Stars Come Out to Support ‘All the Cool Girls Get Fired’

The Tory Burch store on Rodeo Drive was packed to the well-heeled gills on Thursday to celebrate the launch of fashion editors Laura Brown and Kristina O’Neill’s new book All the Cool Girls Get Fired: How to Let Go of Being Let Go and Come Back on Top.

Cindy Crawford, Laura Dern, Rebecca Gayheart-Dane, Tory Burch, Kieran Shipka, Jurnee Smollett, Carolyn Murphy, Monica Lewinsky, Lake Bell, Santigold, Janicza Bravo, Zoey Deutch, Bella Heathcote and Uzo Aduba were among those in attendance to fete Brown and O’Neill, and many participated in a reading from the book, which features stories from Oprah, Lisa Kudrow, Carol Burnette, Jamie Lee Curtis and Katie Couric.

“First of all, I’m sure everyone in this room either has been fired, was almost fired, or should have been fired,” Burch joked in her welcome speech. “I’ll say thank you to Kristina and Laura for this fabulous book on the art of getting fired and for showing us it isn’t the end. In fact, it’s just the beginning of something smarter, cooler and much, much bigger.”

Brown and O’Neill rose in the ranks over their 20-year friendship, both becoming editor-in-chief at prestigious publications — Brown at InStyle and O’Neill at WSJ Magazine. In early 2022, Brown was let go, followed by O’Neill in the spring of 2023. At drinks to commiserate over their respective firings, Brown had an idea. “I was like, ‘I know what we’re going to do.’ Kristina said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘We’re going to take a picture for Instagram, and we’re going to caption it, ‘All the cool girls get fired.’’”

The Instagram post blew up, with women including Monica Lewinsky commenting under the post, sharing their own experiences; in her comment, Lewinsky joked, “If I hadn’t been fired from the White House, I would never have met Linda Tripp”.

“We knew the next morning, that we’d sort of opened some sort of psychological doorway,” Brown said.

The post has evolved into All the Cool Girls Get Fired, a rollicking, joyful self-help book and how-to guide, that aims to empower and inform women amidst the turbulent job market of the 2020s. “I was on the back foot, and there was so much information in so many different places,” O’Neill recalled of the weeks after she was let go. “You’re on a health care website, you’re over here. I was like, ‘If everything was just in one damn place, this would be so much easier.’ So it was really like a book that we wish existed and didn’t.”

As some of the duo’s famous friends read excerpts from the resulting book, everyone from Bravo to Bell proudly admitted to having been fired in their careers. But it was Lewinsky who again brought the house down, quipping “I don’t want to show anyone up, but I was fired from the White House,” eliciting a high-five from Brown.

And the conversation is spreading across the country. “Now that the book is out,” Brown said, “women are writing us on LinkedIn and saying, ‘This happened to me.’ It’s opening people’s hearts, and it’s helping people uncork this thing. We want the shame to be gone … our worth doesn’t go away if our job does.”

O’Neill concurred: “I think it is really important that people understand that their value lies within them, and that carries forward, and those skills are transferable,” she said. “If Laura and I didn’t stay at it and had not persevered, we wouldn’t be here today.”

Glancing around the standing-room-only party, filled with joyful hugs and happy chatter as guests drank spicy margaritas and nibbled on fries in paper cones printed with quotes from the book, a dazed Brown smiled. “If you lose your job, and you’ve been good and you’ve worked hard, people show up for you,” she said. “And it may not be a fancy party on Rodeo Drive, but your friends will show up for you.”