I Bought and Read Steve Adler's Book So You Didn't Have To

Friends & Neighbors,

Fair warning, this is a long read. I estimate about 18 minutes.

I did something to myself this earlier this week that I can’t fully recommend: I bought Steve Adler’s memoir with my own money, read all 280-some pages of it, highlighter in hand, and decided you deserved to hear about it before I let myself forget how it felt.

I need to be honest about something up front: this was not a fun read. I don’t mean that as a critique of the politics, though we’ll get to those. I mean, the actual experience of turning the pages felt, at points, like being cornered at a fundraiser by someone who wants to walk you through every council vote from 2017 personally, in order, with footnotes (except the book has no footnotes). There’s a genre of political memoir that exists mostly to let its author relive being right about things, and this book, Hot Seat, Hot City: The Austin Mayor’s Story, lives comfortably in it. It arrives with a foreword from Pete Buttigieg and back-cover blurbs from what appears to be every mayor in America who has ever stood next to Adler at a conference. I finished it anyway. I am fine. I would like a nap.

A little context for anyone new here: I served on Austin City Council for one term, January 2021 to January 2025, two years overlapping with Adler before he left office in January 2023, and two more years next to his successor, Kirk Watson. Adler spent some time after leaving office to write about his years in office. All that to say, I was serving two years of the eight he recalls in his memoir.