If this is the first time you’ve held a book from the What I Know Now™ series in your hand, I’d like you to think of it as a gift—from me, from the generous young women whose letters are featured here, and from my mother, Joyce Spragins, who inspired the concept contained in these books. Unlike many books that contain advice, rules, and mandates about how to live your life, this book will not tell you to do anything. That’s because each of the letters here is written by an accomplished young woman to herself at a younger age, with guidance, encouragement, or a warning she wished she’d been given at that time in her life. If I’d Known Then: Women in Their 20s and 30s Write Letters to Their Younger Selves captures those moments of twenty-twenty hindsight we all experience about our own lives.

    Who knows better than Danica McKellar—the actress who played Winnie on The Wonder Years—what she needed to hear when she spent hours finding fault with herself in the mirror and days wondering why the object of her crush didn’t call?

    Who knows better than Olympic gymnast Amanda Borden what advice would have helped her thrive at the pressure-packed, elite level of competition when she was fifteen?

    Learning the words of advice that a woman would give to herself, if she could somehow post a letter back in time, offers an intimate glimpse of who she was on the inside and what she struggled with at a particular juncture of her life. We can read these letters simply to understand more about fascinating women, such as Spanx founder Sara Blakely or Misty Copeland, the first African American ballerina to become a soloist in the American Ballet Theatre. Or we can discover that the hard-earned wisdom that would have helped Sara through the experience of her best friend’s death or aided Misty through what she thought was a career-threatening moment actually applies to our own life.

    Or we may understand, with a jolt of recognition, that we’re not the only one who has felt this way. That realization can be a surprisingly powerful salve that brings comfort at the same time that it binds us to one another.

    For this book I chose to focus on young women writing to themselves during their teenage and college years for a couple of reasons. After What I Know Now: Letters to My Younger Self™ was published in 2006, I found myself inscribing great numbers of books destined to be given as gifts and graduation presents to teenagers and college-age women. I later received glowing reports from many of these young women. My own daughter, Keenan, who was then eighteen, stayed up all night reading the book with one of her best friends. (Yes, I know she’s my daughter. But her list of favorite late-night activities does not usually include reading.) These young women seemed hungry for the insights and true experiences of other women.

    Also, when I invited readers, Web site visitors, and audiences to write their own letters to their younger self (and send them to me at www.letterstomyyoungerself.com), I noticed that almost every letter was aimed at ages twelve to twenty-two. Those years bracket such enormous physical and emotional change that it’s no surprise they are packed with difficult moments and turbulent periods. It’s a measure of the intensity of those ages that women, who could pick any time in their life to send a message to, thought they needed the most help as a thirteen-year-old or sixteen-year-old or twenty-year-old.

    What kind of life wisdom does a twenty-four-year-old have, really? Not much, I thought at first. But when I reflected upon the distance traveled between ages thirteen and sixteen, just three short years, or between junior year in high school and junior year in college, I began to change my mind. Women in their twenties and thirties may not have acquired life wisdom in every arena, but they have enough distance to know intimately what would have helped smooth their way through the thickets of cliques, bad boyfriends, bullies, unwise friendships, and family traumas that snagged them in middle school, high school, and college. That is the age group represented here, except for a couple of letter writers who left their thirties recently and a couple who are just edging out of their teens. These women were extremely opinionated about their messages.

    Picked on because of her mixed racial background and her refusal to join a crowd, actress Jessica Alba dived into acting at thirteen because it meant she could get out of the hateful atmosphere at school. “Because I felt so alone when I was a kid, I really love young women. I think they are incredibly underestimated,” she told me.

    Confidence on the soccer field was never a problem for two-time World Cup champion, two-time Olympic gold medalist, and Olympic silver medalist Julie Foudy. But entering high school with “concave boobs” and short hair shriveled her self-assurance. “Looks are temporary. Strengths are not,” she counsels her younger self.

     The enormity of what some young women had to deal with and overcome as teenagers was humbling. Jewelry designer Mindy Lam was considered an unlucky child by her Chinese father and was treated poorly compared to her sister and brother. Artist Tara McPherson essentially raised herself from age twelve because her alcoholic mother, with whom she lived, was absent or not functioning, and her father, whose house was nearby, often traveled the world for his work.

    One theme in these letters surprised me, and one did not. Almost no one in the book truly felt they “fit in” or were “normal” during these years, even ostensibly successful cheerleaders, class presidents, and beauties. The absolute uniformity of every girl feeling different would be funny if the details weren’t often so heartbreaking.

    The unsurprising theme is how many girls wished to be skinny. I got the feeling that girls would have considered themselves pretty much untouchable if they could only be skinny. I don’t blame the fashion industry or the media. I think skinniness is simply the handiest, just-possibly-attainable shield against slings and arrows and their own insecurities. It’s more a measure of how desperately girls want some protective armor, or a magic power, than a rejection of their own bodies.

    My desire to find out what I did not know, hard-won nuggets of wisdom, sparked What I Know Now: Letters to My Younger Self™. Yet I gained so much more than that. I discovered that these letters touch a deep place inside both letter writers and readers. The process of writing a letter to your younger self can bring closure. Sharing a letter can bring a wonderful connection that bridges differences among women.

    I found that book clubs, women’s groups, and reunion classes were reading the book and sharing their own letters to their younger selves. I began conducting women’s leadership seminars for companies, using the concept of letter writing. Inspired by the idea which his wife, Kimberly Williams-Paisley, told him about, country music star Brad Paisley wrote a sweet, wry song called “Letter To Me,” aimed at his seventeen-year-old self. The music video was filmed at his old high school and some of the real-life people he mentions in the song have roles in the video.

    All of this is to say that I now know enough not to know what will unfold after the publication of If I’d Known Then. But I do know it has been a privilege to meet and talk to the young women whose letters you are about to read. My wish is that they realize how much their words resonate with—and help—readers. And for readers, well, I hope for so much: less loneliness, more comfort, an escape from your little demon, whatever it may be. Most of all, I hope you see that you are not the only one and that it won’t be like this forever. As Atoosa Rubenstein, founder of CosmoGIRL! and Alpha Kitty, says in her letter to her younger self, “You will find yourself in the future as you imagine yourself.”