cover image The Comeback: Seven Stories of Women Who Went from Career to Family and Back Again

The Comeback: Seven Stories of Women Who Went from Career to Family and Back Again

Emma Gilbey Keller, , . Bloomsbury, $25 (228pp) ISBN 978-1-59691-223-6

Keller (Lady: The Life and Times of Winnie Mandela ) recounts the professional and personal identity crisis she suffered after full-time motherhood estranged her from her former career as a successful writer and left her in the shadow of her husband—New York Times executive editor Bill Keller. Drawing upon her own experience and discomfort in being “Mrs. New York Times ,” the author chronicles the challenges facing seven other women in diverse professions—law, business, photography, teaching—launching their own career comebacks after devoting themselves exclusively to their children. Keller's profiles are warm, laudatory, refreshingly nonjudgmental—she honors both working and stay-at-home moms—and relentlessly honest in depicting the low confidence that paralyzes women eager to rejoin the workplace. Although Keller occasionally burdens her tales with excessive—and bland—biographical detail, her character and career sketches do shed insight into how women have rediscovered their professional identities through sheer perseverance. Women contemplating their own re-entries into their careers or into new professions will relish this book for its frankness, encouragement and practical direction. (Sept.)