Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?: And Other Questions You Should Have Answers to When You Work in the White House

by Alyssa Mastromonaco

The quickest way for people to lose confidence in your ability to ever make a decision is for you to pass the buck, shrug your shoulders, or otherwise wuss out.

I thought it wouldn’t work, but I didn’t know it wouldn’t work, so I didn’t say anything. That might be the difference between men and women: Women need to know they are right before they stand up. Men are OK objecting if they just think they might be right. I thought, but I didn’t know.

There is no bigger compliment than being intellectually curious about what someone else spends his or her days doing—it turned out that not having the answers did me no harm.

Some very simple but useful advice: Always ask to see where you’ll be sitting.

What I did think about was the fact that I would forever be looked at funny by other people, who, deep down, probably pity me for not having kids. That was the truly sad part.

One of my favorite documentaries is The September Issue, about the making of the biggest issue of Vogue of the year. In the film, Anna Wintour talks about how her dad knew it was time to leave the London Evening Standard—he said it was because he had started getting angry.

I didn’t realize what an important part of my life Shrummie was until he got sick. As I had moved around the country, he was the constant; he made all the random apartments I’d lived in feel like home.

Before I registered what was happening, I was on the phone with POTUS. “I heard we lost Shrummie today,” he said. “There are a lot of sad faces up here on Air Force One right now. You should know—I’m pretty sure we saw his spirit up here over Denali.”

Barack Obama, graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, broker of normalized relations between the United States and Cuba, and the nation’s first black president, does not have time to call a 39-year-old woman to offer his condolences for the loss of her cat. It’s bordering on an episode of Broad City. I said something like, “I really appreciate this call. I know this is awful.” “He’s been around since the beginning,” he replied.

I think a “serious” woman can also be a crazy cat lady, and I will be rescuing cats until someone has to rescue me.