Laura Brown and Kristina O’Neill were at the top of their games. They had dream magazine jobs as editors in chief, with Brown at Instyle and O’Neill at WSJ. Magazine.
Then they got fired.
That’s the term they prefer, by the way. Not part of a restructure, made redundant or laid off.
“Same s—canning, different day,” Brown, who was fired from Instyle via Zoom in 2022, tells CNBC Make It. “Here’s an anvil that’s smacked you on the head. And then you take another weight of shame [and] weird verbiage and construct some narrative for yourself that isn’t even true, when everything [feels like] you’re already three feet tall.”
“It’s the same feeling, no matter what you call it,” says O’Neill, who was let go from WSJ in 2023.
After meeting at a Marc Jacobs fashion show in 2001 and spending the next 20-plus years building their careers together, the two friends wrote about the blunter side of losing their jobs within a year of each other in their new book “All the Cool Girls Get Fired.”
It’s the book they didn’t have when they were fired, covering severance, health insurance and bouncing back in your career with “more professional mojo than ever,” they write — plus personal essays from icons like Jamie Lee Curtis and Oprah about their own firing stories.
CNBC Make It spoke with Brown, who’s since founded her own company LB Media, and O’Neill, now the head of media at Sotheby’s, about everything they learned from getting fired and writing this book:
Why you shouldn’t spend too much time alone after getting fired
Laura Brown: It’s really important to rest, but don’t retreat. If you spend too much time alone, you just always feel worse. All those bad thoughts compound. So don’t do that, but listen to yourself.
Have a coffee with someone. Have a breakfast. You don’t have to do all of them in a day. We certainly went to things after we both got fired that made us feel funny in our tummies. And we were like, ‘Oh, I don’t think we should have done that.’ Calibrate enough to do the odd thing: Respond to an email, have a phone call, have a Zoom.
Oftentimes — breaking news — when you go out of your apartment and into the world, you do feel better because you’re reminded there is a whole world out there beyond you and your shrinking bank balance. There’s these little options that are going to open up to you. Just be judicious about it. There’s not a quota you have to hit. Do what we call ‘proof of life.’
If you’ve been good and worked hard, people will show up.
Kristina O’Neill: I call it ‘The Scarlet F.’ I think a lot of people feel like they’re walking into a room and everyone’s going to turn their heads and stare at them, like, ‘Oh, she’s here.’ It’s all in your head.
Talking about it helps; calling it what it is helps; having your fired crew helps.
How to approach networking: ‘Take no shame in asking for stuff’
LB: Networking is just getting to know people and finding opportunities. But it seems to come with this mercenary scenario: ‘I’m going into a corporate party, I’m gonna network, and here’s my business card.’ It always sounds so aggressive. I think that we’re all throughout our careers naturally networking. My husband calls it ‘Johnny Appleseed-ing,’ where you’re slinging out seeds the whole time. And when something like this happens, if you’re fired or there’s a big change, there’s actually an orchard that you’ve built with your work and your relationships.
If you’ve been good and worked hard, people will show up. Also with the environment that we’re in, there’s so much more empathy in the workplace and in hiring than there ever was before.
No. 1, take no shame in asking for stuff, because everyone is and everyone will. No. 2, understand the way you steer yourself might be different to what you’ve been grown up with, because there are different options and different schedules and different ways to make money.
If you can let yourself just look around the corner and think, ‘Oh, there are more and different opportunities to what I grew up with,’ and then listen to yourself a little bit.
Think: ‘Was that my dream job, or did I not really like it that much? Did I feel like myself? Did I feel obliged? Did I feel comfortable? Sometimes you’re shocked into this reevaluation that can serve you. Your financial priority is your greatest priority always. But if there’s even a tiny bit of time that you can take, sometimes you don’t think about these things when you’re in this rote job.
Disentangling your sense of self from your job
KO: If you put all of yourself into your career, when the job is taken away, everything goes. We had ourselves, each other, our friends, our family. Even if it’s just liking to read or going to Pilates, very simple things that just make you feel human, that helps.
It’s easier said than done. When you’re in a high-profile role, the way you’re introduced to people is you’re so-and-so of so-and-so, and suddenly you’re not. The thing that surprised us with our community is so many people said, ‘We don’t care if you’re not working for that place anymore. We still want you to come along with us.’ That’s a great confidence boost.
Getting fired as a boss
LB: I was fired with my whole team over Zoom. I kind of launched into this speech about how now, your value lies in you. Everything you achieved is yours. It’s not the company’s. They didn’t take it from you.
I remember saying, ‘don’t give them the power of thinking this has been done to you; don’t add this on to yourself. Take everything that you’ve learned, all your abilities, all your skills, they’re yours, and you’ll be able to take them somewhere else.’
Our hope and our dream for this book is that the takeaway is this level-setting on what it means to be fired and how to come through it and be strong and face what comes next.
KO: I was one of one fired. I was the boss of a team of almost 50 people. There was uncertainty around who was replacing me and how that would look, and that created a lot of anxiety for the team. As much as I wanted to hold their hands, at a certain point, I had to look out for myself.
I adored my team, and we had a very close-knit relationship. We got to have a party, which was really nice. We did have closure. I think a lot of workplaces, unfortunately, when things are very abrupt, there isn’t that moment for everyone to come together and just have that final hurrah. So, I highly recommend that, even if your workplace isn’t going to throw the party for you. Try to have that closure when you leave, because I do think it helps you be able to move on.
How to deal with everyone telling you to look at a firing as an opportunity
LB: Thirty-five people are going to say ‘this is the best thing that’ll ever happen to you.’ You are going to want to choke them all. They are, in the long game, right.
I think the best thing you can do as a friend to people in these situations is two things: One’s less evolved. Your friends can say, ‘They suck. What a bunch of ass—–.’ They can defame your employer all day long, in a way you can’t. Your friends can be your worst self.
And then they can help by keeping your social rhythms as they always were. So much of our employment comes from our social rhythms and keeping up with other people. Being out in the world engenders those opportunities.
The biggest lessons of writing a book about being fired
KO: Just how needed this conversation is. It should have been really easy to report this book in terms of having the conversations with the women who are in it. It did take us a minute to find women who are willing to be out there talking about what happened to them. Our hope and our dream for this book is that the takeaway is this level-setting on what it means to be fired and how to come through it and be strong and face what comes next.
LB: Having women go, ‘I just read it. This helped me. It makes me feel like I’m not alone.’ That’s been absolutely wild. If we can modify how women think about getting fired so there’s less shame and more of a ‘Yeah, I’m a cool girl’ feeling, then that’s a victory.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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