When Kristina O’Neill was let go from her role as editor in chief of WSJ Magazine in 2023, she knew exactly who to contact. Her friend, former colleague and fellow media powerhouse Laura Brown, who herself had been publicly ousted from her gig as In Style editor in chief 14 months earlier; the pair had previously worked at Harper’s Bazaar together. “Getting the boot. Call me when you’re up,” read the text O’Neill fired off to Brown when she was still in the HR meeting.

Later, when they got together in New York, the pair posted a cute, sunny selfie to Instagram. The caption? “All the cool girls get fired.”

That post had an “insane” response—it turns out there are a lot of people out there who’ve been booted out of a job for all sorts of reasons, and women started sharing their own stories on social media. Now, it’s evolved into a book. All the Cool Girls Get Fired: How to Let Go of Being Let Go and Come Back on Top is, says Brown, “like a roadmap and a hug.” It’s filled with warm advice and an intimate camaraderie that readers might expect to receive from their best friends in such times of crisis.

“You’re probably on the couch—by turns pounding out replies to friends’ and colleagues’ texts, staring at your bank balance permanently open in your browser, wondering what the eff COBRA is, and maybe popping a Xanax," they write, in the book’s introduction. “That special ‘I lost my job’ feeling is the same, wherever you are based… We’re here to help.”

Industries today are rapidly changing. Given the current economic climate globally, the looming threat of AI in replacing white-collar jobs and constant company buyouts, All the Cool Girls Get Fired feels particularly pertinent right now—especially when lay-offs are all-too-often happening over email.

“We wish every HR department in America would hand this book to the women that they’re sending on their way,” says O’Neill. It’s the book she wished she could have had. “When I got fired, there was not a single resource that had all the information that I wanted in hand. Yes, I could go to 50 different websites or get nuggets here and there [but] I just wanted a manual. One thing, one place, one checklist that could outline all the things I was feeling vulnerable and anxious about.”

Candid, smart, funny, and, yes, useful, the book is part self-help tome, part manual-cum-memoir. Practical advice comes via chapters on finding a lawyer, navigating healthcare, managing mental health; it’s interspersed with been-there-done-that stories from inspirational (and highly successful!) women who have also been through a firing, like Oprah Winfrey, Lisa Kudrow, and Dominique Browning. “In between eating your spinach are little nice bits of pie,” laughs Brown. “You get healthcare and then you get a nice story from Katie Couric.”

Brown and O’Neill are fluent in the language of fashion and luxury, and have reached the glossiest, most glamorous heights of a notoriously hard to crack industry. (They collectively spent 30 years working in fashion media.) Together, their shared demeanor is almost sisterly—they are friends, colleagues, and confidants—thus busting the aloof, snooty fashion boss myth. In less nurturing hands their glamorous back stories could run the risk of alienating the reader, but here it only amplifies the message that is hammered home again and again throughout the book: You are not your job title.

Plus, if they can feel the vulnerability and insecurity that comes with being fired—these two sharp-minded, connected, creative, well-dressed women—can’t we all? The ‘cool girl’ reframing of the narrative is smart too. Their message to laid-off women is this: You are not a sad sack reject.

Their fashion media experience is more relatable than some might initially imagine. The perception of fashion in the mainstream consciousness errs on cartoonish, thanks to films such as The Devil Wears Prada. It’s arguably the one industry where hierarchy is put on display; your status (or lack of) is very starkly spelled out. What row are you sitting on for a show at New York or Paris Fashion Week? Did you get invited to this party? Why did so-and-so (a publicist) not send you so-and-so (the new It bag) from so-and-so (a hot new designer)? This happens in every industry, under various guises. “There’s status in every business,” says Brown. “Whether you work in a law firm [or] you work in a Starbucks.”

What’s also collective is emotion. The loss of a job commonly brings with it feelings of humiliation. It’s hard for women to stomach; women who have spent so many years collectively fighting for pay and promotion-equality. Let’s not forget that many companies still discriminate against hiring women because they don’t want to potentially wind up giving maternity leave. “There’s a lot of shame in rejection and being fired. Not only do you feel like you’ve let yourself down, in many women’s cases especially they’re carrying so much of the home and the family,” says O’Neill.

The selfie that started it all. Courtesy of Kristina O’Neill and Laura Brown

The pair aim to quiet that crueler part of yourself. “We preach on and on about that your value lies in you; it’s not given to you by your job,” says Brown. “In your work life, every single bit of experience that you have is like a little brick on a wall or a platform, and each bit of experience you have makes your platform taller and taller and taller and taller. And you stand on that and that’s yours. It doesn’t disappear if you lose your job, it doesn’t disappear if your circumstances change. That is your worth. That is up to you to remind yourself of that.” Adds O’Neill: “The sooner you shake off the shame, the sooner you’re able to set the path ablaze for what comes next.”

Still, how do you do that? Our careers can often feel inextricable from our identity and even our self-worth. “It’s a combination of things, and of course for a lot of people it is easier said than done,” says O’Neill. “But really making sure you have passion outside of your job that you feel closely aligns with who you are as a person [helps].” She continues: “It’s sort of a cliché now to say, ‘it’s so important to have work/life balance,’ but when work goes away you’re really stunned with the life part if you haven’t engaged with it consistently throughout the work part.”

Today, as well as being co-authors, the duo have a wealth of fulfilling professional opportunities. O’Neill is the editor of Sotheby’s Magazine; Brown is a multi-hyphenate who juggles different projects, including her work at the HIV nonprofit RED. In a way, the very existence of the book is proof that you don’t know where a firing might take you. There is a possibility to be found in the vulnerability, the unmooring.

“You get the time to figure [things] out,” says O’Neill. “What am I good at? What do I like doing? What skills do I have that can apply to these other industries?” And you don’t need to wait until getting fired to check in with yourself in this way—why not regularly ask yourself those questions? Stay informed on the subject of yourself. “If someone had told me three years ago I’d be working at an auction house, I would have been like 'what are you talking about?'" says O’Neill.

In an ever-shifting work culture, what a career even looks like today can be very different from how we once envisaged; it’s almost certainly not linear. “You run your own thing; you can have four jobs at once; you can have a side hustle; you can be on TikTok; you can do all of these things,” says Brown. The stability’s gone, sure. But there’s a freedom to be seized. “The rules are gone too.”

There are good things about being fired that they both can recognise now. There can be a strengthening of relationships, seeing who turns up for you. A clarity around what you really want to do can be found. The time spent recognizing your own worth is incredibly valuable. “Your passion and voice and happiness is more important than anything,” says Brown. There’s a whole big wide world to discover—along with new things about yourself that maybe you didn’t have time to explore before.

And what if you’re going through it right now? “It's the worst thing someone can say to you, but it is the most true,” says O’Neill. “That this is going to be the best thing that ever happened to you. But it’s the last thing you want to hear on the day of.” Adds Brown: “You want to punch people that tell you that the day of! But it’s true. It’s going to be all right.”