In her 20s, Jennifer Romolini was a divorced college dropout, born to teenaged Italian-American working-class parents. She spent years waiting tables and waded through many an unsuccessful job interview -- finally to score editorial roles at media outlets like Glamour, Yahoo and HelloGiggles. Now the chief content officer for Shonda Rhimes’ soon-to-launch lifestyle site Shondaland, she has published a new book “Weird in a World That’s Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures.” During a recent "Salon Talks" episode, she explained that many people, especially women, are fed images of what success looks like that are just unattainable. Calling this "success porn," she advised people to take a more grounded approach to moving up the career ladder.
What made you stop caring about your "failures"?
I had very little to lose and everything to gain, right?
It’s a very circuitous thing, and you’re just constantly falling and failing and fucking up and getting back up, right? I am weary of the way we talk about success and the ways in which we fetishize it, the ways in which there’s like a “success porn."
What gave you the urge to seek something beyond your hardscrabble upbringing in a rural Pennsylvania town?
I just kept thinking, Well there has to be more for me. . . . And that didn’t mean that like the lightbulb went off and like all of a sudden there was like a golden path and I started walking down it. It was a struggle. I sort of — I was clumsy. I navigated it awkwardly, but I knew I wanted more than what I had.
What do you think of society's popular attitudes and depictions of success, especially among women?
It’s just these ideas we have of what success should look like are. They’re not universally true.
My inbox has — I don’t know — 24,000 messages in it. I will never be an “inbox zero” person. But that doesn’t keep me from being a successful person.
Catch more of our conversation on Salon about reaching toward success, no matter who you are.
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