Melinda French Gates' "The Next Day" - As Out-of-Touch as Marie Antoinette

Memoirs are supposed to be a public service, right. 

The lessons learned and the inspiration imparted are positioned and packaged to help the rest of us with whatever: lousy childhood, financial ruin, chronic disease or, as in Melinda French Gates' "The Next Day" the continuum of transitions. 

In the volatile, technology-driven, value-shifting 2025 there are certainly lots of those transitions. The current emotional undercurrent is: Please, not one more change, not right now. 

For Gates, the transitions included adjusting to college as one of the few female computer science majors, parenthood, death of a best friend, the end of a marriage and veering away from a career path managing a philanthropic foundation.

The slim volume (153 pages of actual content) is having brisk sales. On Amazon, the ranking is 7287. 

But the reviews, such as this one from the Standard, aren't strong. 

One complaint is the sin of omission. 

Gates, for example, doesn't discuss the couple's looping in with Jeffrey Epstein. We want to know about that not just for the gossip. Couldn't it provide insight about the collapse of a marriage. 

And how about why she "fell for" Bill Gates and how we could dodge the bullet of becoming romantically involved with a star player who might not be "good for us." Meanwhile there could be a takeaway here about matters of heart in the workplace. In Gates' time being employed at Microsoft it seems like power in relationships was allowed to be uneven.

My beef, as a tarot reader and intuitive coach, is that the supposed lessons learned can't be replicated during the soul-wrenching experience of transition. At least not for my clients. Nor for me. 

This is the chronicle of good luck (being born into a loving family with a supportive father for a bright daughter) and privilege (can afford to fly off to exotic places to attempt to sort things out). 

Think about that and more: Obvious is that there was no financial crunch during the separation and divorce. That wipes out so many ordinary people. Just the legal bills alone. Those following the Gates split saga know, for example, that she could afford the expensive lawyers at Paul Weiss to iron out financial arrangements for the three children. 

And what about leaving the foundation? Unlike so many of my clients, the exit was voluntary. In addition, when she did that she didn't have to max out her credit cards to survive. Or, on an e-bike deliver food or prematurely age a car by being a contract worker for a ride-hail service. 

In essence, like a 21st century version of an out-of-touch Marie Antoinette Gates provides a model that mocks the pain too many humans are experiencing. The tarot has so many cards related to transition because the ordeal is brutal. The Tower card is just one.

The mission of us tarot readers is to guide the searchers through that raw experience. They need to talk. And most won't get an ear to listen to as Gates did with Gayle King. Or being able to afford a therapist for over a decade. The average session with a tarot reader is 20 minutes. Most are one-off. That's all many can afford to squeeze into a budget.

Could it be that this kind of self-indulgent memoir is moving the needle toward the embrace of the values of Zohan Mamdani? Yes, that guy who's running for mayor of New York City does enjoy privilege. So did Franklin D. Roosevelt. But both got it that life has become so hard for so many of us. At the top of the current list of challenges is the amount of change we're expected to process. 

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