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.
