From the Corner of the Oval" ( Spiegel & Grau, 330 pp., **1/2) is a clever description of her time as a political nonfactor - a stenographer - blending into the woodwork of the Obama administration.
Housed in the vast confines of the EEOB, or Eisenhower Executive Office Building, a city-block-size civic cathedral next to the White House, Dorey-Stein was part of the team tasked with transcribing every public presidential utterance, speech or interview. Not an inconsequential job, but Wesleyan grad Dorey-Stein was overqualified.
The harder part was gaining security clearance. But Dorey-Stein's brief tenure tutoring at Washington's Sidwell Friends School, where the Obama daughters (and Vice President Joe Biden's granddaughters) were enrolled, smoothed her way to a White House post. Before that, she had been kicking around D.C. in the manner of post-graduate aspirants to the good life.
Clearly, this is a chronicle of privilege - flights on Air Force One, accompanying POTUS and the press around the globe, chasing romance and status with other lucky twenty- and thirtysomethings.
Obama is a bit player. Dorey-Stein encounters him at a fitness-center treadmill, and he nods his encouragement amid some casual conversation.
But there's no insight into politics or policy, nor any behind-the-scenes presidential tension. What's at stake, mainly, is the author's love life.
The book offers a steady stream of meet-cute moments, as Dorey-Stein encounters hunky staffers and Secret Service guys.
It shamelessly echoes its chick-lit model, "The Devil Wears Prada," as Dorey-Stein's cohort dish out side-eye and are duly cited for their expensive Tumi luggage and "steep Tory Burch high heels with the circle logo on the toe."
The sense that this is mainly a 300-page treatment for a Saoirse Ronan vehicle or a Netflix series is solidified by the implausible perfection of Dorey-Stein's first D.C. boyfriend, who materializes animatronically on page 14, "tall, with sandy brown hair his bear paw of a hand the sportsman's scruff and moss-green eyes." Their initial breakup is so maudlin, even by rom-com standards, that not even artistic license the size of the EEOB can sell it.
In fairness, Dorey-Stein warns us in a prefatory note that "I've used pseudonyms, composites and other forms of disguise. In some instances, I have rearranged and/or compressed events and time periods in service of the narrative."
In other words, let's not burden things with reality since, you know, you get the idea. Of course, we expect such truthiness from our biopics and docudramas, but in the context of something so recent and so concrete as the Obama administration, this feels like an abdication.
Yes, Dorey-Stein is a lively writer, and her tale makes for fizzy beach reading - evaporating, alas, like many a White House gig after election day.
CAPTION(S):
photo
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Damsker, Matt. "Fizzy chick lit invades the Oval Office." USA Today, 19 July 2018, p. 06D. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A547232791/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=423b3f34. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A547232791
How One Woman Got a Job at the White House Via Craigslist
Beck Dorey-Stein, author of the funny, intimate memoir From the Corner of the Oval, describes how Obama exceeded her (already high) expectations.
by JULIA VITALE
JULY 6, 2018 10:00 AM
Author and former White House stenographer Beck Dorey-Stein.
Photo courtesy of Lawrence Jackson.
Beck Dorey-Stein found the job on Craigslist, and nearly blew it off before she rescheduled. When she did, the recruiter revealed a few more details: “For transparency’s sake, I wanted to let you know this is a job at the White House, and you’d be traveling with the president on his domestic and international trips. Let me know if this changes things.”
From the Corner of the Oval, which will be published on July 10 from Random House’s Spiegel & Grau imprint, tracks Dorey-Stein’s time in the Obama White House, traveling on Air Force One, recording and transcribing the press conferences after major meetings between the president and world leaders, and even exercising next to Obama—“I slow to a stop,” Dorey-Stein writes, “and out of the corner of my eye, I see someone step onto the treadmill to my right. ‘I thought you’d be faster than that,’ he says. I look over to see who this joker is. It’s the president.”
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This isn’t a memoir about policy or politics in the Obama White House, and Dorey-Stein’s admiration for Obama remains primarily in the personal, anecdotal sphere. Instead, the book provides details and insights that a purely journalistic account might leave out, like White House jargon: “the pool,” for the group of 13 reporters and photographers from the White House press corps who travel with the president, and “POTUS” or “the president” for Obama—never his last name. Dorey-Stein describes the shiny red metal pin staffers wear on their shirts, which allows them to go wherever the president goes—“except ‘secondary hold,’ which is code for the bathroom”—and breaks down “bag calls” for Air Force One travelers, which require depositing your suitcase by a certain time each morning, so you don’t have to carry it around all day. (Dorey-Stein writes, “In my rush to make a bag call, I’d packed all my underwear. Today, I’ll be traveling commando with the commander in chief.”)
Watch Now: Liza Koshy Re-Creates Stock Photos
The author remembers ending up in the Mitt Romney press van after a particularly bad Obama debate, Vice President Joe Biden’s penchant for jokes, and showing up for a trip to Petra with “bright green slacks from the Gap.” (The dress code for the trip was “disaster casual.”) But she also recounts the rougher moments of the Obama administration: plummeting approval ratings, a government shutdown, and, most poignantly, national tragedies including the Sandy Hook shooting, the Boston Marathon bombing, the James Foley beheading, and the Charleston and San Bernardino shootings. In a few short, careful paragraphs, Dorey-Stein conveys the grief felt in the White House after each of these disasters, plus the added challenge she faced of transcribing the president’s emotional speeches surrounding the catastrophes: “Back in the [office], I type the remarks with tears streaming down my face, and as the president says the name of each victim, sobs erupt from the crowd.”
In an interview about the book, Dorey-Stein said she took these tragedies with her: “Those experiences haunt you, which is a good thing. I think this country would have evolved a lot faster if everyone had to see what President Obama saw, and had the same compassion that White House had . . . Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.”
The job certainly wasn’t limited to the hilarious experiences she peppers the book with, she says, adding, “I discovered early on I didn’t love sitting in a room typing by myself, which was a real bummer, since it was how I sort of got to keep my seat on Air Force One.” Nevertheless, Dorey-Stein mentions forming close connections with other staffers, and slowly mastering the learning curve: “When I first started, I was very concerned with following protocol and disappearing into a room and being a good stenographer, and the longer I was there, [I realized] you also have to get tough and stand up for yourself.”
The best part of her job, Dorey-Stein readily offered, was “see[ing] President Obama up close, and watching history unfold around him at home, and then also going abroad and seeing how he interacts—especially juxtaposed [with] what we’re seeing now.” The author was nervous, she said, when she first started; having followed Obama through his election campaigns, she worried he would fall short of her expectations. “And then he was so much better.”
It was a particular shock, then, as Obama’s term ended and Donald Trump moved into the White House, to see “Napoleonic clowns swagger through the West Wing in bad suits,” Dorey-Stein writes, “and the female contortionists, who believe bending over in a miniskirt and stilettos is a good idea but a woman’s right to choose isn’t.” Imagining what it’s like for White House stenographers now, Dorey-Stein said, “Well, their job is much easier, because [Trump] uses much smaller words . . . ”