Someone actually wrote a book encouraging women to try to have it all.
It’s called, The Joys of Much Too Much: Go for the Big Life – The Great Career, The Perfect Guy, and Everything Else You’ve Ever Wanted (Even If You’re Afraid You Don’t Have What It Takes), and it was written by Bonnie Fuller, who apparently thinks book titles should also have it all.
Fuller’s book is all about cramming everything you want into an impossibly full, rich life, with herself as the primary example (and sometimes, cautionary tale).
Fuller is a very important person in the business of producing the magazines responsible for coarsening, cheapening, and dumbening America. Her special genius is the coarse, cheap, dumb part:
It’s fairly obvious that Fuller has applied that philosophy to her career, having held the top spots at a whopping six magazines (Canada’s Flare,, the now-defunct YM, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and Us Weekly before moving to American Media, where the publications she oversees include Star, her flagship, Celebrity Living and 21 other titles under her purview. She is also arguably responsible for the recent explosion of celebrity weeklies at the newsstand, proving there was an audience for endless nuggets about celebrities and the news they made just by walking from Starbucks to their car, packaged in candy-colored, irresistible covers and pic after shiny pic with pithy captions.
Apparently, she jumped from Us Weekly after rescuing it from mediocrity and landed at American Media, which produces a bunch of other magazines that were a lot like Us Weekly before and which now are even more like Us Weekly.
In some ways, she’s the Joel Schumacher of editing: a single-minded producer of superefficient blockbusters, instinctively mass-market. She’s dumbed down every magazine she’s ever worked for—Us to the point of its being little more than a slickly packaged, guilty-pleasure-inducing collection of paparazzi photos—by stripping away anything that the reader wasn’t going to be instantly interested in.
And it works:
She’s posted hefty circulation gains at every magazine she’s touched, including Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, and Glamour, minting money in turn for Gruner + Jahr, Hearst, and Condé Nast.
The interview is refreshing. Fuller says straight out that there are a lot of negative messages directed towards women who want to claw their way into the upper echelons–or, indeed, to have any kind of career:
I wanted to encourage [young women] and say, “Yeah, you can do it.” It’s not just for women in media, it’s for women everywhere. I don’t want them to feel that having the best life possible is unattainable. It’s not. I do believe that the road to happiness is to have all of this in your life.
She rejects the idea of opting out as either a revolutionary idea or a brilliant one, and argues that women who opt out now face some of the same problems Betty Friedan was complaining about forty-odd years ago. Her advice, moreover, is explicitly directed towards all working women, whatever their family situation:
I’d seen friends who had “opted out” — and it’s amazing how quickly ten or twelve years go by and your kids are really busy with their own lives, and these women were feeling very much like life had passed them by, and they didn’t know how to jump back in. I saw that there was a lot of regret about their decision and they became very fearful of jumping back in, and I just don’t think it’s necessary to have to opt out in order to enjoy raising your children. You can still have a wonderful relationship with your children and get so much out of it without having to give up your whole other life — your intellectual life, your passion, whatever it is.
Her advice is about how, not whether, a woman should try to prioritize her career. She happens to be a hardass, and a perfectionist, and an unrepentant one. Good for her.
Some complaints:
I wish she hadn’t engaged in sister-punishing the choosy thirty-year-olds she works with for their high standards, especially since “perfect guy,” is mentioned in the book’s title.
I also wish the idea of fulfillment in one’s personal life hadn’t been reduced to “the perfect guy,” as though a woman’s life outside of work is limited to her husband and their kids. The Cosmopolitan-esque cover only adds to the implication that a woman’s personal life is a kind of night job: yet another sphere in which she must perform to spec or risk termination. A woman shouldn’t merely be able to “hold down” a family and a career. She should be able to live a rich, fully-realized life. It sounds like Bonnie Fuller has made that happen for herself, and it sounds like she wants other women to have the same option.