The version of the story that gets told is clean: leave the first career, struggle briefly, arrive at the second. The actual sequence involved two false starts, a period of about four years that is rarely mentioned, and a decision that was made for reasons that had very little to do with ambition.
“I was not brave,” she says, early in a conversation that runs close to three hours. “I was out of options that I could stand. Those look the same from the outside.”
What follows is a detailed account of how a person rebuilds a working life in public, including the parts that did not work and the specific week she nearly went back.
It is the most candid interview we have published this year, and it is not, in the end, an encouraging one – which is what makes it useful.
