Why driven women Get Trapped in Perfectionism (and How to Get Free)
Perfectionism in driven women is rarely a personality quirk. It’s most often a trauma adaptation, a nervous system pattern built in childhood that teaches a girl her safety and worth are earned through flawless performance, and it persists into adulthood long after the original threat is gone.
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- Perfectionism in driven women is frequently a trauma adaptation rooted in conditional childhood approval, not a fixed character trait.
- Socially prescribed perfectionism, the belief that others demand your flawlessness, shows the strongest links to depression and suicidal ideation of any perfectionism dimension.
- A meta-analysis of 113,118 participants found perfectionistic concerns significantly correlated with depression, anxiety, and OCD symptoms.
- Perfectionism is stored in the nervous system as a threat response, which is why cognitive reframes alone rarely produce lasting change.
- High self-critical perfectionism uniquely predicts emotional exhaustion and depersonalization burnout in physicians.
- Healing requires nervous system regulation and relational repair alongside insight, not insight by itself.
This guide explains why perfectionism shows up so consistently in driven women, from Silicon Valley leaders to physicians to founders, and why it is best understood as a trauma adaptation rather than a personality trait. It covers the research on perfectionism and mental health, the neurobiology of the perfectionist loop, and what actually helps it resolve.
- The 2 A.M. Inbox Check
- What Is Perfectionism in Driven Women?
- Signs of Trauma-Adaptive Perfectionism
- The Neurobiology of the Perfectionist Loop
- How Perfectionism Shows Up in Driven Women’s Careers
- Contingent Self-Worth and the Approval Trap
- Both/And: Extraordinary Output AND an Exhausted Nervous System
- The Systemic Lens: Why Perfectionism Is Rewarded, Not Random
- How to Heal From Perfectionism
- Deep Dives on Perfectionism and Driven Women
- Frequently Asked Questions
The 2 A.M. Inbox Check
It’s 2 a.m. and Priya is awake again, phone lit up in the dark, scrolling past a Slack thread she already answered hours ago. There’s nothing new in it. She checked twenty minutes ago too. She’s a senior product manager at a Silicon Valley company that everyone in her network would recognize, and she has just shipped a launch that, by every external measure, went well. The metrics are good. Her director sent a message with three exclamation points. And still, Priya is awake, replaying a single Slack comment from a junior engineer that could, if she squints, be read as slightly critical.
This is not insomnia in the ordinary sense. It’s her nervous system doing what it has always done: scanning for the flaw, the missed detail, the version of events where she wasn’t quite good enough. In my work with clients, this exact scene, the driven woman awake at 2 a.m. auditing a win for hidden failure, is one of the most common entry points into understanding perfectionism in driven women as something deeper than a work habit.
Perfectionism gets talked about casually, almost as a badge, in professional culture. “I’m just a perfectionist” gets said the way someone might say “I’m just detail-oriented.” But what I see in the therapy room looks different from a harmless quirk. It looks like a woman who cannot metabolize a compliment, who treats rest as something to be earned rather than something she’s entitled to, and who experiences an ordinary mistake as evidence of a fundamental, hidden defect. This guide is about understanding that pattern accurately, tracing it to where it actually comes from, and mapping what real change requires.
What Is Perfectionism in Driven Women?
Perfectionism in driven women is a pattern in which self-worth becomes contingent on flawless performance, often rooted in early relational experiences where love or safety felt conditional on achievement. It is not simply high standards. It is a nervous system state in which falling short of an internal or perceived external standard triggers disproportionate shame, anxiety, or self-attack.
Thomas Curran, PhD, associate professor at the London School of Economics and author of The Perfection Trap: Embracing the Power of Good Enough, has documented that perfectionism has risen significantly across recent generations, driven in part by cultures that link a person’s value to measurable performance metrics.1 His research reframes perfectionism as a social phenomenon as much as a personal one, something shaped by the environments driven women move through, not a flaw unique to any individual.
Maladaptive perfectionism describes a pattern in which unrealistically high personal standards combine with harsh self-criticism and a persistent gap between performance and self-perceived adequacy, distinguishing it from the healthier pursuit of high, attainable standards.2 Paul Hewitt, PhD, and Gordon Flett, PhD, whose Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale remains the most widely used clinical measure of the construct, identified three distinct dimensions: self-oriented, other-oriented, and socially prescribed perfectionism.3
In plain terms: If your standards for yourself keep moving no matter what you accomplish, and every success gets immediately discounted while every flaw gets magnified, that’s not ambition working correctly. That’s perfectionism, and it’s a pattern that can be understood and changed.
What makes perfectionism especially relevant for the women I work with, Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, founders, attorneys, is that it is frequently praised rather than questioned. A woman who cannot stop working, who catches every error, who apologizes for imagined shortcomings, often gets promoted for these exact behaviors. That reinforcement makes the pattern harder to see, and much harder to interrupt, because the culture around her keeps confirming that it’s working.
The angle that matters most clinically is this: perfectionism in driven women is very often a trauma adaptation, not a fixed personality trait. Alice Miller, PhD, the Swiss psychoanalyst and author of The Drama of the Gifted Child, wrote extensively about children who learned early that their parents’ love or attention depended on their achievement or their ability to meet a parent’s emotional needs.4 That child grows into an adult whose nervous system still equates performance with survival, long after the original relationship that taught her that lesson is gone.
Signs of Trauma-Adaptive Perfectionism
Trauma-adaptive perfectionism shows up as a specific cluster of behaviors and internal experiences, not just a preference for doing things well. In my practice, the following signs appear together consistently enough that I look for them as a pattern:
- Inability to rest without guilt, even after a genuine accomplishment
- Disproportionate shame or panic after a minor, low-stakes mistake
- Discounting praise or reframing success as luck, timing, or someone else’s effort
- A persistent sense that you’re about to be discovered as inadequate, sometimes called impostor phenomenon
- Difficulty delegating because no one else’s work feels safe enough to trust
- Physical symptoms of chronic activation: tight jaw, shallow breathing, disrupted sleep
- Treating your own needs as a lower priority than everyone else’s expectations
- A belief that slowing down, even briefly, will cause everything to fall apart
A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis spanning 416 studies and 113,118 participants found that perfectionistic concerns, the self-critical, fear-of-failure dimension of perfectionism, showed significant medium correlations with depression, generalized anxiety, social anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive symptoms.5 Perfectionistic strivings showed smaller but still significant associations with the same outcomes. This distinction matters clinically: the drive to achieve isn’t the dangerous part. The self-criticism attached to falling short is.
The Neurobiology of the Perfectionist Loop
The perfectionist loop is a self-reinforcing neurobiological cycle in which achievement briefly quiets a threat response, only for the nervous system to reset toward vigilance almost immediately, restarting the search for the next thing to fix. Understanding this loop as biological, not just psychological, helps explain why willpower and reframing rarely interrupt it on their own.
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, author of The Body Keeps the Score, has documented how early relational stress recalibrates the brain’s threat-detection systems, particularly the amygdala’s sensitivity and the prefrontal cortex’s capacity for regulation.6 For a driven woman whose childhood taught her that mistakes carried real relational risk, whether that meant a withdrawn parent, a punitive reaction, or the loss of the only attention she reliably received, her amygdala learned to treat ordinary, low-stakes errors with the same intensity as genuine danger. That calibration doesn’t reset simply because she’s now capable, credentialed, and safe.
The perfectionist loop describes the cyclical pattern in which task completion produces a brief reduction in anxiety or threat activation, which the nervous system then treats as confirmation that vigilance and effort caused the relief, reinforcing the next round of hypervigilant striving. The loop resets almost immediately after each success because the underlying threat signal, not the specific task, was the actual driver of the anxiety.
In plain terms: The relief you feel after finishing something perfectly doesn’t last, not because you haven’t found the right system yet, but because the relief was never really about the task. It was about temporarily quieting a much older alarm.
This is precisely why cognitive reframes alone don’t work for most driven women. Telling yourself “done is better than perfect” is true, and it rarely changes behavior on its own, because the belief driving the behavior isn’t fully cognitive. It’s stored in implicit memory and nervous system reactivity, the domain Bessel van der Kolk’s research places outside the reach of purely verbal, top-down intervention.6 Real change requires working with the body’s threat response directly, not just replacing one thought with another.
A 2022 study of physicians found that high self-critical perfectionism, the tendency toward harsh self-judgment and the belief that others demand perfection, uniquely predicted both emotional exhaustion burnout and depersonalization burnout, even after accounting for personality traits like conscientiousness.7 The nervous system cost of perfectionism is not abstract. It shows up as measurable clinical burnout in some of the most rigorously trained professionals in the country.
How Perfectionism Shows Up in Driven Women’s Careers
Perfectionism shows up in driven women’s careers as an inability to feel finished, a compulsive need to over-prepare, and a tendency to treat delegation as a risk rather than a skill. It rarely announces itself as a problem, because in most high-performance cultures, it looks identical to excellence.
Nadia is a composite of the cardiothoracic and surgical residents I’ve worked with. She chose her specialty in part because it left no room for error, which felt, at the time, like a relief rather than a burden. In a field where a single missed detail can cost a life, her hypervigilance had obvious value. But Nadia also cannot sleep the night before a routine, low-risk procedure. She reviews the same imaging four and five times. She has never once, in six years of training, taken a compliment from an attending without immediately listing what she could have done better.
Nadia grew up the daughter of two physicians who equated love with academic performance. A 98 on an exam prompted a question about the other two points. She learned early that being good wasn’t enough; she had to be flawless to be safe from disappointment. That template followed her directly into medicine, a field that, structurally, rewards exactly the hypervigilance her childhood trained into her. You can read more about how this specific pattern plays out for physicians and perfectionism and how it differs from ordinary clinical rigor.
Jordan is a composite of the founders I’ve worked with, someone who raised two rounds of funding before the age of thirty-five and still cannot look at her own product without immediately cataloging its flaws. She built her company, in part, because she couldn’t tolerate working for someone else’s imperfect judgment. Her investors describe her as relentless. Her therapist, and eventually she herself, came to understand that relentlessness as something closer to an inability to stop, rooted in a childhood where her efforts were only acknowledged when they exceeded expectation. If this pattern resonates, my guide on good girl syndrome in driven women traces a closely related version of the same wound.
This pattern also shows up as a specific kind of impostor phenomenon in which success never updates a woman’s internal sense of adequacy, and as an inability to set boundaries at work because saying no feels like inviting the exact disapproval perfectionism was built to avoid.
Contingent Self-Worth and the Approval Trap
Contingent self-worth is a self-esteem structure in which a person’s sense of value depends on external outcomes, achievement, appearance, or approval, rather than resting on a stable internal foundation. For driven women with trauma-adaptive perfectionism, contingent self-worth means every accomplishment provides only temporary relief before the underlying question, am I actually enough, reasserts itself.
Socially prescribed perfectionism, one of the three dimensions identified by Paul Hewitt, PhD, and Gordon Flett, PhD, describes the belief that other people hold you to an impossible standard and will withdraw approval, respect, or love if you fail to meet it.3 Research consistently shows this dimension carries the strongest associations with depression and suicidal ideation of any perfectionism subtype, more damaging even than the internally generated self-oriented perfectionism.8 A meta-analysis of over 2,000 participants across 15 studies found socially prescribed perfectionism predicted suicide ideation beyond what hopelessness alone could explain.9
Socially prescribed perfectionism is the perception that significant others hold unrealistic standards for you, evaluate you harshly, and will withdraw approval if you fall short, regardless of whether that perception accurately reflects the other person’s actual expectations.3 Gordon Flett, PhD, and Paul Hewitt, PhD, have described it as the most destructive of the three perfectionism dimensions, with documented links to depression, burnout, and suicidal ideation across dozens of studies.8
In plain terms: If you feel like everyone around you, your boss, your parents, your partner, is silently grading you and will pull back the moment you slip, that felt sense didn’t come from nowhere. It usually traces back to a much earlier relationship where approval genuinely was conditional.
Brené Brown, PhD, LMSW, research professor and author of The Gifts of Imperfection, describes perfectionism not as a route to safety but as a twenty-ton shield people carry believing it will protect them, when in practice it prevents the very connection and self-acceptance that would resolve the underlying fear.10 Her research reframes perfectionism as fundamentally about managing other people’s perception rather than pursuing genuine excellence, a distinction that matters enormously in treatment.
“Perfectionism is not the same thing as striving to be your best. Perfectionism is not about healthy achievement and growth. Perfectionism is a defensive move. It’s the belief that if we do things perfectly and look perfect, we can minimize or avoid the pain of blame, judgment, and shame.”
Brené Brown, PhD, LMSW, research professor, University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work, author of The Gifts of Imperfection
Both/And: Extraordinary Output AND an Exhausted Nervous System
Driven women with trauma-adaptive perfectionism live inside a persistent both/and: their output can be extraordinary by any external measure, and their internal nervous system can be running on a level of chronic threat activation that would concern any physician if it showed up on a lab result. Neither cancels out the other. Both are simultaneously true.
Most of the women I work with arrive believing they have to choose between two stories: either they’re thriving, because look at everything they’ve built, or they’re struggling, because look at how exhausted and joyless the striving has become. The truth doesn’t resolve into either story. It’s both at once, and learning to hold both without needing to collapse into one is part of the actual work.
Maya is a composite of the attorneys and litigators I’ve worked with who made partner faster than almost anyone in her firm’s history. She is, without exaggeration, one of the most capable negotiators her colleagues have encountered. She is also someone who hasn’t taken a real vacation in four years, who edits her own emails eleven times before sending them, and who cried in her car in a parking garage the week she made partner because the achievement she’d organized her entire adult life around didn’t produce the relief she’d been promised it would.
Maya’s capability was never in question. What was in question, and what took real work to name, was the cost her nervous system had been quietly absorbing to produce that capability. Her perfectionism wasn’t a flaw sitting alongside her competence. It was, in many ways, the engine of it, built in response to a childhood where her father’s approval arrived only after visible, undeniable achievement. Recognizing that both/and, extraordinary AND exhausted, wasn’t a demotion of everything she’d built. It was the beginning of building it on a foundation that didn’t require her own collapse to sustain it.
The Systemic Lens: Why Perfectionism Is Rewarded, Not Random
Perfectionism in driven women is not a random individual quirk. It is a pattern that specific systems, families, medical training programs, venture capital, elite academic institutions, actively reinforce and reward, which means the solution can’t be purely individual either.
Thomas Curran, PhD, has argued that rising perfectionism across generations correlates with cultures that increasingly tie personal worth to measurable, comparable performance metrics, from standardized test scores to social media engagement to quarterly OKRs.1 A driven woman’s perfectionism doesn’t form in a vacuum. It forms inside families that modeled conditional approval, and it gets reinforced by professional cultures, medicine, technology, law, finance, that treat exhaustion as a credential and rest as a liability.
Excellent vs. Excessive, a 2023 analysis published for medical educators, found that maladaptive perfectionism in medical trainees is shaped significantly by institutional culture, including shaming experiences tied to learning and an environment that treats overwork as a rite of passage rather than a risk factor.11 The system doesn’t just fail to interrupt perfectionism. In many cases, it actively selects for it and then punishes the person for the burnout that inevitably follows.
This systemic lens matters because it removes a layer of unnecessary self-blame. If you’re a driven woman who cannot rest, the honest answer for why is rarely just “I have a personality flaw.” It’s more accurate, and more useful, to say: I was raised in a family and I now work inside a system that both taught me my worth is conditional and then rewarded me, visibly and repeatedly, for acting as though that’s true. Naming the system doesn’t remove your responsibility for your own healing, but it does mean you can stop treating your exhaustion as evidence of personal defect.
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How to Heal From Perfectionism
Healing from perfectionism requires more than adjusting your thoughts about achievement. It requires nervous system regulation, relational repair, and a gradual re-education of the part of you that still believes rest and imperfection are dangerous. In my work with clients, the process tends to move through several overlapping stages.
- Name the pattern accurately. Most driven women initially describe their perfectionism with pride, not concern. The first step is honestly cataloging its actual cost: sleep, relationships, physical health, joy.
- Trace the pattern to its origin. Understanding where the belief “I must be flawless to be safe or loved” was first installed, often in a specific childhood relationship, removes some of its automatic authority.
- Do nervous system work, not just talk therapy. Because perfectionism lives in the body’s threat response, somatic approaches help the nervous system learn, experientially, that imperfection is not dangerous.
- Practice tolerable imperfection deliberately. Small, structured exposures to being visibly less than perfect, sending an unedited email, leaving a task at eighty percent, build real evidence that safety doesn’t require flawlessness.
- Build relationships that don’t require performance. Healing accelerates inside relationships, including therapeutic ones, where you experience being valued independent of your output.
- Separate healthy striving from self-attack. The goal isn’t to stop caring about quality. It’s to stop treating every gap between effort and outcome as proof of unworthiness.
Gabor Maté, MD, physician and author of The Myth of Normal, has written that many traits our culture praises, relentless achievement among them, are trauma adaptations a disconnected culture has learned to reward rather than examine. Healing, in that framing, isn’t about becoming less capable. It’s about becoming capable from a place that doesn’t require your own nervous system to be under constant siege. My Fixing the Foundations course was built specifically to walk driven women through this exact process, and the mini-course Enough Without the Effort addresses the achievement-as-worth pattern directly.
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Deep Dives on Perfectionism and Driven Women
Everything above is a foundation. Below is a fuller map of related resources, organized by category, so you can go as deep as you need on the specific piece of this that matters most to you right now.
Understanding the Pattern Itself
- Perfectionism in Medicine: A Therapist’s Guide for Physicians: how clinical training culture reinforces trauma-adaptive perfectionism specifically in doctors.
- Good Girl Syndrome in Driven Women: the close relative of perfectionism built around compliance and being low-maintenance.
- Impostor Syndrome: A Therapist’s Guide for Driven Women: why success rarely updates the internal sense of being a fraud.
- What Is Relational Trauma? A Complete Guide: the foundational trauma framework that perfectionism often sits on top of.
Where Perfectionism Shows Up
- Burnout in Women Executives: A Therapist’s Guide: the physical and emotional endpoint of unaddressed perfectionism.
- Overfunctioning in Relationships: Why Driven Women Do Too Much: how perfectionism migrates from work into partnership and parenting.
- Dead Bedroom: When You Haven’t Been Touched in Months: how chronic hypervigilance quietly erodes physical intimacy.
- The Pursuer-Distancer Dynamic in Driven Women’s Relationships: a common relational pattern in perfectionist partnerships.
Where the Pattern Comes From
- Healing as the Adult Child of Emotionally Immature Parents: the developmental root of much conditional-approval perfectionism.
- The False Self: How to Know If You’ve Built One: the performed, flawless self that perfectionism often constructs.
- Your Relational Blueprint: How Childhood Patterns Shape Adult Life: mapping your own family’s specific version of the conditional-approval pattern.
Recovery and the Path Forward
- Inner Child Work: Evidence-Based Exercises, a Therapist’s Guide: practical exercises for reaching the part of you that still equates achievement with safety.
- Setting Boundaries With Difficult Parents: What Works and What Doesn’t: applying boundary work to the relationship that often originated the pattern.
- The Dark Night of the Soul: the disorienting period when perfectionism’s old coping strategies stop working before new ones settle in.
- Enough Without the Effort: Annie’s mini-course addressing the achievement-as-worth pattern directly.
- Fixing the Foundations: Annie’s signature course for driven women rebuilding the psychological foundations beneath their achievement.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Is perfectionism in driven women a mental health condition?
A: Perfectionism itself isn’t a standalone diagnosis, but research links it strongly to depression, anxiety, and burnout. When self-worth depends entirely on flawless performance, it functions less like a personality trait and more like a trauma-adaptive coping pattern that warrants clinical attention.
Q: Why can’t I just think my way out of perfectionism?
A: Perfectionism is stored in the nervous system as a survival strategy, not just as a belief. Cognitive reframes can shift the thought for a moment, but the underlying threat response, the fear that rest or imperfection equals danger, lives beneath conscious reasoning and needs somatic and relational work to actually change.
Q: What’s the difference between healthy high standards and perfectionism?
A: Healthy high standards allow satisfaction when a goal is met and tolerate mistakes as information. Perfectionism, particularly the self-critical and socially prescribed types, moves the goalpost after every success and treats mistakes as evidence of fundamental unworthiness.
Q: Why do so many physicians and founders struggle with perfectionism?
A: High-stakes, high-visibility professions reward exactly the behaviors that perfectionism produces: hypervigilance, overwork, and an inability to tolerate error. Research on physician burnout has found that self-critical perfectionism uniquely predicts emotional exhaustion, meaning the culture of medicine, technology, and law can reinforce a trauma pattern rather than interrupt it.
Q: Can perfectionism be a trauma response?
A: Yes. When a child learns that approval, attention, or safety are conditional on achievement, the nervous system encodes performance as a survival strategy. Alice Miller, PhD, described this pattern decades ago, and it remains one of the clearest developmental pathways into adult perfectionism.
Q: What is socially prescribed perfectionism?
A: Socially prescribed perfectionism is the belief that other people demand your flawlessness and will withdraw approval if you fall short. Research by Paul Hewitt, PhD, and Gordon Flett, PhD, identifies it as the most psychologically damaging of the three perfectionism dimensions, with the strongest links to depression and suicidal ideation.
Q: Does therapy actually help with perfectionism?
A: Yes, particularly approaches that combine nervous system regulation with relational repair rather than cognitive strategies alone. Because perfectionism often originates as a trauma adaptation, treatment that only targets thought patterns tends to produce temporary relief rather than lasting change.
Q: How do I know if my perfectionism is trauma-related?
A: A useful signal is what happens internally after you make a mistake or receive praise. If either produces disproportionate anxiety, shame, or a compulsive need to immediately do more, that intensity usually points to an earlier relational pattern rather than a simple preference for doing things well.
- Curran T, Hill AP. Perfectionism is increasing over time: A meta-analysis of birth cohort differences from 1989 to 2016. Psychol Bull. 2019;145(4):410-429. doi:10.1037/bul0000138
- Frost RO, Marten P, Lahart C, Rosenblate R. The dimensions of perfectionism. Cogn Ther Res. 1990;14:449-468. doi:10.1007/BF01172967
- Hewitt PL, Flett GL. Perfectionism in the self and social contexts: Conceptualization, assessment, and association with psychopathology. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1991;60(3):456-470. PMID: 2027080
- Miller A. The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self. New York: Basic Books; 1981/1997.
- Limburg K, Watson HJ, Hagger MS, Egan SJ. The relationship between perfectionism and psychopathology: A meta-analysis. J Clin Psychol. 2017;73(10):1301-1326. doi:10.1002/jclp.22435
- van der Kolk B. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking; 2014.
- Martin SR, Fortier MA, Heyming TW, et al. Perfectionism as a predictor of physician burnout. BMC Health Serv Res. 2022;22:1425. PMID: 36443726
- Smith MM, Sherry SB, Chen S, et al. The perniciousness of perfectionism: A meta-analytic review of the perfectionism-suicide relationship. J Pers. 2018;86(3):522-542. PMID: 28734118
- Brown B. The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are. Center City, MN: Hazelden Publishing; 2010.
- Smith MM, Vidovic V, Sherry SB. Self-oriented perfectionism and socially prescribed perfectionism add incrementally to the prediction of suicide ideation beyond hopelessness: A meta-analysis of 15 studies. In: Handbook of Suicidal Behaviour. Singapore: Springer; 2017. doi:10.1007/978-981-10-4816-6_19
- Rissman ED, et al. Excellent vs excessive: Helping trainees balance performance and perfectionism. J Grad Med Educ. 2023;15(4):404-408. PMID: 37637342
If reading this felt uncomfortably familiar, that recognition matters. It usually means you’re closer to understanding your own pattern than you were an hour ago. You don’t need to have it all figured out before you reach out for support, and you don’t have to dismantle a lifetime of adaptive strategies on your own. Perfectionism kept you safe once. It doesn’t have to be the only way you know how to be safe now.
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Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven women, including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs, in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
