Laura Brown and Kristina O’Neill Want to Cure Your Fear of Being Fired

In ELLE’s monthly series Office Hours, we ask people in powerful positions to take us through their first jobs, worst jobs, and everything in between. This month, we spoke with Laura Brown and Kristina O’Neill, co-authors of the new book All the Cool Girls Get Fired. The pair met as young journalists at a Marc Jacobs fashion show in New York City on the inauspicious date of Sept. 10, 2001. They would eventually spend years working together at Harper’s Bazaar before rising to be long-tenured editors-in-chief: Brown at InStyle and O’Neill at WSJ. Magazine. Then, about a year apart, they were both fired. Their book is a guide for any woman who has been through the same—which, in the age of DOGE and downsizing, means almost all of us. It provides everything you need post-layoff but the ice cream: part pep talk, part group therapy, plus practical advice on paying your bills and keeping your health insurance. Whether you want to score another office job like O’Neill, who landed on her feet as editor-in-chief at Sotheby’s Magazine, or you want to strike out like Brown, who founded the consultancy LB Media and is the chair of (RED)’s Creative Council, the pair shares advice on planning your comeback, starting today.

Laura Brown: I got on a plane from Sydney, where I’d worked in fashion magazines, and was just happy to be here. Australians grow up at the bottom of the world. And my generation, we didn’t have the internet when we were teenagers, so everything was happening somewhere else. And so, especially if you want to be in media or the creative businesses or anything that you perceive as shiny, it was happening here. The worst-case scenario was, if it doesn’t work out in New York, okay, I guess I’ll just go back to the beach. And people in New York, I think, really like people who are happy to be there, stick their hand up, and are up for things. That’s how I got employed and how I got to the lofty peak that we then were chucked from. And now we’re in the peaks of our own, not someone else’s peak.

Kristina O’Neill: My first media job was as Candace Bushnell’s assistant, when I was still in college. I worked for her a few days a week, and the way that came about was because I cold-called her from a pay phone outside Dean & DeLuca on University Place, back when I was at NYU, and asked if I could interview her for a school paper project that I was working on. She said yes. Then I pitched myself as her assistant after we connected.

LB: Details. I won’t go into it too much, but I don’t like any environment where you don’t know where you stand, you know? And magazines can often be like that, or the cliché of magazines has been like that. That’s why I enjoyed Harper’s Bazaar—the editor at the time, Glenda Bailey, is relentless, she’d be the first to tell you, but she’s honest. What you see is what you get, a completely unambiguous person. And we are both like that, so any sort of passive aggressive employer is so awful. I remember when I first bonded with Glenda, I said, “You know, what I like about you, Glenda, is that you’re not passive aggressive.” And she said, “Oh, I’m aggressive aggressive.” My other worst job was in the Versace store for six weeks in Sydney in between trips. I just couldn’t stand around in the heels. And I also couldn’t gift-wrap.

KO: I have really never had a bad job. I had, like, six jobs when I worked at NYU; I worked at the Gap, which wasn’t great, but my friend worked there, and we had fun. I can fold a really mean stack of T-shirts, jeans, sweaters, whatever. To this day, that job has served my closets well.

LB: Moving on is easier if you admit it earlier and say that you need help earlier. Nothing good comes from wallowing in shame and spinning and obfuscating and pretending this didn’t happen to you. Because, breaking news in 2025: you don’t have the exclusive on being fired. There are tens of thousands of people around you getting fired every single day. So 99 percent of the time, it’s not personal. As women, we carry generations of not running things. And that’s why it does hit harder when we’re fired. But we’re trying to unleash women from that and own what happened to them. Stick the hand up so someone else can grab it. You know, there’s never, never a good time to get fired. But in a weird way, it’s one of the better times to not take it personally, because there’s just too much of it. Let that be some sort of cushioning, even though nothing feels like a cushion when you lose your job.

KO: My biggest lesson probably lies in the fact that everything you worked for doesn’t disappear when your job does. It is such an overwhelmingly vulnerable time period when something like this happens to you. Remember your value and know your worth and recognize that everything you built over all the years doesn’t disappear. You have that platform to stand on from all of that bricklaying you’ve done your entire career.

LB: It’s like your professional like terror alert. Money is red. Healthcare is kind of lesser red, but still orange. And then it just goes from there. You’ve got to be practical at the time when you’re like feeling like you’re 3 feet tall.

LB: Some people were like, “Oh, you were in a bar, and you did this thing [spontaneously].” No, no, no. We were premeditated on the way to the bar [laughs]. We decided to do this because it demonstrated ownership of our skills—which I think is what we all work for as women professionally. Like, we’re really good at what we do. We got fired and own what happened to us. And there was, for us, no question of spinning it.

LB: My theory is Instagram is the magazine of your life. So approach it like an editor. If it’s three selfies in a row, maybe do something else. If there’s something professional you’re proud of, great. What’s something personal you’re proud of? Everyone knows, like an editor or a chef, when there’s a bit too much of something or it needs something else to complete the whole. I can speak from experience that me existing on social media as myself was a wonderful insurance on losing my job. Don’t telegraph entirely your job on social media, because you look like you’ve got nothing else going on.

All the Cool Girls Get Fired: How to Let Go of Being Let Go and Come Back on Top by Laura Brown and Kristina O’Neill

LB: My word of the year is “diligent.” Like, we have been so diligent, and there’s something about the old-school quality of writing a book. It’s a lot of work! Some of the greatest pride in work comes from making things, whatever you do, if you’re a bricklayer or you make a magazine or make a coffee. To have something to show for yourself is often the greatest reward in a workplace. For us to have something to show for ourselves that we’re proud of, that we know will help people, and it came from us losing our jobs? That’s pretty magnificent, honestly.

KO: It was very entrepreneurial—the whole work of creating, pitching, and selling, and then having to go through the process of reporting and interviewing and putting the book together. That was something that, as people who had day jobs for so long, was a fun process that highlighted a lot of skills that, again, we had worked towards honing our entire careers.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.