Whatever Happened To ...
… the guy who wrote about losing his job
gave me a lift.” Still, the confi dence
Terry Shine, who lives in Florida, is still writing.
BY KRIS CORONADO Terry Shine never intended to make a name for himself as “the unemployment guy.” Still, after he wrote a personal narrative for The Washington Post Magazine in May 2008, that’s what happened. The story — which detailed Shine’s life- shattering experience of being abruptly laid off as a journalist after 18 years — resonated with readers who found themselves in similar situations. “You know how it is when you come
back from vacation? All of the sudden there’s 200 e-mails there,” recalls Shine, 53. “I just went, ‘Oh, my God.’ It really
boost couldn’t pay the bills. Shine was continuing to live off wife Chris’s salary from her job as a phlebotomist as well as his unemployment check. He sent his résumé to dozens of newspapers — most of which he says never responded — while also applying for retail jobs at department stores. (No callbacks there, either.) In the summer of 2008, he learned he hadn’t gotten the Rosalynn
Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism for which he had applied. Then came the call in December:
A literary agent had read Shine’s Post article. Would he be interested in developing the concept as a book? Shine’s fi rst novel, “Nothing
Happens Until It Happens to You: A Novel Without Pay, Perks, or Privileges,” was published by Crown in September. In it, a middle-aged guy
WHAT IT TAKES
39 weeks // T e average amount of time it takes someone older than 55 to fi nd a job
(Continued from Page 3)
wanting to sit down and talk to you. If you have a bad attitude when you talk to people and you are speaking down to them, it’s a turnoff, and you are not going to get much cooperation out of that person. One of the things I learned to do early
on in my career — I compartmentalize things. You have to compartmentalize
ANSWER Wernher von Braun
some of these issues, or they will probably disrupt your career. I’ve worked on some very heinous cases, and I’ve had to deal with the people responsible for those things. And some people fi nd that’s very distasteful. My goal is to get to the truth and try to leave out any personal animosity or judgment that I might have against the accused. I think it’s made me a more logical and deliberative-type person over time. I don’t usually jump to conclusions very quickly.
4 THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE | OCTOBER 24, 2010 I’m not the trier of the facts; I’m
not the defense attorney. I’m there to do a segmented part of a case which deals with credibility, usually of the witness or of a defendant, and I give that report to the attorney. We are all human. There are good and bad in every profession. It’s a challenging profession, very challenging and varied in its application. But I always wanted to feel as though I did something important with my life, and [that] it would help, in some way, society.
must fi nd his place in life after being laid off from a longtime job. Sound familiar? Much of the book is borrowed from Shine’s own experience. With a new book out, it would seem
as if Shine’s life is back on track. Shine isn’t so sure. Although he no longer feels stressed out daily, he says there are still times when it’s hard to keep his fears at bay. “You wake up in the morning, and your mind is racing: ‘Oh, my God. What if my wife loses her job, too?’ That’s the biggest battle.” He has been off unemployment
since he signed the book contract in February 2009 but expects most of the advance money to be gone soon. He’s putting his energy into a proposal for a second work of fi ction, about an ailing man’s quest to track down his brother’s murderer. But if sales of “Nothing Happens” don’t meet his expectations, he says, he’ll apply for a retail job again. For now, he’ll continue the four- to-six-mile daily bike rides near his Lantana, Fla., home that help keep his mind at ease. On one such early morning ride, Shine couldn’t help noticing the automobile gridlock surrounding him. “I said to myself, ‘Where the hell are all of these people going?’ And then I remembered … work.”
For the original story, go to
washingtonpost.com/magazine.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRYNN SHINE; STATISTICS SOURCE: U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS, AUGUST 2010
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