Take the case of Queens College alum Marsha Brandsdorfer, an English major who set out to forge a writing career in New York and ended up with a job at a Queens, New York law firm. In The Accidental Secretary (Xlibris Publishing), a new release, Brandsdorfer brings forward a fascinating memoir that tells of her odyssey. An English-writing major who always loved to read, write, and tell stories since she was a child, Brandsdorfer wanted to make it in the world of publishing or journalism. But as she painfully found out, writing opportunities in the Big Apple are hard to come by, especially if you’re a young upstart with limited job experience and no marketable skills. So when an attorney hires her as a file clerk, Brandsdorfer takes it as a temporary profession, with her sights firmly set on trying again in the publishing industry in a year or two. More than two decades later, Brandsdorfer still works in the legal arena, and she never made good on her vow to return to publishing. “Well, I never did explore the publishing field. Sometimes life takes different paths than what we plan, when we are trying to make a living,” says the author. “Instead, for almost twenty-five years I have been working in the legal field. I found working in offices and with attorneys intriguing, and full of interesting cases and stories. I became 'the accidental secretary'.”
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Life, especially life in the Big Apple, is full of strange, unfamiliar twists — and sometimes, it results into a modern-day fairy tale of sorts.