Fresh Reads: Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women's Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours by Dr. Corinne Low
You don’t realize how much you’ve been carrying until someone quietly names it: Why am I so tired? In this A Fresh Story: Book Talk episode, Olivia sits down with economist and author Dr. Corinne Low, whose book Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours reads like a mirror held up to modern womanhood. Between the groceries arriving mid-interview, the crying babies on the book cover, and the dinner on fire, Corinne’s world looks a lot like ours: a life built on ambition, love, and care—held together by one woman’s invisible labor.
Having It All weaves together fifteen years of rigorous research with Corinne’s own story of becoming the primary breadwinner, default parent, and eventually a divorced single mom who chose to start over. She shows, with hard data, how gender roles have converged at work but stubbornly refused to shift at home; how men are still doing roughly the same amount of housework as they did in the 1970s, while mothers spend twice as much time with their kids as previous generations. Inside the numbers is a deeply human story: the slow realization that the “deal” she was living in was unsustainable, the terror of considering divorce, and the shock of discovering that, afterward, her life actually got easier—less cooking and cleaning, more sleep, more room to breathe.
In this conversation, Olivia and Dr. Low talk about treating the household like an enterprise, your joy like a “utility function,” and your life as a story in which you are allowed to be the protagonist. They explore the grief of letting go of a marriage, the healing that comes from finally centering your own needs, and the quiet regeneration that happens when you stop contorting yourself to keep everyone else comfortable. Having It All was written for the woman in a life transition—the burned-out married single mom, the newly divorced mother, the high-achieving professional who can’t shake the exhaustion—who needs someone to say: it’s not you, it’s the system. You are allowed to renegotiate the terms of your life. You are allowed a fresh start.