I Was a Burnt-Out Lawyer. Now I’m a Romance Author (Exclusive

Years ago, I was having lunch with a group of female attorneys. We chatted about our cases and families, trading war stories about the exhausting juggle that’s required when you try to “have it all.”  One woman who was pregnant with her second child commented, “at least I have a break coming.”  We laughed, because maternity leave is no break, but it is a cycle disruption. The newborn days are so demanding and sleep-deprived that it’s impossible to do anything else, a brief pause in the multitasking insanity that life requires. 

So many women are overworked and overstressed and on the verge of collective burnout. We are too involved in everything: our careers, our marriages, our childrearing and yet we constantly feel like we are failing. It’s not just working mothers. When I was on maternity leave, I met a group of amazing, talented women who primarily stayed at home with their children. They were just as burned out as I was, only it was somewhat harder to complain about the source of their burnout since they birthed it. They prepared healthy, creative meals for their family, purchased frugally because they managed the family grocery budget, all the while volunteering in their children’s classroom while nursing a newborn. 

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In Nora Ephron’s 1996 commencement address to Wellesley College she said, “be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”  She explained the obstacles she faced and the hard-fought options now available, commenting that if these graduates didn’t take advantage of those choices, then “you will have no one to blame but yourselves.”  

She was kinda right. After all the work of prior generations, I realized I was following expectations instead of choosing my own path. I was killing myself trying to honor a legacy, making myself a feminist martyr, instead of being the heroine of my story. 

My mother didn’t seem to have this problem. In my childhood memories, she worked as a college professor, had a supportive network to help with childcare and curled up every night with a romance novel while the rest of us watched 90’s sitcoms. There was no midnight emailing or vague blocks on her work calendar to disguise school events. She seemed to have a unicorn life, much more balanced than my own, and I wondered why, as a generation of women, did it seem like we were doing it worse? 

I think Pinterest and Instagram are partially to blame. My house never looks like that and my stomach certainly isn’t that flat and why do recipes always take 20 minutes longer than described? 

There’s also the guilt. I feel like I should take full advantage of the opportunities my mother and Ephron didn’t have. Otherwise, what was it all for? But after a lifetime of working hard and doing my very best, I yearned for mediocrity. I wanted someone to say, “She’s an okay mom, I guess.”  Or a client to comment, “Not the best, not the worst, gets the job done.”  Because I thought that maybe by doing less everywhere else, I could create a vortex of time in which I could be good to myself. I also wanted to take a nap. 

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In 2021, I quit my legal career. I was already on the cusp of burnout and the pandemic was the accelerant. I focused on my three kids and all the homeschooling and bread-baking and gardening that filled those days. Questions about my profession made me uncomfortable. When someone asks a stay-at-home mom what they do, should the answer be “shaping the future” or “preserving life” or “tending to three growing hearts?”

I was worried that it was anti-feminist to enjoy being a stay-at-home mom. Our society tends to admire the value of motherhood in retrospect. It felt like the ideal, modern, feminist mother needed an “and” in their title and since I wasn’t a “mother and lawyer” anymore, I felt less valued. 

It was all in my head. No one else cared. After all, the point of those options Ephron and others fought for was the freedom to choose any of them, without restriction by society or your partner or, most of all, your own personal judgment. 

Slowly, I let go of the guilt and started embracing a path based on what I wanted. It shifted the way I parented. Less focus on “performative” parenting and how I was perceived as a mother and more on true connection with my children and their individual personalities. 

I felt free to chase my dreams. Like my mother, I’ve always loved romance novels and ending the day curled up with a good book. Unburdened by the expectation to lead some idealized version of “successful female,” I purposefully pursued the things that brought me joy and started writing romance novels. 

Some days, it feels impossibly hard to be a woman. From girlhood forward, women face societal pressure that impacts our relationships, ambition and self-worth. Oftentimes, strength is second to likeability, an ever-shifting and unpredictable barometer that’s impossible to satisfy. These are themes I love to explore in the books I write. 

In my latest novel, The Summer We Ran, the main character is running for political office against the first boy she ever loved. She struggles to balance public image and private desire, ambition and expectation, love and duty. There are many women in my life who inspired her experiences. 

My life still isn’t balanced. I don’t have it all. But I try to make deliberate choices for the life I want, setting aside what I think is expected. Ephron’s other brilliant advice in that commencement address: “you can always change your mind.” I did. And I probably will again. I think that’s a woman’s superpower. 

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The Summer We Ran is on sale now, wherever books are sold.