Book Review: Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie

Some books you recommend. Orbiting the Giant Hairball you press into people’s hands while maintaining eye contact. I read Gordon MacKenzie’s strange, hand-lettered manifesto in 2019, back when I was still figuring out how to stay creative inside institutions that had other plans for me, and I’ve been evangelizing it ever since.

The premise: MacKenzie spent thirty years at Hallmark Cards, where his job titles eventually included — really — Creative Paradox. The Hairball is his name for the corporate mass of policy, precedent, and how-we’ve-always-done-it that grows in every organization until it swallows the people inside. His survival strategy is Orbiting: staying connected enough to be useful, far enough out to keep your own gravity. The book is his flight manual, illustrated and hand-lettered like a zine your most interesting coworker left in the break room.

What I Loved About Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie

There’s a story early in the book I’ve retold a hundred times. MacKenzie visits schools and asks the kids how many of them are artists: in first grade, every hand shoots up. By sixth grade, almost none — the kids look around first to see if it’s safe. That’s the whole book in one image. Creativity doesn’t leave us, it gets schooled out, and institutions finish the job. MacKenzie’s case for orbiting instead of surrendering is the kindest, funniest treatment of that problem I’ve read.

I read it while running a literary collective in LA and circling an industry with one of the densest Hairballs on earth. My eventual answer was to orbit so far out I left the building entirely — freelance, no org chart, my own gravity — but MacKenzie wrote this for the people still inside, and he never shames anyone for staying. He just wants your spark to survive the badge.

What I Didn’t Love About Orbiting the Giant Hairball

That there’s only one. MacKenzie never wrote another book, and I would have read five more exactly like it.

Final Thoughts on Orbiting the Giant Hairball

A weird, generous, one-of-a-kind book about keeping your creative soul on a payroll. I saw the Hollywood version of the Hairball up close: my essay on working in Hollywood and the cost of ambition is a dispatch from inside the tangle. And if your orbit eventually slingshots you out of the building like mine did, the practical half of that journey — clients, rates, owning your work — is what Write for Money and Power covers.

My final score: 5 out of 5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Do I recommend this book? 👍 Yes! Especially if you have a badge, a lanyard, and a slowly dimming spark.

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