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Ever since she was just a young girl, Lori Jakiela—the only adopted daughter of her father, a Pittsburgh steel worker who called other people “cockroaches,” and her mother, a part-time nurse—wanted to leave small-town life behind. Lori was going to be a star. She was going to be a beauty queen or a musician or a famous poet—someone with a glamorous life.
But instead of the glamorous life she’d dreamed of, Lori finds herself in dead-end relationships, working as a reporter for a small-town paper. Even after getting a master’s in poetry, she ends up teaching writing at the university. So when she sees an ad in the paper searching for flight attendants to be based in New York City, she sees it as her opportunity to finally live a glamorous life. She pictures her new life like Marlo Thomas’s in That Girl—a TV show that she watched religiously as a kid. She sees herself in a stylish uniform, becoming a sophisticated world-traveler, relaxing in cafés in Paris before returning to her stylish Big City apartment. So she packs her bags and leaves Pennsylvania behind.
Unfortunately, Lori’s jet-setting big-city life isn’t what she dreamed it would be. Though her job has a few bright spots, she often feels like she’s just another part of the plane. She deals with rude, demanding, and often drunk passengers. She wears ugly flammable polyester uniforms, and her hair and nails are styled to airline regulation. And instead of three-day layovers in Paris, she often ends up with eight hours in Cincinnati—or Germany, where her limited knowledge of the German language can get her a beer and little else.
When Lori’s father is diagnosed with cancer, she starts to spend more and more time back home—and she begins to look at her life, her family, and the dreams she once had from a new perspective.
Miss New York Has Everything is an open and honest memoir, full of both laughter and tears. Jakiela deftly tells the story of her life—not just the flight-attendant part of it—and she’s not afraid to share her hopes and dreams, her failures, or her less-than-glamorous moments. She definitely has plenty of stories to tell—about the things she’s done, the people she’s met, and the things she’s learned along the way. Her anecdotes will grab your attention, and her light, witty style will have you coming back for more.
Miss New York isn’t the least bit preachy, but it might cause you to take a minute to look at your life and think about what’s really important to you. And, if nothing else, it’ll at least make you think twice before complaining to your exhausted flight attendant about the quality of the food.
