REVIEW: If It’s Shreveport, It Must Be Tuesday by Marilyn Carr
A sharp, self-deprecating comedy about surviving the dot-com crash, and yourself.
It’s 2001, and tech startups are imploding, taking Marilyn Carr’s brand-new telecom job with them. Four months in, unemployed, and saddled with a terrifying Toronto mortgage, panic would be reasonable. Instead, Marilyn finds material.
A glittering consulting contract rescues her: all-expenses-paid travel across the United States, interviews with high-powered executives, and precious U.S. dollars. But America proves stranger than expected, where weather maps erase Canada and everything is supersized, including the culture shock.
Marilyn’s gift is her ruthless honesty. She skewers her own insecurities as sharply as everyone else’s, saying the things we all think but rarely admit.
As she reinvents herself as a cross-border road warrior, she channels her inner Mary Tyler Moore, determined to make it on her own, mishaps and all.
Review
I’ll admit that the reason I looked at this book is because the title reminds me of an old 60s movie – “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium.” I’ve mentioned before that I like to occasionally see an outsider’s view of the US and here, Carr provides it as she crisscrosses the country, often ending up in smaller, less visited (or at least less mentioned) cities and states.
We begin with a run-down of why Canadian Carr needs a job so much. It’s summer of 2001 and the tech start-up she’s barely worked at has now tanked, her phone calls to all her friends and contacts turn up nothing, she’s got an expensive mortgage to pay by herself, her house’s antique HVAC system is kaput and needs updating, and she’s got a cat to feed. Then, hooray, one contact calls her back but the job sounds boring. Still – see the list of why she needs money.
I frankly don’t understand what she’s doing as I don’t have an MBA but she can do this and it pays $2500 dollars (US) for each company she visits. Carr is not a seasoned traveler as well as someone who hasn’t driven in decades, when she starts but over the course of visiting (often Tristate!) locations (which usually means vanishingly small regional airports and budget airlines or in the case of the [harrowing] trip from RMMA to Denver, a Cessna) she gets her feet under her. Driving lessons in Toronto with Fred get her from white knuckled, ten kilometers below the speed limit to (sorta) being able to manage an interstate tunnel in Pittsburgh. There’s also crossing and recrossing the border while making sure the US border agents don’t think she’s being paid in the US.
The whole time I was reading it, I kept thinking of how easy it is to do stuff like this now with Zoom and indeed, late in the book Carr has to make use of something similar to that to round off the interviews she misses at a Disney World conference due to an attack of norovirus.
The joy of this book is the subtle humor and watching Carr deal with culture shock and go from baby travel steps to managing the inevitable screw-ups and hiccups of flying to places she’s never been and then navigating to often miniscule business locations such as the (then) tiny bungalow headquarters of Sketchers. She gets her interview done, ponders whether or not to take the free swag she’s offered (yes, she can take it but in the case of the sausages from Pittsburgh, it’s better to dump it in the airport ladies room than try and sneak it past the beagle on duty at Pearson International Airport). Carr also amasses a fridge door full of fun magnets from the locations she visits. Ricky the cat is not impressed though. He wants his tuna now. B+
~Jayne
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Is this a memoir or novel? I’m confused by the “based on a true story” on the cover.
@SusanS: It’s a memoir. Maybe she changed some names to protect the innocent? Or guilty?
Anyway – this is in the book.
“Marilyn Carr is an MFA graduate from the from the University of King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia, which is her fourth degree but who’s counting? (She is.) Her first memoir, Nowhere like This Place: Tales from a Nuclear Childhood, was published in 2020, followed by How I Invented the Internet in 2022. If It’s Shreveport, It Must be Tuesday is the third installment of her life story. She clearly has a lot to say about herself. You can find her musings about the absurdness of everyday life at http://www.marilyncarr.com.”