“I was atGlamourfor a total of 13 years. I started before I had kids and by the time I stopped, I had both my babies. It was during a time when I had climbed the ladder and had a good amount of executive privilege. I also had the privilege of working among a whole lot of amazing, supportive women who were comfortable talking about our physical needs, even our mental health, back then. At the same time, publishing was a challenging industry because, in reality, we were still there until two in the morning shipping pages to the printer and missing out on nursing our babies to sleep. 

“There was a vibe of ‘fake it till you make it,’ among women building their careers back then. And, as a masthead climber at the time, I embraced that stuff until I had kids when it became completely unrealistic and unsustainable to fake anything. I didn't have energy, I wasn't sleeping. I did have some maternity leave, some of it even paid, but ultimately learned years later the reason why it didn't feel like enough: Physically and emotionally, the minimum amount to be protective of your health, your baby's health, and your ability to sustain your career is six paid months. And we had nothing close to that. 

“I found that, counterintuitively, rather than acting ‘professional’ the way I had always thought I needed to move up, there was a vulnerability that, as soon as I started sharing, actually helped me grow my career. There was a moment when my colleague came into my office. I stumbled over my words and I was like, ‘Danielle, I'm so tired. I just, like…’, and I gestured to the breast pump on my desk which I hadn’t even bothered to put away. And Danielle, who at that point was far away from parenthood in her life, said, ‘Thank you so much for being so open and honest about this stuff…You're showing me that it's incredibly hard and yet you're still here, you're still doing it, you're making it visible.’ And that was a real eureka moment. It showed me that there was a whole other area of growth that I had and that it would come from truly just being myself.”

“The birth of my second son really crystallized this idea ofThe Fifth Trimester. I had lunch with an entrepreneur, Lisa Sun, who had a company called Project Gravitas. And at the end of it, she said, ‘I always ask people at the very end before saying goodbye: What do you really want to be doing?” And I was like, ‘Well, I have this idea for a book about the return to paid work after maternity leave for moms, but I don't see a way to write a book. And then, what comes next?’

“Neither of us had a pen and so Lisa took out her lip pencil from her purse and, on a napkin in the Conde Nast cafeteria, she drew [a plan]. She was like, ‘First, you write the book and it's for the moms, and then you create the business and that's for all of the business leaders who want to know how to treat moms better.’ That's the genesis story. With my husband's encouragement and a big gulping breath of, ‘Can I do this?’ I gave myself six months and I created a book proposal and sold the book, but all along knew that the book couldn't just be a book. It had to turn into a business.”

“I was actually laid off fromGlamour. If I'm being candid, I had gotten to a point where I was ready to go. And yet I was dug into ambition the way I had always defined it. My only measures of success were working long hours, making more money, and moving up that masthead. And that just did not sync with anything I needed in my personal life or what was happening in an industry. So I exited and I thought very seriously about trying to find another job that was something in content creation. Finally—and this is not how I tell this story typically, but I'm like ready to—my husband said, ‘Will you please just go write your book?’”

"It was. And honestly, it stays with me to this day, some of the complicated feelings. But I also think that those feelings make me better at the work that I do, and that's why I'm more willing now to talk about that part of the story.

“It's funny, on the hardback cover of my book, the subtitle is ‘The Working Mom's Guide to Style, Sanity, and Big Success After Baby.’ And when we made the paperback, which was only a year later, we took the word ‘big’ out. I think we had a premonition that the whole ‘girl boss’ thing was going away, and rightly so. It was really meant to be much more about defining success on your own terms.”