THE WORLD'S WORST ASSISTANT

Conan O’Brien’s longtime personal assistant dishes on the career she never saw coming.

Growing up, Movsesian couldn’t get enough TV, from Sesame Street and Mister Rogers to TGIF programming on ABC. “I eventually made it to HBO,” she writes, “and from there, any dreams of a more ‘productive’ hobby were over.” After an adolescence spent egging houses and not doing homework, she decided her future was in TV. While a student at USC, Movsesian was hired as an alternative programming intern at NBC without knowing “what the fuck” the job entailed. That experience gave the author her first, most invaluable lesson about work: “Never ask questions and always pretend like you know what you’re doing.” She also learned that bosses mistreating their employees was the norm. “I’ve seen people mistreat others because they themselves were mistreated,” she writes, “and think it’s a rite of passage to treat someone like garbage.” At age 26, when a random joke landed her a job as Conan O’Brien’s personal assistant, everything changed, and their mutual “juvenile tendencies” began to feed off each other. As he made fun of her and her unadulterated lust for junk food, Movsesian struck back. O’Brien recalls that she retaliated with “ingenious time-sucking distractions”—like watching TV and napping at work—that revealed her “unquenchable thirst to stick it to The Man,” which, in this case, was O’Brien himself. Nonetheless, as he reveals in the foreword, even though he calls Movsesian the “World’s Worst Assistant,” he also praises her as “one of the most honest and really caring people I know.” This lighthearted, often amusing book, which also includes black-and-white line-drawn comics, will have greatest appeal to fans of Movsesian (who has appeared on several of Conan’s shows, including a special filmed in her ancestral Armenia) and of Conan himself.

Playfully surreal reading about the comedy of human foibles.