The post was ostensibly about a new book she and her husband have just published, Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences — a reflection on writing, teaching, and the kinds of stories people choose to put on the page.

I practically memorized “Shitty First Drafts.” Bird by Bird sat on my desk for years like a trusted, slightly disheveled friend talking me off the ledge of the blank page.

Which is why I was so startled by her Substack post today, It’s Memorial Day: Want to Write a Memoir?

The opening paragraph stopped me cold:

“When I first met my husband, Neal, nine years ago, he was helping elderly clients write their memoirs…”

Elderly clients. Writing memoirs. So their grandchildren “might someday know from whence they had sprung.”

I kept waiting for the pivot. The disclaimer. The deeper point.

But it never came.

And I found myself strangely saddened by it.

I’m sure she didn’t mean to imply that memoir is a retirement hobby, a sentimental family keepsake category, or a legacy project for people nearing the end of life, tying up emotional loose ends for descendants.

Memoir is literature.

At its best, memoir is one of the most psychologically rigorous forms of writing there is. It asks the writer to interrogate memory, identity, shame, perception, family mythology, self-deception, power, grief, longing, performance, and time itself. Good memoir isn’t “here’s what happened to me.” It’s: What did it mean? And can I bear to look at it honestly enough to make it art?

That’s not a gateway drug.

That is the work.

So when Lamott later writes:

“I think of memoirs as a gateway drug to novels and screenplays, the perfect training ground.”

…I honestly don’t know what to do with that.

This from a writer whose entire body of work helped legitimize deeply personal writing as serious literary territory. A writer whose own essays and memoirs helped create legitimacy for candid, self-searching narrative nonfiction in the first place.

It felt oddly dismissive of the very form that made so much of her work resonate so deeply.

There’s already a tendency in some literary circles to treat memoir as lesser-than. As indulgent. Therapeutic. Easier than fiction. A warm-up act before the “real” writing begins.

But anyone who has actually tried to write honest memoir knows otherwise.

You are working without the protective veil of invention. You are contending with actual people, actual histories, actual consequences. You are excavating your own contradictions in public. And if you’re doing it well, you’re shaping experience into meaning with the same precision, architecture, rhythm, tension, and thematic depth demanded of any serious literary form.

Great memoirs can sometimes accomplish more truth in twenty pages than four-hundred-page novels.

And as someone who writes creative nonfiction myself, I found this particular post sad to read — not because Anne Lamott owes memoir writers validation, but because she has, and continues to, make so many of us feel that writing from the self is not small. Not embarrassing. Not secondary. Not a stepping stone to something more important.

Because despite all of this, Anne Lamott remains one of the writers who first taught me that the raw, difficult, deeply human material of our lives was not something to write around, but something worth walking straight into.

And for that, I am deeply grateful.

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It was a good fellowship. A prestigious one. The setting was rigorous, with high expectations. When the announcement was made, colleagues sent congratulatory notes, and the institute director described her in the kind of language universities reserve for scholars whose work clearly matters: thoughtful, influential, widely respected. Her career had followed the trajectory institutions like to reward — serious scholarship, invited lectures, essays in respected journals, and published work.

But she had a problem.

The language used to describe her was accurate. Professor of this. Fellow of that. Author exploring the intersection of race, culture, and the arts. Careful, polished, ceremonial in the way academic bios tend to be.

And yet something felt off.

What she had spent years building was far more significant and nuanced than the pro forma academic language suggested. Her work moved between scholarship and cultural criticism, examining how art, history, and institutions shape public memory — how race and power circulate via the stories society curates.

She was well regarded.

But the issue was how she was perceived.

The language around her work stripped it of its power. It placed her adjacent to conversations but neglected the way she thought across them — connecting them, interrogating them, pushing at their edges.

Like many of us, she assumed that her work would speak for itself. It didn’t.

She had left it open to interpretation, letting others define who she was. Her story was not going to revise itself. If she wanted to be understood on her own terms, she’d have to define it herself.

As it stood, her story was not inaccurate. It was accurate in the way academic descriptions are always accurate — careful, ceremonial, admiring. It was all there.

But none of it positioned her as the scholar that she was. None of it conveyed the distinctiveness of her thinking or the role she played in shaping the field.

The dots did not connect.

This was her turning point: a recognition that she had the requisite credibility. What she didn’t have was the recognition her work deserved. She needed to be known for the quality of her thought — recognized as someone advancing the conversation, not simply participating in it.

The work didn’t change. The way she positioned it did.

At the center of her new brand narrative was a simple, forceful idea: the ways women read, annotate, argue with, and reimagine culture are forms of knowledge. Their interpretations expose power, illuminate strategies of survival and brilliance, and make visible what freedom requires.

And from that point on, her work spoke for itself.

The post The Big Shift appeared first on The Brand Dame.

Fair question. And it touches a nerve for a lot of us who have spent entire careers navigating systems that weren’t built with us in mind.

Sam makes a point I wholeheartedly agree with: women have always been asked to adjust ourselves to fit expectations. Be ambitious, but not threatening. Be confident, but not arrogant. Be capable, but still likable. The rules shift constantly, and somehow we run to catch up.

Any woman who has spent time in corporate life — or academia, media, nonprofits, you name it — knows this.

Where I part ways with her argument is around the idea that reinvention itself might simply be another form of compliance.

Maybe so.

But in my experience, as well as in the work I do around identity and visibility, the opposite is often true.

What many successful women reach in the later stretch of their careers isn’t compliance. It’s agency.

It’s the moment when you finally have enough perspective—and enough distance from other people’s expectations — to look at the whole arc of your professional life and ask a different set of questions.

What parts of my experience actually matter most?

What do I want to carry forward?

And what can I finally let go?

This isn’t about becoming someone new. It’s the reverse. It’s about rearranging the pieces of a life that’s already been built.

Some parts stay exactly where they are. Others get moved around. A few go away altogether.

The point isn’t transformation for its own sake. It’s clarity.

Sam draws an important distinction between evolution and compliance, and I think she’s exactly right about that. Compliance is externally driven. It’s about fitting yourself into what a system rewards.

Evolution is internal. It comes from a much more reflective and deliberate place.

I’d argue that what people often call reinvention — at least the healthy version of it — is really just evolution made visible.

Not cosmetic. Not performative. Not overlay.

More like a decision to stop waiting for someone else to recognize the value you’ve accrued; to take full, confident public credit for the work you own; to look hard at the arc of your career and say, without apology, this is what I’ve built. That’s reinvention.

The dog-eared phrase, “Tiara Syndrome,” still rings true: the idea that if you simply work hard enough and do excellent work, someone will eventually notice and reward you for it.

Sometimes that happens.

More often, it doesn’t.

At some point, we realize that telling our own story differently — the story of what we’ve built, achieved, and worked so hard for — isn’t bragging. It’s leadership.

It’s also ownership.

Which is why midlife — and the later chapters of a career — can be such a powerful moment. You finally have enough experience behind you to see the pattern. The through-line. In many cases, that’s reinvention: stepping forward and claiming, clearly and publicly, who you are and what you stand for.

And once you see it, you can shape how the world sees it too.

That’s not patriarchy.

That’s authorship.

Baker ends her essay with something I completely agree with: many women at midlife aren’t trying to become someone else. What they’re really looking for is a return to parts of themselves that were set aside along the way.

Yes.

But sometimes that return also requires a bit of rearranging. A reframing of the story. A clearer articulation of what’s there.

Sam Baker’s piece is part of an important conversation about how women navigate identity, work, and power over the course of a lifetime. It’s well worth reading, and I’m glad she raised the question. Because reinvention, at its best, isn’t compliance. It’s the ongoing work of reassessing, reframing, and claiming the arc of one’s life that’s still unfolding.

Photo by Puscas Adryan on Unsplash

The post Reinvention Isn’t the Problem appeared first on The Brand Dame.

What makes endings so difficult is that they demand trust — trust that something else will meet us on the other side, even if we cannot yet see its outline. Trust that letting go does not mean failing. Trust that the world keeps offering itself to us in different forms. Trust that the sun will come back up tomorrow.

For me, and maybe it’s true for you as well, my identity has been shaped by the companies and institutions I’ve worked for. 

An impressive title, marquee universities, and an Emmy in my back pocket — all telegraphed my level of authority and the world I operated in. I relied on the shorthand because it worked like a charm every time. I didn’t need to explain it. The masthead did it for me.

Inside most organizations, the results are visible. The person responsible for them often isn’t. For women in particular, the higher we rise, the more our singular contributions blur, dissolving into the titles we assume.

Which raises the question I keep coming back to: do we actually matter, or are we simply there?

When we talk about wanting to “matter,” we usually mean recognition, influence, and authority. Being seen for the value and expertise that have carried us this far.

You see this everywhere — nonprofits, professional firms, businesses we’ve built. We are indispensable to the results themselves — things would fall apart without us — yet we’re seen as a faceless part of the enterprise rather than a key person driving it.

Results carry our fingerprints, while the credit goes elsewhere.

Part of the problem is cultural. 

Women learn early on not to call attention to our accomplishments. Don’t crow. Don’t brag. Be a good colleague. Let the work speak for itself. If someone else takes the credit, so be it.

That conditioning runs deep. Over time, we unconsciously settle for being invisibly indispensable while remaining largely anonymous.

But there’s another way to think about this.

Mattering isn’t just about being good. Everyone is good enough. It’s about taking control of the narrative — showing up unapologetically, claiming credit for what we’ve built, and envisioning a future that expands rather than shrinks.

Stepping out from behind the title and owning what has been ours all along.

That shift is ours alone to make. But it requires a different mindset — a willingness to shape how we are perceived, to claim the outcomes we create, and to define our worth on our own terms outside the narrow definitions of titles and corporate status.

I’m working with a client who leads a successful organization she built from the ground up. It is thriving. Her leadership is widely respected. But as we talk about the future, a central question has emerged: where does the organization end and where does she begin?

For years, the two have been almost indistinguishable. Her authority, her ideas, and her leadership are defined by the business she spearheads. That has served her well. But it also means that much of what she has created is seen as belonging to the enterprise rather than to her.

The work she and I are doing now is about widening that lens. Well before she decides what comes next, she’s beginning to define a fuller public identity — one that stands on its own.

So what would happen if you asked yourself the same question? What are you willing to leave behind — and what can you take with you?

If we want to matter, we have to embed ourselves at the point of consequence. 

We have to connect what we do directly to outcomes — money, risk, growth, credibility — and make that connection visible.

That shift doesn’t happen by accident.

We have to position ourselves there, deliberately, confident that the sum of the parts will create an even greater whole. Only then does the question answer itself.

Photo credit: Annie Spratt @ unsplash

The post Where Do I Begin? appeared first on The Brand Dame.

To our families, to our communities, to the world around us. 

But what does that mean in the context of the work we do? To the businesses we started, the organizations we founded, the teams we belong to, or the customers who pay us?

We succeed in direct proportion to the value we create and claim. Presence is abundant. Necessity is rare.

Being okay with just being there is lazy.

To move inward, we have to embed ourselves at the point of consequence. We have to connect our work directly to outcomes that carry weight — money, risk, growth, credibility — and make that connection visible and readily available. That shift doesn’t happen by accident. We have to position ourselves there, deliberately.

Over time, people begin to associate us with a specific result. They stop seeing us as one of many capable options, but the one tied to something they must have.

The shift isn’t cosmetic. It’s positional. It requires deciding, with clarity, how indispensable we really are — and aligning everything we say and do around that center of gravity.

For women operating at scale — builders of companies, practices, reputations — the question isn’t “Am I competent?” That was settled years ago.

The real question is, “Am I consequential?”

At a certain level of success, that becomes the only question worth asking. It’s the difference between identity and consequence.

And in our professional lives, consequence is what really matters.

Photo by Syed Ahmad on Unsplash

The post Do I Matter? appeared first on The Brand Dame.

But the person we present to the world, one we relied on for years, has atrophied. 

Its impact and edges have dulled. 

How long will you keep telling the same old story?

It’s not a motivational question. It’s strategic because identity isn’t cosmetic. It’s the foundation on which your visibility, authority, and new opportunities depend.

Identity defines how much of ourselves we are willing to bring forward. But over time, we become so locked into a version of ourselves that our market-facing identity stops doing its essential job.

The problem isn’t talent. Or expertise. Or reputation. Or effort.

When your identity is outdated, overly cautious, or built around an earlier version of you, everything downstream suffers. Marketing can’t compensate for it. Visibility can’t compensate for it. A new platform won’t fix it.

I’ve shaped brands and public identities for everything from Ivy League institutions to early-stage tech companies, and a whole host of accomplished women. And this is what I know for sure: most advice about branding and perception is either too vague to be useful or too slick to be true.

My work lives at the intersection of clarity, credibility, and message — where identity stops being abstract and starts doing real work in the world. I’m not interested in polish for polish’s sake. I’m interested in the inside-out work — the part where you examine what actually holds the center. What’s evolved. What’s expanded. What no longer fits. About finding language that can carry the full weight of complex, accomplished work.

Identity isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about clarity.

When the way you’re positioned undersells what you can actually do, momentum stalls. You feel it in rooms where you should have more authority. In proposals that don’t land the way they should. In introductions that undersell you. In opportunities that go south.

We’re rewarded early for competence, steadiness, and execution. We build reputations around reliability. We learn to make ourselves legible inside institutions. 

But growth complicates the old story that we’re telling. Our scope widens. Our thinking deepens. Our ambitions stretch beyond an increasingly restrictive frame.

And yet we hesitate to disrupt the story.

So we keep using the same language. The same positioning. The same overthought bio.

Until one day, those two selves collide. It’s rarely dramatic. It’s a gradual realization that your brand — if we’re going to use that word — isn’t doing the load-bearing work your marketing depends on.

This isn’t easy work. Especially for women.

We’re taught to be consistent. To be grateful for the role that allowed us into the room. To keep proving. To let experience speak quietly for itself.

At some point, owning your identity means being willing to disrupt the old narrative and put a new stake in the ground.

Because the real work isn’t choosing between those two selves.

It’s bringing them together — and moving forward from there.

The post When The Selves Collide appeared first on The Brand Dame.

At first, I thought that meant I’d lost interest. It turned out to be something else entirely.

I couldn’t find my way back to the page.

What actually happened is simple. I got sick. Suddenly, persistently, and in a way that wasn’t resolving itself. As my health faltered, so did momentum, certainty, and the version of myself I’d always counted on to keep going.

When something in your body stops working the way it’s supposed to, it does more than interrupt your days. It quietly dismantles your assumptions.

About stamina. About competence. About control.

About who you are when the scaffolding comes loose.

There’s a particular disorientation that comes with realizing you can’t will your way through something. You can’t outwork it. You can’t think your way around it. You can’t decide to be “fine” and have that be enough.

My days immediately rearranged themselves around tests, waiting rooms, and not knowing,

In that stretch of time, a lot of what I thought I knew about myself fell apart. I’d believed I was someone who kept going — who could manage pressure, ambiguity, and complexity through sheer forward motion.

That belief turned out to be far less durable than I’d imagined.

What surprised me wasn’t fear, but how quickly the familiar version of me disappeared, replaced by someone still fully herself, but less certain of the ground she was standing on.

At first, I tried to fill the silence. I told myself I should be documenting this. Making sense of it. Turning it into something useful. That impulse faded quickly. There was nothing to shape yet.

Only a clearing.

And clearings are uncomfortable places to linger.

They’re stripped of markers. No milestones. No narrative arc. Just space where something used to stand.

That space isn’t empty so much as unfinished. It resists being organized into before-and-after, progress, or setback. Living inside it requires a different kind of patience — one that doesn’t reward effort or offer reassurance, only the slow discipline of staying put long enough to notice what’s still there.

Gradually, things have begun to shift. Not into answers, but into a clearer kind of attention. I started to see how provisional identity really is — how much of it depends on health, energy, and the ability to keep moving.

A few weeks ago, after a procedure that brought some resolution — though not all the answers — I noticed something unmistakable: color returning to my face, a lightness I hadn’t felt in months.

It wasn’t relief, exactly. It was recognition. I wasn’t restored, and I wasn’t “back,” but I was steady again — aware of how much of the self is built in motion, and how much is revealed when that motion stops.

The post Returning appeared first on The Brand Dame.

It’s safe. Reliable. You don’t have to think about it, and so what — you can explain it if someone’s actually interested… but you don’t have me at hello.

You lost me before we even got started.

Why is this important? Because it’s not enough to sound sort -of-good. And “good” is rarely self-evident anyway.

Every business, organization, top performer, consultant, and nonprofit is good — or you wouldn’t still be chugging along. But how you talk about what you do — on your website, on social media, in a proposal or on your CV — how you describe and pitch what you do — why people should buy from you and not your competitors — has become blah blah blah — safe but probably wearing thin.

My guess is you know it’s not working..

So why should anyone else’s ears perk up?

Yes, it’s ok, it’s been working so far.. 

But you parked it, let it coast, and convinced yourself it was still doing the job. 

Maybe it was. But you’ve evolved, and so has your business. Vanilla won’t carry you forward. It won’t keep you relevant. It certainly won’t help you grow and expand.

When I started my business, I had a way of describing what I offered and why it mattered that was great, right out of the gate. But my company, my clients, and even my expertise evolved, forcing me to take a hard, dispassionate look at what I was selling and who I was selling it to.

Since then, I make myself look at it every few months, inevitably tweaking, editing, and revisiting the assumptions that made those the right words at the right time. And every time — every time I force myself to do this — I end up with a new and improved value proposition that aligns with what my business is today. 

It’s not a new brand, far from it.

It’s a truer, more compelling way of talking about my work to the people I want to reach.

This isn’t failure. It’s repeated 5,000-mile check-ups. It keeps the car running and moving forward at lightning speed.

The problem is that we are afraid. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. 

But it is, if not broken, wearing out. As the writer Flannery O’Connor famously said, we must eventually “kill [our] darlings,” words that we’re in love with but which bog down meaning, clarity, and the impact of what we want and need to say.

Take a sharp knife and start slashing. It’s hard. Not always fun. And maybe that’s why we’re all reluctant to do it — but who wants to settle for good enough?

The identity stays stuck exactly where it started, while the work keeps moving.

And that’s the whole point. You’ve grown. Your work has grown. Your clients have grown. But your words haven’t.

Identity isn’t once-and-done; it’s consistent maintenance over time. Neglect it, and it goes stale. And stale is where momentum goes to die.

So stop saying the same old shit. You’re not who you were last month or last year — and that’s the good news.

But your story needs to catch up.

image credit:ubjug

The post Stop Saying the Same Old S__t appeared first on The Brand Dame.

That bike carried me through the pandemic — my trusty steed parked in the corner of my office. I rode it like my sanity depended on it, which, frankly, it did.

However, a few months ago, I had to take a break for medical reasons. When I returned, the Peloton universe was there, but I found myself on a different planet.

Peloton had rebranded. 

New logo, new voice, new everything. What used to feel like a badge of belonging now looked like a tech company trying to reinvent itself as “wellness for everyone.”

I’m guessing the rebrand was meant to make Peloton more accessible.

In theory, that’s smart. In practice, it stripped away the emotional DNA that made the brand so compelling in the first place.

Peloton wasn’t selling fitness equipment; it was selling motivation — the promise that you’d show up, sweat, and be part of something bigger as your living room walls closed in. 

The experience was as much about connection as it was about exercise.

However, it’s now a new and improved version, and here lies the problem.

Wellness for everyone usually ends up meaning wellness for no one.

In trying to be all things — meditation, strength training, outdoor runs, stretching, content subscriptions — Peloton is fast becoming a platform without a point of view.

What once felt focused and aspirational now feels transactional, a buffet of generic options that leave you full but not fed.

The brand’s original power came from clarity: a bike, a ride, a community that made you believe you could do hard things. When you start adding everything to the menu, you lose the reason people came to the table in the first place.

Now the whole platform feels generic, a content hub, not a community.

My favorite instructors are still there — the familiar voices that cheer me on — but the story isn’t.

And that’s the crux of it: the brand lost its narrative throughline.

When you rebrand from a place of apology instead of aspiration, people feel it.

I still love my bike.

But firing it up now is like driving by the house you grew up in and not recognizing the people playing on the lawn.

Seen / Heard / Noted

NYT Wirecutter | Is Monetization Undermining Trust?
I rarely buy anything without checking the New York Times Wirecutter first. Their early independence made every review feel like a conversation with a savvy, financially prudent, trustworthy friend. But lately, readers are noticing an uptick in affiliate-linked product reviews, and the balance feels off. It’s a reminder that when commerce quietly edges out credibility, even a beloved brand can start to feel transactional.

Nordstrom | Nostalgia with a Pulse
Bringing back the print catalog could’ve been pure retro kitsch — but it isn’t.Nordstrom’s glossy, tactile lookbook feels like a love letter to personal style and storytelling, reminding people why they fell in love with the brand in the first place. It harks back to the excitement of the FAO Schwarz catalog — that ritual of circling what you wanted, dog-earing the pages, imagining possibilities. Catalogs were physical brand theater: aspirational, immersive, and deeply personal. Nordstrom’s revival proves that nostalgia can still spark emotion when it’s done with craft and intent.

Photo credit: Erge Mahindra on Unsplash

The post Case Notes | Still Love the Bike. Don’t Know the Brand. appeared first on The Brand Dame.

The Harris Campaign Rebrand

The Vice President’s new memoir revisits the 107 days of her campaign — part behind-the-scenes account, part political post-mortem. It reads like an apologia: measured, careful, more managed than confessional.

I love any political behind-the-scenes story, but here you can feel the guardrails. Lots of regret and reflection with equal amounts repair, while floating the not-so-subtle possibility that she might run again.

M&M’s Mascot Resurrection

First, M&M’s retired the “spokescandies” after right-wing backlash over their new, allegedly “woke” redesigns (the green one wore sneakers instead of heels!). Then, after a temporary handoff to Maya Rudolph as “Chief of Fun,” the mascots quietly crept back for the brand’s anniversary campaign.

Taylor Swift’s NFL Era

The NFL thinks it’s borrowing her fandom; she’s actually rebranding the league in her image. What started as a celebrity sideshow has evolved into a full-blown marketing strategy — camera cuts, merchandise tie-ins, and the choreography of visibility.

It’s easy to dismiss it as hype, but she’s doing what every strong brand does: reframing the stage to make herself the story. The NFL gets a cultural sugar high; she hands us a masterclass in audience expansion. Guess who comes out ahead.

The New York Times and the Business of Trust

The Times has launched another campaign built around “independent journalism” and the question “Who do you believe?” — a direct nod to a culture where truth itself feels negotiable. The ads are polished and the message earnest, but the subtext is harder to miss: trust has become a marketing problem.

The paper’s authority once derived from its being accepted without explanation. Now it has to explain. When credibility becomes a campaign, you know the ground has shifted.

The Takeaway

Each one of these stories is about control — who owns the story, who shapes it, who gets to say what it means. 

Whether it’s a politician trying to shape the public narrative, a megastar reframing a billion-dollar industry, or a legacy brand defending its own relevance, the question is the same: how much truth can a brand afford?

The M&M’s saga might seem trivial next to politics or the press, but it’s the same machinery at work — reacting instead of leading, confusing noise for feedback, and ending up with a brand trying to get out of its own way..

I spend my days helping people define what’s real in their own work. Watching these public gymnastics, I’m reminded that the only thing riskier than telling your story is letting someone else tell it for you.

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