Megan Greenwell on holding out for the once-in-a-lifetime book idea

Like so many journalists, Megan Greenwell resisted inserting herself into the story that would ultimately shape her career. But the plot came to her.

Greenwell knows as intimately as anyone how a private equity buyout can alter the fabric of a workplace. In 2019, Great Hill Partners acquired the Gizmodo Media Group — the parent company of Deadspin, where Greenwell was the first woman to become editor-in-chief. Shortly into the new ownership, Greenwell resigned — and explained why in a viral blog post. 

Her own experience catalyzed what became an obsession with understanding the wide-reaching tentacles of the private equity industry and its powerful grasp on the American economy. But Greenwell wasn’t drawn to memoir. She instead chose to pursue a rigorously reported narrative account of the industry’s impact through the lives of four people working in retail, housing, medicine, and media. Her debut book, “Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream,” was published by HarperCollins in June.  

Greenwell has previously edited or reported features for publications including Wired, Esquire, GQ, New York magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek and The New York Times, among others. She also serves as the deputy director of the Princeton Summer Journalism Program, which recruits and trains high school students from underrepresented backgrounds who are interested in journalism.

I spoke with Greenwell about the devotion necessary to bring a book project to fruition, her approach to structuring the reporting process, and how she juggled the book deal along with the rest of her freelance business. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve written plenty of long magazine features before. What was the moment when you realized or felt convinced that this idea actually needed to be a book?

After I wrote a piece for Deadspin that went viral, a lot of people said to me “You should make this a book,” including my book agent. I was resistant to that idea because I didn't want to write a book just about the media industry. It felt too niche. And I really didn't want to write a book about my own experience. I’d rejected the idea of doing a private equity book for quite a while, but I also couldn't stop reading about it. I became obsessed with how private equity works in other industries and felt myself coming back to it over and over again. 

Have you always been interested in writing a book?

This was my first. I’ve had an agent since around 2013, and she signed me because she liked my work in other places. I knew back then that at some point I wanted to write one, but I was very adamant that I was not going to until I knew it was the right idea. For years, my agent and I had lunch every six months or so. I’d float some ideas and she’d say to poke around on them. Somewhere between the initial poking around and finishing an actual proposal, I would either determine there wasn't enough there or I just wasn't interested enough. I was very afraid of signing a contract for something I wasn't going to stay excited about. That went on for almost 10 years and this was the first idea that I never lost interest in.

Is it common to find an agent so long before there’s a seedling of an idea?

I certainly have other friends who’ve done the same. My agent in particular is very good at keeping tabs on what's out there because she’s willing to play the long game. I've been in her home office and she has this whiteboard with three categories: people who have sold a book and are working on it, people who are midway through a proposal and people who are just ideating. Last time I saw it, the ideating list was the longest. It’s smart because she ends up getting a lot of people who might take more time to get there, but are going to be ready when they get there.

How much reporting was required to put together the book proposal itself?

My proposal was probably 80 pages and had character sketches of people I thought would be my primary protagonists. I did find it harder to get people to talk to me for a book proposal rather than an actual book. Others told me that most of what you write for a proposal is not going to end up in the book, and I was like, “No, I'll be different.” I was not different. Basically, nothing from the proposal ended up in the book. But I was super glad I did all that work because in editor meetings, I got feedback that this was an incredibly thorough, well-reported proposal. I think this helped me get a good deal for it and helped convince editors that I was ready to do it. I did find it hard to be doing a ton of work — more than I had ever done for any story — without knowing whether this would sell, or whether anybody would ever see any version of it. This was not a mental space I’d ever had to occupy for that long.

How did you find your protagonist? What was your process like when you were exploring potential subjects who’d occupy the real estate of the book?

This was by far the hardest part. I knew I needed people who readers were going to want to spend a lot of time with. I had three characters in the proposal but four in the book. One from the proposal ended up in the book.

I did so much grunt work to find them. A lot of LinkedIn searching for people who had previously worked at various companies. A ton of scouring Facebook groups and Reddit, and talking to nonprofit groups to see who they recommended. I was trying to plumb every possible avenue. I talked to a little over 300 people for the book as a whole, and almost 150 of those were potential protagonists. 

I needed the right mix of geographic, racial and personality diversity. I also needed people who were going to let me into their lives for two years and tell me absolutely everything — which is not most people. I got relatively deep with several people before realizing they were going to be reluctant past a certain point, which is totally understandable. 

The worst moment was when I had been talking for months to a woman for the housing section. She’d given me recordings, contemporaneous notes, everything. I flew to Indiana to meet her and texted her about when she wanted to meet up the next morning, but she didn't respond. She always responded quickly. I woke up the next morning and she still hadn't written back. I texted her and knew her address so I went to her place, but she wasn’t there. I never heard from her again. She fully stood me up, but only once I got to the point of being in her town. All I can assume is that she got cold feet when it got to that level of reality. I wasn’t going to write the chapter without spending time with her, so I had to start that section from scratch.

What do you think is most misunderstood about private equity’s relationship with the media?

The private equity industry has been very good at making everybody think that the problems of any of these industries are the inevitable result of societal and economic change — particularly with media. Most people's understanding of the landscape is that the ad market got decimated so the media was screwed — and maybe private equity profited off of the ashes, but they didn't have anything to do with killing media. I just don't think that's true.

One thing I learned from the reporting that genuinely surprised me is that a lot of these local newspapers were still profitable at the point when private equity got involved. That doesn't mean the trend line wasn't down — of course it was. But private equity wasn't going to come in unless the businesses were still profitable. Then they came in and didn't do anything to try to adapt to the new age. So they either hastened the demise of a lot of these publications or really did directly kill them.

What has the marketing experience been like since the book was released? What has surprised you most about that leg of the journey? 

I tried to go into it with as few expectations as possible. My goal was to sell enough copies so that somebody lets me do this again because I really did love the experience. I was cognizant that I had gotten a bigger advance, relative to the typical scale of advances, so I didn’t want to be a flop. There are people who write their first book, it doesn't sell enough copies and they’re unable to sell a second — which is what I was most afraid of. As long as I could sell a reasonable number of copies, I would be happy. 

Setting my expectations low has made me pleasantly surprised by how things have gone. I got to do a little tour. I got to do a bunch of sold out events in towns that are meaningful to me because I was super conservative about only booking events in towns where I knew I could draw a real crowd. I didn't want to get my hopes up that I would even get reviews, much less that they’d be positive. How long the tail of this has lasted continues to surprise me. I thought people would care about the book for two weeks then never mention it again. 

How did working on the book trickle out to the rest of your freelance business? How did it impact the amount of work you could take on or what kind of work you could take on?

Having the advance allowed me to adapt based on what the book needed. I could make decisions for any given month, or any given season, based on what I needed to do for the book — instead of the other way around. The last three months before my deadline, I didn't take on any other assignments. But when I was reporting, I was still doing a mix of newsroom management consulting, freelance editing and freelance writing. 

Even if you do get a healthy advance, they’re typically split into four payments. Mine was in five. You get the first payment upon signing the contract. It took me two years to even get a first draft in, and you don’t get the second payment until the draft is through copy edit and legal review. It was two-and-a-half years before I saw payment number two of five. So even what sounds like a life-changing amount of money on paper is not exactly a life-changing amount of payment of money in the early days, but the advance did allow me to do what was best for the book.

This didn’t mean making the book my full-time job. I was still doing a ton of other stuff. But when I really needed to buckle down, I was able to buckle down. When I needed to travel for reporting, I could afford to fund it and take the time off of whatever else I was doing. I was very glad I did not try to do this book with a full-time job, and that I had the kind of freelance career with some flexibility to it.

What do you think is important for nonfiction writers who are considering pursuing a book to know? What should they keep in mind as they embark upon this process?

Make sure you really, really love the idea. I have done plenty of features where the idea is interesting to me, but it's not something I want to marry. For a book — especially a narrative book where the reporting is so intense — you are marrying that idea. I would have been absolutely miserable if I had been even 20% less excited about this idea.

I am 41 years old and just published my first book. A lot of people feel the pressure to write a book by a certain time, a bit like pressure to get married or have kids. For a certain group of writers, it feels like the next career achievement box you have to check. I certainly felt those pressures at certain points, too. But I do not think I could have written a book as good earlier in my career — in part because I had to work on my talents, but also because I had to get to that once, or twice, or 10 times-in-a-lifetime scale of an idea. 

I'm so glad I didn't listen to the pressure of “Just do it. You don’t have to be in love with every idea.” Maybe I’ll get to a point in my book writing career where that’s true. Maybe if you write 15, it gets to the point where it feels banal. But I was very cognizant that you only get to do the first one once.

***

By Megan Greenwell 

Once, years ago, Liz Marin was talking to a friend who had recently been laid off. The friend, Annmarie, was fretting because her husband needed insulin to treat his diabetes and she needed an inhaler to treat her asthma, but she had recently lost her health insurance along with her job, and they could only afford to cover the cost of one of the two medications out of pocket. Liz was enraged — at the company that laid her friend off, at the American health care system for failing to provide an adequate safety net, at rich people generally for fighting to preserve the status quo. 

She couldn’t fix any of those problems, but, she figured, she could get her friend an inhaler. Liz didn’t have much money either, but she did have health insurance, and she also had asthma. So she did what seemed to her like the obvious thing: she called her doctor, lied that she had lost her inhaler, got a new one, and mailed it across the country to her friend. 

“Yeah, I know it’s insurance fraud,” she said later. “But the thought of her dying because she couldn’t afford a three-hundred dollar fucking inhaler, I couldn’t fathom that. I have the power to do something, and just because the government calls it illegal is not going to stop me.”

Of all places to start Liz’s story, why did this anecdote stand out to you?My first draft started with a different scene, one I had actually witnessed at Liz’s home. But my editor pointed out, correctly, that it felt a little generic, and we wanted to communicate to readers immediately that Liz is a particularly strong-willed person. Going back over hundreds of pages of transcripts looking for a new place to start, it was the quote below that jumped out at me. It shows several things about Liz: her fury at how working-class people lose out even on basic necessities, her primal need to do anything in her power to help people she loves, her willingness to ignore laws when necessary, her love for the word ‘fucking.’ The rest of Liz’s story is about how she fought back against Toys R Us’s private-equity owners, so establishing all of this about her from the very first sentences felt perfect. Readers have really fallen in love with Liz as a character, and I think this story is a big reason why. 

Liz can’t help herself from speaking up or butting in when she sees injustice in the world — especially when someone she loves is involved. Most of the time, it doesn’t involve violating federal law. But it doesn’t matter how much or how little she has; she won’t be happy unless she’s sharing it with family, friends, and strangers. How much time did you need to spend with Liz before getting to know her personality and ethos on the level where you could make an assertion like this? Is this something you gleaned or a sentiment that she expressed to you?I spent many days with Liz over two years. The first time I was at her home, for 12 hours one Saturday, she mostly ignored me because she had a house full of relatives. I was worried about it at first — I had so many questions I needed to ask her! — but I realized pretty quickly she was giving me a great gift. Seeing her interact with her kids, her sister, her dad, her husband made me understand her in a much deeper way than I would have if we had gone straight into an interview. My other visits were a mix of focused interviews and fly-on-the-wall time, and I valued both equally. I also talked to her relatives and friends about her at length. So I don’t think she ever told me this verbatim, but it’s so core to who she is that she didn’t really have to. Several years ago, her in-laws, who had never lived outside their home country of Colombia, moved to the United States to live with her and her husband, Henry, in Washington State. More recently, her own father, Loren, whom everyone calls Buddy, came from Alaska to the American mainland and began splitting time between Liz’s home and her sister Mindy’s, a couple hours south in Portland, Oregon. 

The Marin house, which sits on a quiet street of cookie-cutter homes atop neatly manicured lawns in University Place, a suburb of  Tacoma, is designed to take care of people. In the kitchen, next to stacked cases of Kirkland water bottles, sit value-sized boxes of individually sized snacks — mixed Frito-Lay chips, chocolate and vanilla pudding, Ensure, apple chips, fruit cups. Just above that, on the kitchen counter, is a first aid kit teeming with Band-Aids, face masks, rubbing alcohol, gauze, and painkillers. When Mindy’s family comes for the weekend, which happens often, Liz’s office is swallowed by an air mattress, the living room overtaken by video-game controllers and kids’ shoes, the bathrooms drowned in other people’s toiletries. 

Like many women socialized to put everyone else first, the one person Liz often forgets to take care of is herself. I really enjoyed this transition; I thought it was insightful and smooth. Sometimes it’s because she’s too busy. Sometimes she’s just too broke from providing for everyone else. A few years ago, the Marins had a little financial breathing room for the first time in their adult lives. When one of the kids outgrew their sneakers, she’d sprint to the store to buy them a new pair, but she hadn’t bought herself a new item of clothing in years. Henry encouraged her to go shopping for herself — demanded it, basically — but she didn’t see the point. So he threw out her entire wardrobe. 

Liz still sounds a little shocked about it all. Henry is the soft-spoken one of the two, the one content to sit quietly, awaiting further instruction, while people mill about. He adores his wife. So when he and their children began carrying armfuls of her clothing to a dumpster near their house, she couldn’t quite make sense of it. Now you have no choice but to buy some new things, he told her. What did you feel like this anecdote more broadly serves to illustrate about Liz and what made you choose to introduce it so early in the chapter?I am aware this story has been controversial on Goodreads; I guess some people read it as Henry being mean. Nothing could be further from the truth. Liz is the first to admit that she has to be forced into taking care of herself, and that felt like an important contrast to the Liz of the lede. Together, they make her a fuller, more complicated character. It was really important to me to treat my protagonists as complex humans rather than caricatures of victims. And though Liz and Henry fought about this, it was clear when she told the story years later that she interpreted Henry forcing her to buy new things as an act of deep love. She still struggles to take care of herself. She still relies on Henry to make her do so. People will always map their own feelings onto someone else’s relationship, but the significance of this story for me is showing this other side of her, and the importance of her marriage, that you wouldn’t see from watching her give a speech or march in a protest.

He didn’t realize he had missed a bucket — a literal bucket — full of her oldest, most worn-out clothes. I’ll go shopping tomorrow, she promised. Instead, she took the clothes from the bucket, folded them, and put them in her dresser. Aside from a few holes and the fact that most of them didn’t fit particularly well, they were perfectly wearable. But Henry realized pretty quickly that the holey clothes that didn’t fit were not in fact new. The resulting argument lasted for days. 

Eventually she bought some clothes. She didn’t, however, shake off the guilt. ‘Guilt’ feels like a very specific word choice. Sitting at the dining room table recounting the story, she wore a threadbare pair of jeans and a six-year-old T-shirt from a Native Alaskan tribal celebration, her long salt-and-pepper hair cascading over the print on the front. 

The Marin home is also a monument to the people Liz loves. Family pictures aren’t sequestered to the mantel or a single gallery display. They cover every table, shelf, and wall, and feature every imaginable combination of relatives. On the few patches of wall that don’t hold photos, traditional Native Alaskan art hangs instead. Often the two are combined: two paintings above the dining room table depict Buddy and his sister in traditional dress at a powwow. I appreciate your attention to detail when it comes to setting — and in particular, to Liz’s internal and external home environment. Why did it feel crucial to make clear to readers early on the type of space that she curates for herself?I don’t think narrative nonfiction works without specificity; I read so many books and features that fail because they try to position themselves as ‘literary’ but it feels like the interviews were conducted over the phone. What I love about narrative is the noticing: not just what someone said, but how she said it. Was she fidgeting? Was she making intense eye contact? Did her voice crack? That’s what separates my favorite works of nonfiction from the rest, and that was really important to me when writing my own. This was another advantage of getting to spend so much time in Liz’s house when I wasn’t conducting an interview — I got to look around, jot down details, and ask her about them later. I think being in someone’s home, seeing how they live, is absolutely crucial to understanding them deeply enough for any kind of profile. The number of family photos in Liz’s house is truly astounding; it would be impossible to understand her without knowing that.

One room, though, is devoted to a different kind of memorabilia. Behind the desk and above the air mattress in the office/guest room, a waist-high bookcase houses dozens of giraffes. Large stuffed ones and bronze ones are surrounded by smaller ones made from plastic, rubber, and wood. Photos rest among the animals, most of them of Liz grinning with friends. In one, her son, Daniyel, holds yet another stuffed giraffe. This giraffe, with the tuft of dark brown hair between its ears and the stars that stud its neck, is recognizable to anyone who has ever stepped inside a Toys R Us. The display is a shrine to Liz’s six years at the company, a shrine to what was the best job she ever had until it all came crashing down. The giraffe in the photo, Geoffrey the Giraffe, is the one that upended the Marin family’s entire life. My curiosity is sufficiently piqued!

***

Before he launched the toy store that transformed retail, Charles Lazarus was a poor kid with a dream. Now we’re launching into the second thread of the chapter and meeting a brand new character, who (seemingly, as of now) is not yet obviously connected to Liz. How did you think about when to make this jump to Charles? When weaving two character-driven threads together, how do you generally approach facilitating that transition as smoothly as possible?I am a complete nerd for narrative structure. When I was a terrified baby features editor, I’d go through my favorite magazine stories and diagram what made the structure work, which I think helped me immensely. (I also think editing per se is invaluable for understanding structure as a writer; it teaches you to think ruthlessly about what serves the story best, rather than what sounds the prettiest. I truly believe that every shortform writer hoping to become a longform writer should do a stint as an editor.) 

The structure challenge posed by the four opening chapters of my book (collectively called ‘Before’) is that they have to introduce both a protagonist and the historical context necessary to understand the private equity part of the story. And because there are 12 chapters in the book, plus an introduction and conclusion, they each have to do all of that in 7,000 words, and compellingly enough to successfully get people to the heart of the story. This was the trickiest of those chapters, because the two stories were so far removed time-wise, and Liz didn’t even start working at Toys R Us until after Lazarus was out of the picture. 

I’ve always wanted to write a feature with a classic A-B structure, because I think it’s so powerful when it works. It came to me pretty early on that I had to at least try it here. This was the first chapter I wrote, and the only one that the editor who acquired the project, the brilliant Kate Napolitano, read before she left for another job. When I wrote the first draft, I must have been scared to commit to fully separating the A and B strands; Kate’s notes were about eliminating the spots where I tried to thematically combine them prematurely. She told me I could trust readers to see the similarities, which built my confidence.

Lazarus was born in 1923 in Washington, D.C., where his father, Frank, owned a not-particularly-successful used-bicycle store called National Sport Shop in the Adams Morgan neighborhood. The Lazaruses, one of the few Jewish families around, lived behind the store: their home was connected to the shop by an opening in the dining room, so someone could get up quickly and help a customer who happened to show up during dinnertime. 

The family rarely had money for luxuries. There was always food on the table, even during the depths of the Great Depression, but Charles wanted more. He wanted to be rich. He didn’t dream of  Madison Avenue or Wall Street. He wanted to sell things to people. 

Lazarus, who died in 2018, once told an interviewer about a pivotal conversation he had with his dad while helping him fix up an old bicycle. Charles asked Frank — who had grown up in a Jewish orphanage in  D.C. and, by his son’s account, never aspired to anything other than the ability to care for his family — why they never sold new bikes, which would bring in more money. His dad responded that new products required too much money up front, and they would never be able to compete with big retailers like Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck & Company. “I just didn’t believe that,” Lazarus said. “I just thought that you had to have a defeatist attitude to always sell used goods. And I told him, ‘I’m not going to do that.’” Given that Charles died in 2018, what was your primary method for gathering hyper-specific details about his personality and mindset?I’m thrilled to be asked about this, because it was a huge reporting challenge, and because the answer to how I solved it is buried in my 400-plus endnotes! Considering how much influence Toys R Us had on the American retail industry, there is woefully little out there about Lazarus himself. Even his obituaries were fairly bare-bones; another book that covers Toys R Us’s acquisition by private equity cites his Wikipedia page in its endnotes. I had talked to some Toys R Us employees who were there toward the end of Lazarus’s time at the company, and they had some details to share. But I did think it was important to understand where he came from and who he was. I checked every source I could think of but kept coming up empty. 

While scouring the internet one day, I found a link to a 3-minute YouTube video taken from an interview with Lazarus. The video description mentioned it was part of a larger project, and included the director’s name and website. When I emailed the filmmaker, I learned that he had recorded Lazarus for nine hours for a private project commissioned by his family members. After an intense negotiation over terms, he agreed to lend me the DVD version, which I had to buy an external DVD drive to access. The interview is incredibly thorough, and includes photos from various points in his life, which I was able to use to confirm details I couldn’t get from anyone else. Thank goodness his family commissioned it, because it seems that all but the most basic information about an important person in the history of American business would be lost.

When the younger Lazarus got his first job delivering newspapers in elementary school, it didn’t take him long to spot a business opportunity. None of the other kids liked collecting subscribers’ payments, which often required multiple visits to every home. Lazarus offered to handle that part for them in exchange for a portion of their income.  Soon he had six boys funneling him a cut. He quit delivering his own papers; he was making a lot more money than he ever had on his route. This anecdote is very effective at illustrating how Charles’ mind was oriented and the shrewdness that drove him, even at a young age.

After high school, Lazarus was eager to start his own business. He worked briefly for the U.S. Treasury Department, earning a relatively luxurious $25 a week, but his goal was $10,000 a year, a fortune by American standards at the time. First, though, he knew he would have to serve; it was 1943 and World War II was in full swing. Looking to avoid being drafted into work he didn’t want to do, he voluntarily enlisted in the Signal Corps as a radio operator and then cryptographer. Military life brought an important perk: there was nothing on which to spend his salary of about $100 a month. Instead he sent the money home for his mother to invest on his behalf. 

When the war ended, an honorably discharged white man with a healthy savings account had plenty of options. The GI Bill offered tuition assistance for college or trade programs, low-interest loans, and unemployment payments. Lazarus, who married his girlfriend, Udyss,  almost immediately after returning home, skipped higher education. With a $5,000 wedding gift from his father-in-law, the profits from investing his salary, and a government-backed business loan, he had enough to start a business. The GI Bill’s homeownership program also allowed him to buy his first home, in the tony town of Chevy Chase, Maryland, north of D.C. (Until the war, Jews had been banned from Chevy Chase, which was created by the white supremacist developer-turned-senator Francis Newlands in the 1890s.) 

Now Lazarus just had to figure out what kind of business would earn him that $10,000-a-year salary and put him in the upper echelons  of society. The winning idea came to him as he observed his fellow veterans. After being discharged from the Army, they all followed a  similar path: move home, marry your girlfriend, buy a house, have a child or two. Lazarus saw the baby boom coming, and he realized all those new parents would need to buy cribs, rocking chairs, changing tables, and playpens. Frank Lazarus had just about paid off his mortgage on the Adams Morgan building that housed his bicycle store and three apartments, so Charles convinced his dad to retire and offered him $320 a month for the building. National Sport Shop became National Baby Shop, a purveyor of all types of baby furniture. 

From the start, Lazarus fixated on how to make even a small neighborhood store a one-stop shop. He expanded his offerings vertically, building shelves to hold chests of drawers above their coordinating cribs instead of side by side, which allowed him to display significantly more products at once. He started with about $8,000 worth of inventory, but when his concept proved successful, he used the profits to stock up on new goods. It didn’t take too long for him to start doing well — not $10,000-a-year well, but making more money than his father ever had. The goal of making more money than one’s parents is such a deeply embedded ideal in American society and lore. Particularly in the 19th century, it feels like this benchmark was the standard success metric for upward mobility. How did you see echoes of this pull in both Charles’ and Liz’s stories?When I started watching the Lazarus video, about a month after my first trip to Liz’s home, the parallels between their lives struck me immediately. They both grew up poor and part of a marginalized group — Lazarus Jewish in the 1930s and ’40s, Liz Native Alaskan in the ’80s and ’90s — and they were both extremely hungry to make better lives for themselves. Lazarus talked very openly about wanting to be rich, whereas Liz was focused more on stability, but yes, they both wanted to do better than their parents did. But there’s an interesting divergence in their stories, too. Lazarus’s success cannot be understood outside the context of the G.I. Bill. That funded the store that became Toys R Us, that allowed him to buy a house. But those kinds of social service programs were far less common, and far less generous, by the time Liz reached adulthood around the turn of the 21st century, and her tribe faced a unique legacy of discrimination and violence. She’s spent her entire career in retail just trying to get by. 

Lazarus was always on the lookout for new opportunities, and one day he stumbled into one that would shape the rest of his life. “Somebody came in one day and said, ‘How about a toy for my baby?’” he said. “‘You know, to play with in the high chair or in the playpen or in the stroller.’” The idea surprised Lazarus, who recalled thinking, What do you mean, a toy? He sold essentials, not frivolities; toys didn’t fit the model. But he decided to stock a few as an experiment, and from then on, National Baby Shop offered toys along with all its other baby goods. 

Until then, people mostly bought toys in department stores. In the 1920s, Macy’s opened the country’s first permanent toy department in its midtown Manhattan store. The chain also started its Thanksgiving Day Parade, which ended with Santa Claus standing outside that Herald Square building, ginning up excitement to buy Christmas gifts. Not long after, Sears, Roebuck & Company followed suit with a toy department of its own, and quickly became the biggest toy retailer in America. 

These big department stores sold more than half of their toys between Thanksgiving and Christmas. But after the woman asked him about toys that day, Lazarus started to think maybe he could show parents that they could use toys year-round. In fact, he thought, toys might actually be a better business than furniture. After all, babies only needed one crib, one rocking chair, one changing table, and one playpen, and younger siblings typically got hand-me-downs. Toys, though — no kid could ever have enough toys. Children would out grow them, wanting new ones designed for their new ages. Or they would simply get bored with what they had and demand something new. And with the prosperity of the postwar era, selling nonessential goods, especially ones that delighted the children of the baby boom, just made sense. I appreciate how you dived into the nitty-gritty of his early strategy to paint a picture of the building blocks of this business.

Soon after adding toys to the National Baby Shop inventory, Lazarus went all in. Initially he renamed his store Children’s Supermart, with reversed R’s to make it appear childlike. But that name didn’t look catchy on a sign, and it certainly didn’t spark joy in kids. So in 1957, he renamed his company Toys R Us. 

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Liz knew what it was like to want more. Why did you choose this segue?Is this the moment to say I actually find most section segues hackneyed and unnecessary? A new section doesn’t have to directly connect to the previous one; that’s the point of the section break! That said: this was the one place I allowed myself to directly nod at the similarities and differences between Liz’s and Lazarus’s experiences. I almost cut this line too, but I wanted readers to start thinking of these two people in relation to each other, to set up the moment when the two strands would finally cross. As a child in Alaska—the state most associated with the American myth of rugged, individualistic bootstrapping—she heard all the legends about how anyone can will themselves to a more successful life, about how everyone has a chance to make something of themselves. Her Alaska, though, is very different from the ones written by Jon Krakauer or Jack London. Liz, or Láxhshaadoosti, is part of the Tlingit people, an Indigenous group who have lived in the southeastern part of the state for centuries. Her family’s history as members of the Eagle/Wolf house in Angoon, a community of a few hundred mostly Tlingit residents on Admiralty Island off the coast of British Columbia, goes back generations. 

As Liz likes to say, the fact that she, her family, or the village of Angoon exists at all is pretty close to a miracle. Almost exactly a century before Láxhshaadoosti was born, her own country’s government attempted to wipe her homeland off the map. On October 22, 1882, a Tlingit healer named Teel’ Tlein was killed in an accident on a Northwest Trading Company whaling boat. The United States had purchased Alaska fifteen years earlier and placed the territory under military control, so when the Tlingit reacted angrily to the company’s refusal to make amends in accordance with tribal practice, the Navy moved in. They shelled the coastal village with howitzers and Gatling guns mounted on a tugboat before sending troops to raze Angoon on foot, destroying the village and killing six children. 

Many Tlingit who were born generations after the bombardment, including Liz and her family, still speak of the event as if it were a fresh memory. Though Alaska was removed from military control in 1884 and became a state in 1959, the Tlingit and other native Alaskan peoples have continued to be discriminated against, cut off from many of the privileges associated with the American Dream. As a child, Liz’s mother, Miranda, like generations of Tlingit before her, was taken from her family in Angoon and sent to a boarding school designed to forcibly “civilize” and assimilate Indigenous Alaskans, stripping them of their native language and culture. Liz’s father, Buddy, was adopted by a white family who lived on a farm in Missouri, and returned to Alaska as an adult. 

As a result, Liz was born in 1979 in Anchorage, not her ancestral homeland of Angoon. She didn’t grow up understanding the Tlingit language, because her father never learned it and her mother had been brutally punished for speaking it. Miranda had moved her family to the city so that her children would blend in. In a majority-Tlingit community, they would never escape the risk of prejudice, persecution, or worse. Why did it feel important to establish Liz’s family history at this point in the chapter?Understanding anyone’s family history is important to writing a profile, and I think writers often do themselves a disservice by thinking too narrowly about what ‘family history’ entails. Liz talks about the Angoon bombardment as part of her origin story as naturally as she does about her parents and siblings, so any story about her that didn’t talk about that would feel incomplete. (I will admit that in the first draft of the manuscript I went way too deep; I was totally compelled by a book and a doctoral dissertation about the bombardment and accidentally wrote a full two pages about this event that happened a century before my protagonist was born. One of my favorite things about being edited is having someone come in with clear eyes and point out when I’ve gotten lost in the weeds in a way that doesn’t actually serve the story.) Liz clearly feels pain about the fact that she doesn’t speak her family’s ancestral language, but to understand why she doesn’t speak it, you have to understand not just her parents’ lives but also these generations of absolutely brutal treatment of the Tlingit people. And her work as an activist, which makes up most of the later part of her story in the book, is inextricable from her identity as a Native Alaskan.

Life in Anchorage wasn’t easy either. Buddy wasn’t around much, and Miranda struggled to pay the bills for her own three children and the four she adopted when her sister died. When Liz was in elementary school, her mom remarried, to a man who sexually abused Liz from the time she was eight until she was fifteen. He abused multiple cousins too. All the while, Liz excelled in school, particularly in math. But she also struggled with trauma and relentless feelings of worthlessness. 

When Liz was fifteen, her stepfather was arrested for sexual abuse of minors. Liz thought it might be a chance for a fresh start, but soon afterward, Miranda died suddenly from a seizure. Liz tried to care for her younger siblings herself, until an aunt intervened and took them  all in. Soon after, the state assigned the kids to different living arrangements: some moved in with relatives, some went to foster care. Liz and her sister Mindy were sent to group homes in Juneau. 

Liz completed her high school coursework there, but she missed out on a diploma because she left a few weeks early to care for a now pregnant Mindy. She gathered up her sister, left the group home, and moved in with their father, who happened to be living in Juneau too. She got a job at Costco to help pay the bills. In 2000, she had her first child, a daughter she named Alleah. How did you initially find Liz as a character? Was she keen to talk with you right off the bat? Was it challenging to earn her trust?I found Liz because she had been quoted in a bunch of stories around the time Toys R Us liquidated, and had even written an op-ed in BuzzFeed News that mentioned Deadspin, where I had been the editor-in-chief before our private equity takeover. So on some level, she was the easiest of my four protagonists to find: I talked to more than 100 candidates to land on the other three, but Liz was the only character I wrote about in my proposal who actually made it into the final book. 

That said, earning her trust took more work than the other three combined. When I first reached out to her, she didn’t respond for months. I started talking to other potential protagonists for the retail section, but I couldn’t get her out of my mind because she had done so much work on behalf of the laid-off Toys R Us employees. Finally, she responded and agreed to talk off the record. She felt burned by a lot of white people who promised to center her story, including the progressive workers’ advocacy group for which she had worked. So she wanted to interrogate me, which felt entirely fair. Once she let me in, though, she let me all the way in: I don’t remember a single question that she declined to answer or that made her clam up.

In 2004, Liz was assigned to train a new Costco employee named Henry Marin on the overnight shift. Henry was from Bogotá, Colombia, and had moved to Alaska to live with his birth father. Liz thought Henry was cute, but he was also six years her junior, and she didn’t want to date someone so young. They became friends, though, and she loved how he cared for Alleah. They married in 2005, when Liz was twenty-six and Henry nineteen. She soon gave birth to a daughter they named Aracely. 

Liz also loved Henry’s ambition. After his night shift at Costco, he would go work days at Burger King. He had plans to become a pharmacist. Liz was used to scraping to make ends meet on a minimum wage income, but pharmacists make six figures; she knew he could care for a family. The trouble was, there was no pharmacy school in Alaska. Following Henry’s dreams and catapulting their family into the middle class would require living thousands of miles from the only homeland she had ever known. This is more of a general question from a pacing perspective, but how did you weigh how much real estate to spend with Liz vs. Charles in each section before flipping back to the other?I thought about this a lot! I needed to include a ton of contextual information to set up how Toys R Us ended up being acquired by private equity. But I was terrified of making this book boring, and I knew that the best antidote to that was centering the four protagonists, each of whom I chose because they’re incredibly compelling people. Getting my hands on the DVDs of the Lazarus interviews allowed me to do some storytelling in those sections as well as revealing information from SEC filings and court transcripts and the like, but I did think we needed more Liz than Lazarus. (There are two sections after this one in the book; one about each of them.) I also knew right away which anecdote about Liz I wanted to use to end the section — I won’t spoil it, but it’s incredibly powerful in terms of shaking assumptions about what it means to be ‘just’ a retail worker. So I landed on hewing pretty closely to a classic A-B structure, but with Liz getting one extra section, so that she’s the first and last person we’re learning about. 

She was terrified at the idea of moving away from Alaska, and hated leaving her family behind, but she knew it was the right thing to do. She hadn’t found much in the way of opportunities in Angoon, where the median household income was under $30,000 a year and her family usually made a lot less than that. She hadn’t found them in her mom’s apartment in Anchorage, or in the group home in Juneau. She lived in a world that had been systematically starved of resources over a period of centuries. Perhaps life on the mainland would be different. Perhaps moving to the West Coast like a twenty-first-century gold rusher would unlock the American Dream she had heard so much about. 

Relocating would require Liz to single-handedly support the Marin family — which in 2012 grew to include a son, Daniyel — for four years while Henry was in school. All of her work experience was in retail, so that’s where she focused her search. She wanted to be able to easily transfer to any city where her husband got into pharmacy school, so she looked for a job in Juneau that would allow her to move elsewhere when the time came. She needed a company with flexible transfer policies, because Henry would have to do his internship in a different city from where he was studying. She needed opportunities for career growth. She needed daytime hours so she could be home with her family in the evening. As she worked her way down her checklist,  

one company name seemed to tick every box. So Liz applied to work at Toys R Us. I really like the parallel construction between this line and the sentence that closes out Charles’ previous section. It’s a crisp signpost to the reader about where we’re going and how these two characters’ storylines are about to converge.

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Excerpted from “Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream,” by Megan Greenwell. Copyright © 2025 by Megan Greenwell. Reprinted by permission of Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. 

Author photo by Loreto Caceres. 

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Carly Stern is an independent reporter and editor based in Brooklyn who covers health, housing and economic security. Her enterprise work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Vox and The Guardian.