In October 2012, a few months into a role at Google’s Creative Lab in New York that felt like a miracle, Claire Stapleton got her first-ever cold sore — a small, cartoonish crisis that, in hindsight, reads almost like an omen.
She had risen fast inside the company, moving from Google’s internal-communications team at its Mountain View headquarters into a coveted creative position, part of a generation that believed the tech giant could be a genuine force for good.
Her new memoir traces the arc from true believer to disillusioned insider — the “superstar” years and the slow unraveling that followed, as the gap widened between the company’s stated ideals and how it actually behaved.
It is a pointed, personal account of what it costs to speak up inside one of the world’s most powerful companies — and of a woman who learned the hard way that being celebrated and being protected are not the same thing.
