Tryhard: A Cautionary Tale of Clocking In and Spinning Out – A Memoir and Satire of Workplace Culture

by Laura Mayer

"Funny, brutally honest and compulsively readable.” — BookPage, STARRED review

"An insightful, funny, and refreshingly personal journey into workaholism and the pathological Type A mind." — Cat Marnell, New York Times bestselling author of How to Murder Your Life

A superstar podcast producer delivers a unique, laugh-out-loud, cry quietly invitation to examine our delusional obsessions with work in this eye-opening book—part memoir, part mentoring, part confessional guide—that dissects the emotional ties that bind us . . . to our desks.

For any type-A, high achiever out there, this is the book that sees you. And provides a cathartic, funny, emotionally charged insight into what drives the perfection-oriented.

Laura Mayer was born a girlboss. As a child in suburban Illinois, she played "V.P. of Sales" in her bedroom, dictating important memos to her twin brother and swapping Judy Blume for the buzzy business books of the day. While other kids dreamed of being pop stars or pro athletes, little Laura had a single-minded the corporate ladder.

Some thirty years later, from a dizzying perch on that very ladder—as Executive Producer of Podcasts at ABC News, with such blockbuster shows as Revisionist History, Bad Blood, and Happier with Gretchen Rubin to her credit—and with an identity shaped by annual reviews, performance indicators, and “executive presence” (whatever that means) a disillusioned Laura is calling "bullshit" on the whole work-is-life thing. Sort of.

Tryhard is a gonzo memoir for 9-to-5 devotees who have read every business book and C-suite-or-bust instruction manual yet still find we’re burnt out and unhappy. It is also a deeply personal and poignant examination of why we race at all. Laura detangles this delusional mess of priorities we've created, rejects the “boss-at-any-cost” culture, and invites us to laugh at ourselves (and her) along the way. She offers the modern office worker a new path forward through her own revelations, and implores us, for the love of God, to chill out a little bit.

This is Laura's messy, somewhat enlightened, possibly transformative, heart-wrenching and always entertaining story—a one-of-a-kind sightseeing trip on the Great American hamster wheel.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Humor, Biography Memoir

288 pages, Hardcover

Published July 7, 2026

Reviews

[Jack Panyard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird reading this one as I used to work for Laura. She writes with a really witty, vulnerable, and self-deprecating perspective, which works well for the subject matter, and paints a colorful picture of her professional life. I thought she would diagnose more of a cure for tryhard-ness through her experiences, but it seems like she's still working it out.

Learned a lot about the business I used to work for through this. A bit eye opening, and I appreciate the candor Laura delivered it with.

[He N · Rating 5 out of 5]

Laura was my boss from 2015-2016 and my mind was blown reading about our time working together in particular, but also the whole scope of the podcast boom in general, from her point of view. Really rare to read a book where you’ve witnessed the same events and had such wildly different experiences. Also she was a great boss, always.

Really laugh out loud funny book. So many jokes. Such an oddly delightful brain. Also this book is mostly about trauma, and is deeply personal and honest, which makes it that much more impressive that it’s so funny.

I think I have a lot in common with Laura but also, man, we really don’t think about jobs the same way. Pretty cool to realize that’s how the world works.

Congrats Laura! Amazing book, write another.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Chart Before the Career
Laura Mayer’s “Tryhard” is a funny, bruising memoir about the childhood vigilance that becomes adult competence – and then adult peril.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | July 9th, 2026

Don’t trust the job titles. In Laura Mayer’s “Tryhard,” executive producer, podcast strategist, startup operator, corporate manager, intern, assistant, and side hustler all matter, but none is the first job. First comes the child’s unpaid household shift: monitoring her mother’s drinking, forecasting adult danger, managing the weather in the house, and making family catastrophe small enough to chart. Before Mayer learns to read a room at work, she learns to read the room at home. Before she becomes good at preparation, production, narrative control, and emotional triage, she is keeping “The Chart.”

Every later skill seems to pass through that graph paper. Mayer’s chart, which rates her mother’s intoxication by level, is the book’s first control panel: a child’s attempt to make fear numerical, visible, sortable. Mayer is very funny about her adult talent for turning dread into tasks – the Pavlok shock alarm, the refrigerator QR code, the stressful cake-serving game before the stressful real job, the dollhouse research conducted with the zeal of a zoning board – but the comedy sharpens, rather than softens, the point. Her try-hardness is not a personality quirk. It is a method of making adults predictable enough to live with, later promoted, salaried, and praised.

Mayer organizes the memoir as a sequence of “Job” chapters, with “Job 1” returning in three installments. At first, the labels have a comic neatness. Then they begin to close in. Girl Scouts are a job. School is a job. Interning is a job. So are side-hustling, sobriety, mentoring, motherhood, dressing like a plausible executive, avoiding panic on the train, negotiating with landlords, and telling bedtime stories about a stuffed orange cat. The repeated “Job 1” sections keep breaking open the career narrative to reveal the hidden employer: the alcoholic household that trained Mayer to anticipate everything except her own limits.

Early on, the book moves through childhood and adolescence with an unsparing eye for suburbia’s silent ledger: braces, snacks, tutors, bedrooms, cars, vacations, other people’s mothers. Mayer’s New Trier world is not poor, but it is full of proximity to ease she cannot possess. Achievement becomes an escape route, a passport, a receipt for future safety. Northwestern becomes a reinvention fantasy; libraries and teachers become shelters; one encouraging remark about her writing opens a door that home has not opened for her. The comedy in these chapters is brisk, but the hunger has an address.

Those adult chapters carry that hunger into public radio and podcasting, where Mayer’s childhood habits – preparation, room-reading, anticipatory repair – become billable. She interns, errs, survives public humiliation, works for WNYC, side-hustles, stops drinking, rides the podcast boom, and enters the startup world’s fog machine of confidence, branded enthusiasm, slippery equity, and men with very large ideas about themselves. Mayer writes especially well about the audio boom because she knows the machinery from inside: branded content, executive producers, table reads, celebrity talent, founder weather, and the fluorescent glamour of standing close to money that may or may not exist.

Rather than make work only the villain, Mayer keeps its double bookkeeping visible. Work rescues her: it gives her money, competence, friends, language, health insurance, a washer/dryer, a book, and some genuine pride. Work also exploits her, inflames her, rewards her for self-erasure, and dresses her childhood emergency system in a better blazer. “Tryhard” is stronger than a standard burnout memoir because it does not stop at exhaustion. It asks why overwork can feel like care, why usefulness can feel like love, and why the body may have to revolt before the mind admits that no actual emergency is being solved.

Its better shelf-neighbors are books about dependency and devotion gone crooked, not ordinary career confession. Caroline Knapp’s “Drinking: A Love Story” is a clarifying ghost here, not because Mayer’s memoir is mainly about her own drinking, but because it helps illuminate the addictive logic that migrates from alcohol to effort. Sarah Jaffe’s “Work Won’t Love You Back” hovers near the labor argument, though Mayer is less polemical and less willing to acquit herself. Anna Wiener’s “Uncanny Valley” offers a neighboring view of startup disillusionment, but Mayer is hotter, more domestic, more comic, and more openly governed by panic.

Page by page, the sentences keep ringing – bright, quick, a little over-caffeinated. Mayer works in a comic-confessional rhythm: riff, aside, object, humiliation, workplace term, emotional trapdoor. Her sentences often feel as though they have had coffee, checked Slack, drafted a pitch deck, texted Danny, and then remembered a childhood wound while waiting for the Q train. The speed is not polish applied to chaos. It is the mechanism itself: feeling becomes copy, embarrassment becomes anecdote, alarm becomes sequence.

A lot of Mayer’s self-criticism hides in the nouns. Pavlok, Apple Watch, O’Keeffe’s Working Hands, Invisalign, Gucci loafers, Red Lobster, La Colombe, Brightwheel, Tender Leaf Toys – the inventory is comic, but it is also social weather. These objects price and costume the self. They soothe it, expose it, sometimes betray it. Mayer is an inventory artist, and her inventories are rarely neutral. She does not need to announce longing when a dollhouse, an acacia table, or a washer/dryer can quietly expose it.

Part of the pleasure of “Tryhard” is that objects keep testifying against themselves. The Pavlok is discipline as self-harm with app compatibility. The acacia table is domestic prophecy disguised as furniture. The org chart is a cry for recognition in corporate diagram form. The father’s Carlo Rossi jug chart, with tick marks tracking moods as wine disappears, is The Chart’s darkest family funhouse mirror. The Gray House is not only a nice house in Brooklyn; it is safety dressed as real estate, class longing with window treatments, a future with original molding. Even the washer/dryer, secured through a strategically drafted landlord email, becomes a domestic monument to one less ordeal.

A tidier memoir might have used the “Job” sequence as a filing system; Mayer turns it into a trapdoor. Her career arc could have been a résumé with sharper jokes, but the recurring “Job 1” chapters make the shape circular and more damaging. The first return brings back the frightening childhood scene: glass, meat, liquor, her mother collapsed behind a door, a frying pan, a 911 call, police, and then the family’s legal and emotional machinery of denial. The final return carries the long aftermath: the father rationing alcohol, the mother’s fall, detox, illness, estrangement, stroke, eventual phone calls, and the apology that finally releases Mayer from the job no child should have been assigned.

Domestic space, not the office, is the book’s real floor plan. Mayer spends much of the memoir trying to build or buy proof that she is safe. She wants a house. Then she wants a better apartment. Then a table where future children will do homework. Then a dollhouse for Joanna, though the intensity of the dollhouse research suggests Joanna is not the only intended beneficiary. Then an in-unit washer/dryer, which becomes the book’s comic sacrament of practicality. The movement from Gray House to dollhouse to washer hum is one of Mayer’s finest acts of scale. She begins with grand acquisition fantasy and ends with a machine that can handle tiny soiled underpants.

It is easy to mock that change of scale, and Mayer, being Mayer, gets there first. She puts the washer/dryer victory on LinkedIn, because of course she does. But the joke works because the longing is real. In a memoir so alert to the way work converts fear into tasks, the washer/dryer is not trivial. It removes one recurring ordeal from the family’s week. It gives Sunday morning back. It makes peace sound like infrastructure. No title, no startup windfall, no glamorous job has given her anything quite as useful as the right to wash her child’s clothes without mounting an expedition.

Motherhood matters here because Joanna is watching. Not judging, not interpreting – watching, which is more unnerving. Joanna does not cure Mayer, and the book is better for denying itself that easy comfort. Instead, she changes the question. Mayer is not only asking what work has done to her; she is asking what kind of working self her daughter will see. The chapter on “Mommy Workin’” is among the book’s sharpest, especially when Joanna’s toy email collapses obedience, labor, and love into a child’s sentence: “Dear boss. Yes. I did the work and I love you.” It is funny, horrible, and almost too perfect, a miniature corporate document from the nursery floor.

In answer, Mayer invents Cookie, Joanna’s stuffed orange cat and Mayer’s plush counterlife. Cookie writes books about Joanna, takes walks, visits bakeries, stacks books at the library, attends readings, and enjoys a writing life organized around curiosity rather than dread. He is ridiculous, but not frivolous. Cookie is the writer without the roil, the worker without the costume, the devoted parent who can leave the house and return with delight rather than office shrapnel. If the Gray House is the fantasy of safety as property, Cookie is the fantasy of safety as temperament.

The phrase “corporate mommy” sounds at first like a bit, and then it keeps getting less funny. Mayer uses it to name the worker, often a woman, expected to soothe, absorb, interpret, stabilize, and patch problems built into the beams without real authority to repair them. She is not content to scold workplaces for exploiting this role; she recognizes her own attraction to it. She knows how to be needed. She knows how to read the temperature, manage the difficult person, protect the team from volatility, and mistake indispensability for power. “Corporate mommy” sounds like a joke until it becomes a family history with office lighting.

Roger, the chaotic founder figure in the middle chapters, is where the memoir’s appetite nearly outruns its shape. He is vivid: ink-stained, grandiose, performative, allergic to budgets, convinced of millions, useful to the narrative in the way storms are useful to weather reports. Through him, Mayer shows how easily a childhood pattern can find a new office address. She manages his moods, translates his rage, shields the team, and tries to keep the company from collapsing. The section is often gripping, but Roger threatens to become a rival weather system, less a figure in Mayer’s pattern than a competing center of gravity.

Occasionally the book brings too many receipts to a claim it has already proved. Mayer’s mind is quick and connective, and “Tryhard” sometimes wants to show every tab it has open. A sharper version might have trimmed a few workplace loops or allowed a few wounds to sit in quieter air. The later material at the storied news organization is emotionally important but less specific about the institutional machinery than the podcast and startup chapters. We feel Mayer’s panic and constriction, but the workplace itself is more veiled, less available to the same X-ray vision.

Proportion, though, is not the same as tidiness. Some of the book’s excess belongs to its subject. This is a memoir about someone who overprepares, overexplains, overfunctions, and tries to earn safety by producing evidence; of course it sometimes behaves like a try-hard. The recurring objects, the “Job 1” returns, the mother-daughter arc, and the ending’s change of scale keep the abundance from scattering. The book has more design than its speed first advertises.

Often, when the career story tries to keep moving, the body argues back. Panic attacks, fainting, hair loss, pregnancy complications, HELLP syndrome, depersonalization, medication, sweat, tears after yoga – the body refuses the fantasy in which enough competence will solve everything. When Mayer works from the ER or wonders how little maternity leave she can take after a medical crisis, the book’s comedy turns wintry. Her mind can still produce tasks. Her body has begun saying no in a language no manager can put in a deck.

Underneath the comedy, Mayer never pretends ambition itself was the wrong desire, which is part of the book’s honesty. She wants distance from chaos, a good job, dental insurance, health insurance, rent security, money for her child, a home, respect, and work that uses her abilities. These are not shallow wants. The danger comes when even reasonable desires are wired to the old alarm. The problem is not that Mayer wants too much. It is that wanting has been trained to feel like a code blue.

Like many strong comic memoirists, Mayer sometimes hides in plain sight. The jokes arrive so quickly that a reader may mistake them for deflection, and occasionally they are. But more often they are how truth gets through when solemnity would be false to the mind on the page. Mayer’s humor is self-skewering, elastic, and usually warm, less interested in dunking on others than in catching herself mid-performance: there she is, in the blazer, the loafers, the panic, the LinkedIn update, the tiny wallpaper for the dollhouse.

Once Mayer’s mother apologizes, the book’s weather changes. The apology does not repair the childhood, and Mayer does not pretend it does. But when her mother acknowledges “everything” and tells Mayer she is a better mother than she was, the old job finally loosens. Mayer understands that her mother never accepted the help she tried to give. Joanna, by contrast, does. The final “little hurricane” image reverses the household weather system: the mother’s hurricane had to be monitored; the daughter’s hurricane wants, needs, and accepts love. That is not cure. It is redirection.

Smallness is the ending’s discipline. Mayer does not buy the Gray House. She does not quit work forever. She does not become a serene person who drinks herbal tea at 5 p.m. and lets emails age naturally in the inbox like artisanal cheese. On Halloween, she sees the neighborhood mansions, the revelers, the party behind the door, the Gray House gone dark, the person on the stoop wearing a cardboard box over their head. The fantasy has become too strange to worship. My final rating is 85/100, which translates to a Goodreads-compatible 4/5 stars: a high, admiring score for a memoir whose finest insight is that, for a try-hard, the radical ending is not triumph but stillness. Back home, Joanna sorts candy, the washer/dryer hums, the dollhouse waits for wallpaper, and the apartment is not the dream but is, briefly, enough – no next step, no chart to update, only the sound of the machine doing its small, necessary work.

[Courtney · Rating 5 out of 5]

I couldn’t put it down. Laura’s voice is so rich, vulnerable, and funny. I literally laughed aloud on plane. Somehow, even though my life circumstances are so much different from hers, it’s still deeply relatable. She’s got a real gift!

[Serena · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley & HarperOne for a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Nora McInerny recommended this book and as a forever Tryhard myself, I knew I needed to request it. What I didn’t expect was to find a moving and self aware memoir into being a try-hard, and how we can advocate for ourselves and set boundaries. I don’t know how much I’ve learned from this book - except maybe I’m not alone in my need to pursue perfection - but I laughed out loud at so many stories and felt a kindred spirit in Laura.

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am the tryhard, the anxious overachiever, the one who has wanted it all and tried to climb the ladders. As such, I've devoured books that support me on the rise and fall of my ambitious career. Perhaps that's why Laura Mayer's Tryhard left me wanting. Or perhaps it's the long list of subtitles that don't quite capture that this is a series of essays about how childhood trauma impacts how you show up at work.

With Tryhard we get a story of her challenging childhood and how she careened around a podcasting career, which Mayer wants you to know has been with Very Important People and at Very Prestigious Companies. At no point, however, did I get the sense that she was working hard? Long hours, sure, but was she achieving? Unclear.

What I did really appreciate is how open and raw Mayer is about the bad and the ugly aspects of prioritizing jobs over life. Her writing is strong and her voice is consistent and clear. I spent most of the book annoyed and frustrated. As someone who has always struggled to balance work and life, this is perhaps the underlying theme of Tryhard - if you don't find balance in your life, you'll lose your sanity, your peace, and maybe even the job you were chasing.

Thanks to NetGalley for an advanced copy - glad I read it, even though my version of tryhard wasn't reflected in the pages.

[Katie Camden · Rating 5 out of 5]

A sharply witty memoir following the author’s podcasting career path features plenty of relatable experiences and anecdotes for just about anyone who has ever held a job! You don’t need to work in radio or podcasting to find the humor and entertainment in this book. Her life struggles including a lack of familial support also feature in the book. I enjoyed her stories and the dry manner in which she delivers them. Thanks to NetGalley and HarperOne for the ARC.

[Sarah Flocken · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished this book in two days because I saw so much of myself in it! It’s stuck with me so much that I told my therapist about it in my 284857th conversation with her about how worthless I feel if I’m not smart/productive/*~crushing it at my work. She said I too was a tryhard. 🙃 This is an excellent read for anyone who has pegged their self-worth to achievement at work.

[Emily Cyr Miller · Rating 2.75 out of 5]

I found this kind of annoying. It felt disjointed - was this about her childhood? Her corporate burnout? The American dream? I also am a little tired of people that overwork themselves having to talk about jt like they’re so special..

[JXR · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic memoir about keeping track of yourself and giving yourself time to get self-care. 5 stars. thanks for the arc.

[Steve Brock · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have selected this book as Stevo's Business Book of the Week for the week of 8/16, as it stands heads above other recently published books on this topic.

[Venneh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I mean, as a way to spend your time while being newly unemployed because NPR's funding got cut by Trump, this is certainly a way to spend it. Tries to advocate for learning to set boundaries and not making work your entire personality but ends up coming off more like she's missing the environment more than she lets on. Solid enough read.

[Jeannette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I. loved. This. Book.

As a fellow elder millennial with enough self-awareness to know that some of our behavior is borderline unhinged (and a little dorky), I immediately connected with this. The author fully owns those tendencies and uses them to her advantage whenever possible. As someone clinically diagnosed with OCD (and actively working on it in therapy), I understand fixations, and a lot of what she describes felt very familiar.

If you love 30 Rock, you’ll love this book. The author is driven enough to buy all the hot dogs from a hot dog cart just to accomplish a goal.

Being a Tryhard extends far beyond your career, even though work is often a major focus. It encompasses personal goals, both big and small, and the commitment to do what it takes to achieve them. While the book is primarily a memoir, the experiences she shares gently reveal how our habits and ways of thinking shape our lives, encouraging reflection and growth without judgment.

I came away feeling heard. I feel similar to the author in so many ways: the way we talk, the self depreciation and the random obsessions that can be all consuming. We are both way too hard on ourselves to an extreme extent. Most strikingly is the drive to care to much when the best thing to do is to not take every single thing to heart.

[Kelly · Rating 2 out of 5]

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