Reviews of in the company of women by grace bonney
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You have been able to deftly talk about harder-to-discuss issues, such as recent police brutality, while in this “lifestyle” space we inhabit as publishers. Leslie: I follow you on social media and have for years online. Adding my voice was taking up a space that didn’t need to be taken up. Between my radio show and the website, my voice is out there a lot. Leslie: I saw that you featured your wife but not yourself. I honestly didn’t expect women running big companies to feel way. Every single woman I talked to, from the age of 19 to late seventies, desperately wanted more personal support from women who were also doing something similar - whether that was other artists or other entrepreneurs or other women who are running large companies. Grace: You nailed it with the second one. Were you like, “Wow, every woman is really hard on herself,” or “Every woman wants more mentors.” Leslie: Was there something that you thought they all had in common? Grace: That still shocks me! I can’t believe that this book didn’t exist yet. You really don’t get that perspective very often. Leslie: One of the things that I thought while reading was how interesting it is to read a book that’s just women and just female entrepreneurs. Women hold themselves to this standard that we’re supposed to be this perfect person in every place of our life at all times and that’s never going to happen. That lesson alone made me come away from this book feeling so much calmer and more confident. The secret was there is no such thing as work/life balance. I went into this thinking that so many of these women, especially women like Eileen Fisher and Linda Rodin, would have secrets to work/life balance. The thing I hope people take home - the lesson that I got that I definitely didn’t expect to get - was to cut myself some slack. I can be exactly who I am and I don’t have to change anything to be successful.” That drove me. To be able to look at that and say, “Oh! I can do that. I wanted young LGBT kids, women of color and people who were over fifty to see thriving, happy, incredibly confident and talented women doing their thing.
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It was really difficult to not have a women who was out in the lifestyle community to look up to. I came out publicly in 2011 and had come out privately two years prior to that. Grace: For me, it’s all about visibility and understanding how important that is. Leslie: What else do you hope women take from it? It was really all about making sure that everyone everywhere opening up this book was able to find some facet of themselves reflected in one of these women. I had a list of musicians and poets and people who worked in politics, then I started expanding and ended up with like 200 people. Ultimately we ended up with 107. That naturally led me to people that work in entertainment.
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By that I mean outspoken and highly opinionated, not afraid to be loud and take up space. Grace Bonney: It began as a list of women I have always admired for being bold. Leslie Price: What was the process behind finding and selecting the women featured in the book? I called Grace to talk about the book, blogging and what she learned from this project. It’s truly inspiring - and that’s coming from a lifelong cynic. Inside its pages, over 100 creative women talk about their career, what success means to them, how they’ve overcome challenges and what they’ve sacrificed to get where they are today. It hit store shelves this week, and she’s just kicked off an epic tour to promote it.
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That’s part of the reason why Grace Bonney, the founder of OG design blog Design*Sponge, wrote a book called In the Company of Women. How do we find mentors who look like us, who understand our story? This is challenging, especially for women, and especially for those of us who don’t fit a certain profile: white, straight, privileged, cisgender.