Sunnyvale: The Rise and Fall of a Silicon Valley Family - Hardcover

Goodell, Jeff

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679456988 ISBN 13: 9780679456988

Publisher: Villard, 2000

Synopsis

"Hi, it's Jeff." Silence. "Your grandson," I added.
"Oh. Yes. Jeff. How are you?"
I told him I'd like to stop by and introduce him to my wife.
"Great," he said, sounding genuinely surprised. "Why don't you come by and pet the robots?"

In Sunnyvale, California, in 1979, Jeff Goodell's family lived quietly on Meadowlark Lane, unaware that their town was soon to become ground zero in the digital revolution. Then one day his mother announced that she and his father were divorcing after twenty years of marriage. Big deal, thought Jeff. "Everybody we knew was splitting up-it was the romantic equivalent of the pet-rock craze." Over the next decade, Silicon Valley boomed, and the Goodell family unraveled. Sunnyvale: The Rise and Fall of a Silicon Valley Family is the story of a fragile, all-too-ordinary family caught at the epicenter of one of the great economic, cultural, and technological explosions in recent history.

After the divorce, Goodell's mother went to work for a little company called Apple Computer and began her ascent into the new world; his father, a landscape contractor who valued plants and trees over bits and bytes, found himself alone and falling farther and farther behind. For the Goodell children, the aftershocks brought pain and confusion: Jeff ran off to Lake Tahoe and the fast track to nowhere; his younger brother, Jerry, began a nightmarish descent into drugs, alcohol, and sexual experimentation; and eleven-year-old Jill bounced between two houses, struggling to make sense of her shattered world.

Watching it all was grandfather Leonard Goodell, a Westinghouse ur-geek who-even in his late seventies-still had enough mental horsepower to work as a lead engineer in a robotics factory. But as Leonard watched his son's family fall apart, he realized his worldly success had not come without a human cost, and near the end of his life he began his own quest for forgiveness and redemption.

Sunnyvale is a portrait of a way of life that is no more, in a place where progress runs wild. It is about individuals struggling to make lives for themselves in a brutally Darwinian world. Above all, it is about what we owe to the people we love. A unique and compelling family story, it is also a resonant document of our age.

About this title

About the Author

Jeff Goodell is the author of The Cyberthief and the Samurai. He is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, and his work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Wired, and GQ. A fourth-generation Californian, he now lives in upstate New York. He can be e-mailed at jg@well.com.

From the Back Cover

"This is a riveting memoir, hard to stop reading and hard to forget. It is slyly presented as being about life in the high-tech economy, but it's really about Life."
-James Fallows


I loved the word Sunnyvale. It was different from the names of the towns around us-like San Jose and Palo Alto and San Francisco, which had a dreamy, old Spanish romance about them. And it was not a name like Silicon Valley, which Sunnyvale was right in the middle of, but which always made me think of breasts and robots. The word Sunnyvale had utopian flair. It suggested to me that I lived in a special place-a world of sunshine and progress, of new gizmos and old fruit trees, where life promised to be a rocket ride across friendly skies. Streets were named after birds and flowers, and I could walk all the way to school on beautifully curving sidewalks, and my fourth-grade class took field trips to buildings where people smashed atoms and built satellites. How could I not feel lucky? I lived in a place where, as my mother often counseled me after a hard day, "everything will work out okay."
And for a long time, I believed her.

From the Inside Flap

Hi, it's Jeff." Silence. "Your grandson," I added.<br>"Oh. Yes. Jeff. How are you?"<br>I told him I'd like to stop by and introduce him to my wife.<br>"Great," he said, sounding genuinely surprised. "Why don't you come by and pet the robots?"</i><br><br>In Sunnyvale, California, in 1979, Jeff Goodell's family lived quietly on Meadowlark Lane, unaware that their town was soon to become ground zero in the digital revolution. Then one day his mother announced that she and his father were divorcing after twenty years of marriage. Big deal, thought Jeff. "Everybody we knew was splitting up-it was the romantic equivalent of the pet-rock craze." Over the next decade, Silicon Valley boomed, and the Goodell family unraveled. <b>Sunnyvale: The Rise and Fall of a Silicon Valley Family</b> is the story of a fragile, all-too-ordinary family caught at the epicenter of one of the great economic, cultural, and technological explosions in r

Reviews

The Silicon Valley bubble burst early for Goodell, who tossed away a plum gig at the pre-IPO Apple Computer to hustle blackjack tables at Lake Tahoe, becoming "the worst-dressed dealer in the state of Nevada." Yet that missed opportunity has been the least of his worries, he relates in this deeply emotional memoir about the ups and downsAmostly downsAof a "suburban American post-divorce, post-nuclear family." The implicit optimism in the name Sunnyvale, the Valley suburb where Goodell grew up in the late 1970s, proves grimly ironic as his father, a failed landscape contractor, dives into an emotional tailspin after a 1979 divorce and eventually succumbs to lung cancer. His mother, meanwhile, suffers scars from a burnt-out marriage she never wanted. The centerpiece of the book is Goodell's "nightmare of co-dependency" with his wildly unstable younger brother, a promising musician who pickled himself with alcohol before he was ravaged by AIDS. Caught in the middle of it all, Goodell describes himself as a vacant lot polluted by family toxins; this memoir is his remediation project, an attempt to sift through the lingering emotional sludge in search of some purifying understanding of the family's implosion. While the high-tech Valley subtext is not without interest (Apple gurus Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak make cameo appearances), Goodell's real subject is the paternal negligence that was carried from father to son through three generations in his family. Now a successful journalist in New York with children of his own, Goodell writes with more raw power than literary polish, ending with a hopeful vow to break the cycle of dysfunctional dads. Agent, Flip Brophy. 5-city tour. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Techie journalist Goodell (The Cyberthief and the Samurai, not reviewed) presents a touching family portrait as well as an acute look at the social implications of the information age.Goodell's story (named for his bright California hometown) opens in 1979, when, after 21 years of marriage, Goodell's mother tells her children that she and their father are getting divorced. This was no crisis to Goodell, who recalls thinking that divorce felt more like a step into the modern world than the breaking of a sacred covenant. But the split proves to be the first of many dark clouds in his family's future, and Goodell is much more of a family guy than this initial reaction suggests. He documents and tries to reason with the slow breakdown of a family he loves dearly--a grandfather who valued engineering over family, a father destroyed by divorce, a mother who learns computer code and remarries, a brother ravaged by drugs and alcohol, and a sister struggling amidst the confusion. Goodell also speaks sincerely of his own rebellions, passions, and adventures--and of his love-hate relationship with technology. He races bikes, works a short stint at a company known by the funny name of Apple Computer, leaves home to work in a Lake Tahoe casino, discovers love and journalism, and continually worries about his family. Founded on family history and set in the accelerating world of Silicon Valley, Goodell's story is linked meaningfully to the past and the future in his attempt to explain addiction, disease, desire, jealousy, and regret by finding the faulty line of code that causes the whole system to crash. And, in trying (unsuccessfully) to explain it all through scientific logic, he proves that love is not a quantifiable entity. Anyone who has ever had a family or a computer can relate to Goodell's story. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Just when we were starting to think that everybody in Silicon Valley must be a carefree gazillionaire, Goodell comes along to root us in reality with this sobering portrait of his dysfunctional Sunnyvale, CA. Goodell (The Cyberthief and the Samurai), a contributing editor to Rolling Stone, presents a moving memoir of his family's growth and disintegration over the last 40 years, paradoxically juxtaposed against the screaming, relentless drive to wealth and success in his hometown, which happens to be in the middle of Silicon Valley. From the belly of the beast comes a mindful story that will resonate with countless thousands of other families as they struggle with multiple divorces, alcohol and drug abuse, parent-child identity traumas, and emotionally distant relatives. While certainly not as extraordinary a memoir as Mary Karr's The Liar's Club (LJ 6/1/95), this heartfelt yet respectful family portrait is an admirable addition to the rapidly growing ranks of books that cathartically write out the traumas of the past. It's useful to be reminded how bound we are to family and how common family anguish is, permeating even the gilt-edged homes in Silicon Valley.DDale Farris, Groves, TX
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Rolling Stone contributing editor Goodell, who has also written for Wired and the New Republic, grew up in the '60s and '70s in Silicon Valley's Sunnyvale, a name that seemed to promise "a world of sunshine and progress, of new gizmos and old fruit trees." It wasn't that simple, of course, especially once his parents decided to divorce when Jeff, eldest of three, was 19. Family dysfunction rings strange chords in Sunnyvale: one of his mother's first jobs is at Apple, and her career rises as his father loses control of her family's landscaping business. Jeff works briefly for Apple himself, but he finds it boring and takes off for Lake Tahoe, where he works for casinos and wastes time. Brother Jerry tries for rock-and-roll stardom but crashes and burns; sister Jill, the youngest, has problems in school and rejects every man her mom dates. Silicon Valley's adrenaline-charged rise is a background presence in this glimpse of those who caught that wave and those left stranded in its wake. Mary Carroll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

He gave me a small smile--more of a nod, really--that said, "I'm here with you, my brother, I did not let you down." And he didn't. He presented the ring on cue, and I was conscious of his eyes upon me as I said, "I do" and then leaned over to kiss Michele with enough happiness to rip her dress. We turned around and walked down the aisle, flashing past four generations of family faces, the great warmth beaming from my father, my mother's tears, my sister with a bouquet of flowers in her hand, Pop in his white jacket and a western string tie, Nan snapping pictures, Michele's mother and father and relatives from Germany, uncles and aunts and nephews and second cousins, many of them strangers to me, but all of us linked by blood and history.

The reception was held on a basketball court in a nearby community center. The mariachi band tuned up as we poured champagne and filled our plates with red snapper. When the moment for the toast came, I glanced at my father, whose eyes were fixed with concern on Jerry--he seemed poised to jump up and tackle him if he said a wrong word. I knew Jerry had been working on his speech for months. He had called me a half-dozen times in the middle of the night and said, "What do you want me to say?" And I had always told him the same thing: "Whatever you want." I knew that he had looked at books of wedding toasts and quizzed our mother, our father, our sister, my closest friends. I was prepared for anything.

Jerry rapped his spoon against his champagne glass. The room quieted. All heads turned toward him. He rose unsteadily, his glass in hand. He looked around the room. He started to say something, then caught himself. He seemed confused, not sure what to do. Finally he said--no, blurted--"To Jeff and Michele. I love them both to death." He looked like he wanted to say more, but tears began to flow, and he sat down quickly.


CHAPTER 20

After the wedding, I thought things were calming down in my family. It'd been eight years since my parents' divorce; the hurt and anger of the split was dissipating. Jerry seemed to be finding his balance; Jill was holding down a good job; my mother and father were both in love again. And I was as happily married as a man could be.

As time passed, I began to see that what had happened to my family was by no means unusual, nor was it particularly nasty, as far as divorces went. And frankly, I was sick of thinking about it. Okay, so my parents split up. Get over it. Whenever I was asked what happened to my parents' marriage--as I often was at parties in Manhattan, where expatriate suburbanites of my generation swapped tales of our parents' divorces as if they were baseball cards--I simply said: "My mother and father got married too young. They didn't know what love was." And that was true enough. But mostly, I was tired of looking backward. I was married now, living on a different coast. It was time to build my own life.

Work was a big problem for me. Once my teaching gig at Columbia was over, my job prospects looked dim. I had no novel to sell, no screenplay, no collection of short stories. I could either continue teaching, probably at some third-rate state college, or apply for a job in corporate PR. Either one was its own kind of hell. Then one afternoon, at a going-away party for one of my professors, I happened to meet Pat Towers, the wife of Robert Towers, who was then the chairman of the writing department at Columbia. Pat mentioned that she was involved with a new weekly magazine in Manhattan and that her husband had suggested that I might be interested in trying my hand at journalism. Where Professor Towers had gotten that idea, I don't know--I'd never so much as covered a high-school soccer game. Nevertheless, I told Pat I'd give it a try.

A few weeks later, I visited her at the offices of the magazine in a loft in the East Village. She introduced me to the city editor, a tall, witty southerner named Eric Etheridge. Pat had given him a couple of my short stories to read--what he thought of them, he didn't say. But he did point to a headline in the New York Post. "A twenty-two-year-old cop had his head blown off last night by a drug dealer in Queens," Eric said. "Why don't you go out there and see what you can come up with? Play Jimmy Breslin for an afternoon." Given my total inexperience as a journalist, that was like telling a Little Leaguer to go play Mark McGwire for an afternoon. But I took the subway out to Queens anyway and looked at the shattered glass in the street where Officer Eddie Byrne had been sitting in his squad car, reading the sports pages of the Post, when a twenty-three-year-old crack dealer walked up and blasted him in the head. Officer Byrne probably never knew what hit him. I wandered around with a notebook, chatting with the patrolmen guarding the scene, slipping under the yellow crime-scene tape that marked off the house where the shooter had been arrested. I stayed up all night writing 750 words, then turned it in to Eric the next morning. He ran it as the lead story in the city section and paid me $125--my first fee as a writer. That night, Michele and I celebrated by spending an extravagant sum--seven dollars--on a bottle of wine.

I immediately gave up writing fiction, which suddenly felt like an adolescent indulgence, and threw myself into journalism. I loved hanging out with taxi drivers, drug dealers, disgruntled bureaucrats, tenants'-rights activists. Unlike the 7-Eleven world I'd grown up in, the characters I met in New York seemed vivid, alive, wonderfully and poetically tormented, and corrupt.


Less than a year after Michele and I were married, my mother and Dwight exchanged vows in a small ceremony in my aunt Carole's backyard in California. Jerry and Olga were there, as were Jill and her boyfriend, Ed. I was beginning to see what a good man Dwight was, kind and bighearted, and tried my best to be happy for him and my mother. It wasn't easy. Nothing feels quite so unnatural and strange as watching your mother take vows with a man who is not your father. And it's your new stepfather, of course, who carries the burden of those unsettled feelings. I know Dwight certainly did. He wore them like a crown of thorns.

My mother's wedding could have been a devastating moment for my father, but a few days before the ceremony he announced, in what I thought was a sad and deliberate way, that he and Bev were going to get married, too. Despite the awkward timing of the announcement and my mixed feelings about Bev, I was glad for my father. It was weird thinking about him remarried, too, but I knew that he would never find peace as a single man. If Bev was the woman he chose, that was okay with me.

At my mother's wedding, Jerry seemed happy. I still wasn't sure about the dynamic of his relationship with Olga, but she seemed to steady him, to give him comfort. I'd always heard that alcoholics needed to hit bottom before they straightened up. I wasn't sure where Jerry's bottom had been, but it seemed to me that he'd bumped into something. The most important news was that, for the first time in his life, Jerry had found a job that he was good at. He had talked his way into a job as a salesman at one of the largest motorcycle dealerships in the Valley and was making--or so he told me on the phone--three grand a month in sales commissions. This didn't surprise me. When Jerry wanted to turn it on, he had more charm than a giggling baby. "God, it's nice to be making money for once!" he crowed to me on the phone one night. "I actually bought myself a hundred-dollar pair of tennis shoes yesterday. Do you know how bizarre that felt?"

Jill seemed to be hitting her stride, too. Ed, whom I'd met briefly at my wedding, was a little slick, but he seemed harmless enough. He was a hard-drive engineer and said the words hard drive as if they referred to a part of his anatomy. He was a few years older than Jill, and he always wore tight shirts and seemed to be romantically involved with his own biceps, even though they weren't all that spectacular. At my mother's wedding, he treated Jill with an excess of civility, pulling chairs out for her, opening doors, refilling her wineglass. Jill enjoyed being fussed over like this and smiled like a princess.


It was a very huggy time. We were all in the mood for reconciliation and forgiveness--even my grandfather Leonard, who was pushing eighty now and was considered an irredeemable shit by pretty much everyone who had ever loved him, with the exception of Elaine.

Divorce hadn't slowed Leonard down a bit. A year or so after he dumped Edie and his three sons, he and Elaine ran off to Carson City and got married and started a family of their own. They had two sons: the older was two years older than me, the younger was my age. It was as if Leonard had decided that there was a flaw in the manufacturing of his first family, so he cast them aside and started from scratch.

I'd never had much feeling for the old man. When I was a kid, he and Elaine and their kids often dropped by during the holidays for perfunctory gift swapping. By that time, Leonard and my father had worked things out so that they had a functioning if superficial relationship. I don't think they ever talked about much but the weather and the 49ers' latest draft pick, but they did speak to each other.

To me, Leonard was a cold and scary guy. He was clearly one of those men who had zero rapport with children and saw them as mewling midgets who shit and eat and breed chaos. Still, I was fascinated by him; he was cool, yet so precise, so brainy. I could see it was hard for him to be around regular people, whose clock speeds were not as fast as his. I was also interested in the fact that my grandfather had two kids about my age. It took me a while to figure that one out, and when I did I understood why my father tensed up whenever Leonard was around.

There was no question where my father got his love of building...

Edition details

• Publisher: Villard
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679456988
• ISBN 13: 9780679456988
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 252