Say More: Lessons from Work, the White House, and the World

I bought this because I’m a Jen Psaki fanboy. I was looking for memoir of her time as Joe Biden’s press secretary, but that’s not quite what I got.

This is really a self-help title about communicating. Each chapter covers a different theme of how to communicate between people and audiences. Things like –

• How to identify and connect with your audience
• How important it is to do research and planning
• How to give and receive feedback gracefully
• How to have tough conversations
• How to build trust

And so on.

Throughout, she peppers the lessons with stories from her time in the Obama administration, at the State Department, and working for Joe Biden. She’s quite humble, she discusses more of her failures than her successes.

However, it was a little annoying that the war stories were in service of the self-help stuff. Because of that, she jumped back and forth in time a lot. It was hard to keep a narrative thread going, because she was talking about all sorts of jobs, all over her time in Washington.

It’s a overall competent book, but I didn’t get much out of the self-help aspect of it. Did I learn anything new that I’ll use in the future? Probably not.

I really just wanted the story of Psaki’s time in government. I sort of got that, but I had to wade through a lot of fluff.