Which Way, Western Woman?

Picture this: your first marriage, to a billionaire, goes belly-up, and you’re in your 50s, and it’s time for your next act. You have two options. The first is to slap on those fake eyelashes and hitch a ride to space courtesy of your new, even richer fiancé, as Lauren Sánchez did this week. The second is to write a curiously petty memoir. That’s what Melinda French Gates did. The result, The Next Day: Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward, was out this week, and I read it so you don’t have to.

It’s about big life transitions—becoming a mother, dealing with death—-but the only reason anyone’s picking up this clunker is to see what she says about being married to and, after 27 years, splitting up with Bill Gates. (Apparently he, as Melinda put it, “betrayed not only our marriage but my values” by which she means he hung out a bunch with Jeffrey Epstein.)

Woven through the chapters, you might find a poem Melinda is fond of, or a piece of encouragement Oprah gave her, or a poem she likes that Oprah told her about. This book screams “divorced” as loud as a new shiny red convertible, but is as un-fun as the footnotes to an alimony agreement. She drags us through her normal childhood in Dallas, and her time as a computer science major at Duke, before she gets to the goods.

“In the decade or so before my marriage fell apart, my inner voice faded. With it, I lost my center, an essential part of myself,” Melinda writes, which sounds vaguely profound (and vaguely profound is the best The Next Day ever gets). To find herself again, she does a healing ceremony in Scotland that she called “incredibly prayerful and moving,” and goes on an “unforgettable” trip to India, and spends time with her girlfriends “creating a place and space to focus on spirituality and mindfulness.” You can almost hear the glass of sauvignon blanc being placed on the patio furniture, and imagine Melinda wrapping herself in an oatmeal cashmere cardigan and looking across Puget Sound, when she writes about “carving out a quiet refuge inside myself.” Who is this book for? Her and MacKenzie Scott?

Melinda’s healing journey would have been digestible if it was supplemented with some actual reflection on being the first lady of Microsoft and the responsibility that came with it. Instead, in The Next Day, Melinda has two settings: aggrieved and apologetic. In one section she’s complaining about being the only woman in her hiring class at Microsoft (I mean, it worked out, didn’t it?) but in the next she’s apologizing for her “tremendous amount of privilege.” She goes on and on about how she hated that her work at the charitable foundation she set up with her husband—which has distributed over $77 billion—precluded her from spending more time with her three kids. But then she’s quick to say: “I want to be very clear that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with mothers spending time away from their children—not at all.”

Read the full review and commentary by Suzy Weiss: