We need to stop telling [women], "Get a mentor and you will excel." Instead, we need to tell them, "Excel and you will get a mentor.

I wish I were strong enough to ignore what others say, but experience tells me I often can't. Allowing myself to feel upset, even really upset, and then move on - that's something I can do.

I don't hold myself out as a role model. I don't believe that everyone should make the same choices; that everyone has to want to be a CEO, or everyone should want to be a work-at-home mother. I want everyone to be able to choose. But I want us to be able to choose unencumbered by gender choosing for us.

Our culture needs to find a robust image of female success that is first, not male, and second, not a white woman on the phone, holding a crying baby.

Grief comes and goes, it ebbs and flows. I think one of the lessons of this for me is that there's no one way to grieve. Everyone does it in their own way, in their own time, and we all process life and its challenges and its ups and downs as they come.

When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys. But do not marry them. The things that make the bad boys sexy do not make them good husbands.

Careers are a jungle gym, not a ladder.