Second chances

Photograph: Jamie Grill/ Corbis

Women hear it all the time: Stay home with the kids and you can kiss the career good-bye. Even if you manage to rejoin the workforce in some compromised capacity, your seniority and paycheck will never recover. (Don’t get us started on the problem of child care.) But a new nonfiction book dares to deliver the kind of good news that doesn’t make headlines. Emma Gilbey Keller’s The Comeback (Bloomsbury) follows seven women who kick-started rewarding second careers after extended family leaves—while overcoming obstacles ranging from reluctant partners to family health issues.

A successful journalist and the author of a book on Winnie Mandela, Gilbey Keller wrote The Comeback after staying home to take care of her two girls, now six and 11. While she loved the Mommy & Me classes and the walks back and forth to preschool, she began to feel isolated. “It was the playground that did me in—I was lonely there, and the swing-pushing was endless,” she admits. On top of that, her husband’s career at The New York Times was soaring (he’s Bill Keller, now the paper’s executive editor), and she found herself at social events being asked about his opinions on Iraq. “I started to wonder how I could justify my day. At supper, the kids would tell us about gym and their reading and art classes, and Bill would discuss the lead story in tomorrow’s paper. All I could add was that I’d been to Fairway.”

Finding the seven women and telling their stories was easier than Gilbey Keller had imagined. “It sounds like a cliché, but they fell into my lap,” she says. “I stopped looking when I thought I had a good mix, but who knows how many more are out there?” Maxine Snider is one of the seven; she’d worked as an interior designer before having kids, and later returned to work by starting up a furniture design company. Her business happened to take off just as her husband was retiring and wanted to travel and relax. (In the end, she kept at it and he found a hobby—photography.) Or consider Elaine Stone, who took a five-year leave from her law practice after her third child was born. She’s now working at a big firm and has made partner.