Hotel Goodbyes

“An extraordinary story of resilience. In his moving memoir, Stephen Thompson opens up about how he broke cycles of abuse, poverty, and neglect to build a better life. It’s filled with lessons for anyone who’s ever questioned their resolve.”—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Potential and Think Again

Left with a gift, in a motel room in Reno

The Rubik’s cube was left behind, and so were they. It was January 1980, in a motel room in Reno. Stephen Jon Thompson was just nine years old, left behind with his four younger siblings, the youngest just a year old. Their mother had left two days before to go to the laundromat. She never returned. Now the power was out, the Nilla wafers were running low, and the Rubik’s cube that his mother had brought home from her waitressing job could not be solved. Stephen, the oldest, had a bigger problem to solve, what to do with the four young souls he was now in charge of. He finally determined they all needed to get out of that motel room. He dialed the front desk. Thus begins Hotel Goodbyes, Stephen Jon Thompson’s gripping memoir about making it in America against incredible odds.

Few knew of Stephen’s past. Maybe he didn’t know it himself. For his colleagues at companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, or Nike, he was a successful human resource executive, who had an uncanny ability to read people, to find the right person for the job, and to convince them that it was right for them. More than anything, they remember his infectious smile. But that grinning face hid a difficult past, a childhood spent in dingy motel rooms, dreary foster homes, and a cold, concrete juvenile home. It took Stephen years to tell his story, to write his memoir, to come to grips with a childhood he would just as soon forget. But when his young son came home with a school assignment to tell his family history, Stephen knew he needed to come clean. He could no longer bury the past, not to his friends and co-workers, and not to his two sons, to whom this book is dedicated.

Hotel Goodbyes is one man’s journey to come to grips with his past. From Ohio to California to Nevada and back, Stephen takes us on his journey from foster child to wildfire fighter to college graduate to blackjack dealer to state assembly candidate to successful technology executive. Along the way, he reconnects with his younger siblings and tracks down his Aunt Ouida, his mother’s sister, to find the answer to the question he has always had: why did his mother leave that day and never come back? In the end, Stephen determines that his mother abandoned him, but also left him with a gift, a gift of a better life.