Laura Gassner Otting

Are your critics right about you? I had an interesting experience last week. And, I don’t mean my happy sheet cake dance for my 50th birthday. (See what you are missing if you aren’t following me on Instagram?) No, I did something even more uncomfortable than eating half of a sheet cake meant for an … Read more

This is me. This is 50. This is unbridled enthusiasm running headlong into discomfort and doubt. ⁣ This is bravado, bravery, and boldness questioning all the things at all the times. ⁣ This is fierceness and femininity wrapped in a moxie-driven, awkwardly uncoordinated, lemon of a body. ⁣ This is a best-selling author and in-demand … Read more

In 1992, I fell under the spell of a candidate and even more of an ideal I heard him state in an impassioned speech on a tiny black and white TV in a small strip mall in Gainesville, Florida. I dropped out of law school, and went to work to get him elected, and later … Read more

The best gift I was ever given didn’t cost a dime, and it changed my life. When I was 17 years old I began to slow dance with an eating disorder. By the time I was 21, it had its lifeless clutches wrapped so tightly around my self worth that every waking moment was spent … Read more

I’m learning how to say goodbye. For someone who has so much, I wrote a lot about loss this year. I wrote about loss of identity in the first weeks of the pandemic — loss of my business, loss of my kids’ rites of passage, loss of all of our normalcy. I wrote about loss … Read more

Goal setting is hard, but it doesn’t need to be. Once upon a time, long ago, likely before you were even conscious of what was happening, someone handed you a scorecard. And, on that scorecard there were a great many items: the right school, the right internship, the right job, the right spouse, the right … Read more

Are you grateful? A few weeks ago, a friend, lamenting about missing travel, asked a question, “What was the last trip you took?”​​​ I couldn’t remember. Sure, I remembered the last trip that was cancelled: two glorious weeks of spring break, the first of which would be spent doing college tours with my son, and … Read more

My brain is broken. And yours might be, too. For the last couple of weeks, my teammates and I have gotten together in my open garage, with our rowing machines spaced six feet apart, to do our regular morning workouts, just as we’ve been doing since the pandemic began. But over the past few weeks, … Read more

Kurt Cobain died 25 years ago. I had tickets to see Pearl Jam at Patriot Center in Fairfax, Virginia on April 8, 1994. I was 23 years old and had been working in the White House at the time. Kurt Cobain was 27, and had just been found dead. For hours we didn’t know if … Read more