The Amazing Writing Career of the Amazon Boss' Wife

MacKenzie Bezos arrives for magazine interviewVogueIn 2013, she was not the wife of Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, but a novelist and mother of four.

The interview took place at a Thai restaurant in Bellevue, a suburb of Seattle. Before that, the reporter's impression was that MacKenzie Bezos was not a soft-spoken woman and looked a bit awkward in the portrait printed on the back of her first book, "The Testing of Luther Albright", published in 2005.

However, the moment MacKenzie Bezos stepped into the restaurant, the reporter immediately realized that the first impression was not correct. This woman looked elegant with pale skin and high cheekbones, but there was not a trace of hesitation or hesitation in her.

Sitting down at the lunch table, MacKenzie Bezos began to talk about writing. Her first book took more than 10 years of incubation and “a lot of tears” to form. During that time, she moved from the West Coast to the East Coast, had four children—three boys and a girl—and helped her husband build the Amazon empire from scratch.

“Jeff is my most loyal reader,” MacKenzie says of her famous husband. The Amazon tycoon is always ready to drop everything he has planned to sit down and read her manuscript in one sitting, meticulously commenting on every detail.

When she began writing her second novel, Traps, MacKenzie decided to break her old habits to speed up the writing process even more than she had done with her first. "Not talking to Jeff about the book turned out to be a very effective strategy," she says. "Because the sooner I finished, the sooner I could share the book with him, and talk about the characters that had been so in my head for the past three months. They were so real to me that I cried while driving to pick up the kids from school."

"Traps" is a fast-paced story about the life events that happen in just four days of four women living in the Los Angeles area. Just like the first book, which was listed by the Los Angeles Times as one of the best novels of the year, in the second book, MacKenzie uses her profession to build the character's personality, one is an animal rescuer, the other is a teenage prostitute. A high-ranking female security expert has the ability to predict threats but is clumsy in intimate relationships that require her to reveal the weak side of her human nature. A Hollywood star is admired by millions but has cut off ties with her mother for many years. The novel is a thriller, with the plot intelligently pushed through the psychological and personality developments of the characters, making readers sometimes breathless and sometimes depressed.

Growing up in San Francisco, MacKenzie was the daughter of a financial planner and a stay-at-home mom. Throughout her childhood, MacKenzie was a shy bookworm who spent hours holed up in her bedroom writing stories and reading.

MacKenzie decided to attend Princeton University to have the opportunity to attend fiction writing classes of famous black female writer Toni Morrison, who has received numerous awards, most notably the Pulitzer Prize for Best Novel for "Beloved", the American Literature Association medal for the author who has made the most significant contribution to the development of American literature and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. Writer Toni Morrison still considers MacKenzie Bezos to be "one of the most outstanding students I have ever taught in creative writing classes".

Talking about her billionaire husband, MacKenzie Bezos admitted that marrying a man with a fortune of hundreds of billions of dollars was a lucky arrangement of fate, especially for a woman who only wanted to write literary novels, a career that, according to MacKenzie, did not make money.

“I definitely won the lottery,” she says. “My husband’s success has made my life better in many ways, but it’s not luck that defines me. The fact that I have parents who believe in the power of education and never doubted my ability to write. And the fact that I have a husband who I love. I think those are the blessings that have defined my life.”

MacKenzie Bezos likened her first meeting with Jeff Bezos to playing the lottery. They met during an interview for a venture capital fund in New York. MacKenzie said she needed the job to pay her bills while she continued to pursue her book. "My office was right next to his, and I could hear his laugh all day long," MacKenzie recalled. "How could I not love that laugh?" She began a campaign to woo Jeff, starting by asking him out to lunch. After three months of dating, they were engaged. And three months after that, they were married. MacKenzie was only 23. Clearly, this young woman was not the type to hesitate when it came to making a move.

Soon after their marriage, Jeff confided in his wife about his idea of ​​starting an online bookselling company. “I didn’t know anything about the business,” she says. “But I could see how excited he was.” And MacKenzie was ready to leave everything behind in New York, move to Seattle, and join her husband in pursuing his dream.

"I think my wife is resourceful, smart, smart, and hot. I had the good fortune to look at her resume before I met her, and I know exactly what her SAT scores were. The scores are... I never tell," Jeff Bezos said, laughing his signature laugh.

In every way, Jeff and MacKenzie are a perfect example of a marriage where two individuals form a stronger team. "Jeff is my opposite," MacKenzie admits. "He loves meeting people. He's very social. Cocktail parties make me nervous. Small talk and crowds are not my strong suit."

However, when necessary, MacKenzie can still stand up to take charge of public events, for example, she played the role of co-host of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Gala. That day, she wore a floor-length red dress by designer Juan Carlos Obando, a complete contrast to her usual jeans and shirt style.

It was not MacKenzie but Jeff who came home with a Diane von Furstenberg silver-embroidered leather bag for his wife. "I pay attention to her fashion sense and you'd be surprised how well I dress her," Jeff said of his frequent clothing purchases for his wife. "Sometimes I call her and say, 'Are you this size?' and she's like, 'Why do you ask?' and I say, 'None of your business!' Things like that make her happy." Jeff laughed and said, "I recommend that to men."

A longtime friend of the couple notes that while Jeff is an extrovert with a quick wit, MacKenzie is more observant. "Family is very important to Jeff and he depends on her to maintain a peaceful family life. They are a normal, loving, affectionate family. Isn't that unusual?" Danny Hillis, a cancer researcher and longtime friend of Jeff's, suggests that wealthy families often live unusual lives.

Building a close-knit family takes time and energy, and so does writing, especially complex, plot-heavy novels. It took MacKenzie 10 years to finish her first book, and it wasn’t because she procrastinated or was lazy. Jeff Bezos remembers waking up in the middle of the night on family trips to find his wife in the bathroom, tapping away on her laptop.

When her children were born, MacKenzie decided to put her writing on hold to focus on caring for and raising the children. Despite her heartache, she had to give in to human limitations. "Writing is a pretend profession," she says. "You can't pretend if you're a lawyer or a teacher. Writing requires a lot of persistence and perseverance because you don't have anyone counting on you to keep working. Plus, the children needed to be taken care of. After my third child, I knew I couldn't be the kind of parent I wanted to be, so I decided to go back to writing. Those were busy years."

People say that with such wealth, why don't they hire an army of maids and nannies to take care of their children? But that's not Jeff and MacKenzie's parenting style. In fact, over the years, the couple took turns trying to homeschool their children. "We tried everything," MacKenzie says, "like taking them on off-season trips, doing science experiments, incubating chicken eggs at home, learning Chinese, learning math using the Singapore curriculum, joining all kinds of clubs and playing sports with the neighborhood kids."

When the kids were old enough, Jeff wanted his wife to have more time to write, so he rented a one-bedroom apartment nearby, giving MacKenzie her own space to focus. She still drives the kids to school every day in her old Honda. If you meet MacKenzie in the school parking lot, you'd be hard-pressed to guess that behind her casual appearance of jeans, a leather jacket, and boots is a woman who, along with her husband, owns a huge fortune. "MacKenzie has a very clear sense of self-worth, and that never changes whether she's rich or poor," says longtime friend Hillis. "They don't want to raise their kids in luxury."

Novelists often openly admit that their writing reflects their own personal lives. “I base my characters on people I know, but I don’t copy them,” MacKenzie says, denying that she is like other writers. But some friends recognize MacKenzie in her first novel’s character, Luther Albright, a middle-aged father who, unable to express his true self, nearly kills his entire family. “She’s not Luther,” says psychologist Alexa Albert, a close friend of the Bezos family. “But like him, she’s psychologically obsessed with making her children independent and self-reliant.”

Meanwhile, Hillis's friend said MacKenzie was like Luther in one way: They both tried to understand people. "She always tried to understand the people around her and help them shine and develop their abilities," Hillis said. Family friends recall the parties MacKenzie threw for small holidays. For example, on the Day of the Dead, she asked everyone to bring a dish that reminded them of their deceased loved ones. "At the end of that party, you felt connected and understood by everyone there," Hillis recalled.

“Overthinking” is a common weakness of smart, sensible women. And MacKenzie knows this well. “When I write, I become a better version of myself,” she says. “And I’m probably a better mother, too, because instead of worrying about my kids all the time, I focus on the characters.”

Jeff agrees. "Writing makes her a happy person," the world's richest billionaire says of his wife. Any day MacKenzie wakes up early to write is a good day for the Benzos. "When I wake up," Jeff says, "I see her dancing in the kitchen, and the kids and I love it."

Amazon has been criticized for killing off traditional bookstores. But MacKenzie argues that Amazon's goal is not to compete with traditional bookstores, but to maximize the benefits for readers. Although Amazon has its own publishing house, MacKenzie Bezos does not choose "family members" to print her books. Speaking of his wife signing with another publisher, Jeff Bezos humorously said: "We call her the fish we missed."