If you could somehow postmark a letter back through time to your younger self, what age would you choose and what would the letter say? This is the question I asked dozens of extraordinary women. Some of the most creative, powerful and famous women of our day were intrigued enough by this question to spend time with me, as I helped each woman focus in on the crucial moment in the past when she could have most used the understanding she now possesses. What I Know Now: Letters To My Younger Self contains their heartfelt responses to my question and shares wisdom that exceeded my greatest expectations.

    I sought the insights of these remarkable women for a very simple reason. I miss my mother. She died in a plane crash when I was 32. This was the first tragedy that ever befell my fortunate family and it seemed like an astonishing, theatrical mistake. Mom? Dead at 60? On a plane headed to her great-aunt’s funeral?

    Before my father finished the sentence, “There were no survivors,” I sat up in bed, back perfectly erect, as if his voice contained an electrical current that had propelled me up and forward. In the same instant I felt something else move forward. An invisible skein, so intricately threaded through my skeleton that I had never known it was there, seemed to rip itself out of my body and float away. I felt the departure of my mother first in my bones and sinews, which seemed hollow after that ethereal netting drifted off and dissolved in the dark Chicago night.

    I know that my tragedy is a small one among the world’s too-abundant supply of heartbreak. Indeed, in time I began to understand how richly indulged I was to have had a mother like mine for so long. She was loving, kind, loyal, with a large, lovely smile she wore often. Her name was Joyce.

    But understanding that I was lucky didn’t lessen the pain of her absence. As the years went by, I felt new grief, as my own life gave me a context for hers. I lost my mother at 32. She had lost hers at 21. I had an ectopic pregnancy and lost a fallopian tube before adopting my daughter and getting pregnant with my son. She had suffered five miscarriages before having five children. As I navigated clumsily, painfully and joyfully through life’s passages my appreciation for her and the way she conducted herself grew. But I felt a fresh, sharp stab of yearning each time she was not there to be my mother when I badly wanted mothering.

    This book grew out of those moments. After the childish need for mothering passed, curiosity would remain. How had Mom handled this situation, overcome that obstacle, made peace with disappointments and betrayals? It wasn’t just her advice that I wished for, though I think I would have welcomed it. I wanted to know what she thought and felt about key moments in her life—when they occurred and also today, when she could use her life’s wisdom to look back and reflect. What did she wish she had done, or wish she had not done? What would have seemed important to her now that seemed unimportant at the time? I wanted to see the underpinnings of her life--the joists, frame and foundation, and how they were put together.

    Then I realized that I didn’t have to yearn for what is impossible. Every woman has struggles, regrets, “what ifs” and, as a result, wisdom to share. I could ask other women whom I respect and admire. That was the seed of this project, a gift to myself, and from an article in O Magazine in April 2003, it has grown. To my great pleasure, loving, kind, fascinating, famous and accomplished women agreed to pull back the curtain on a part of their lives in order to contribute to this book. Now that it is complete, my hope is that fWhat I Know Now: Letters To My Younger Self will help women better understand their own hurdles and, more importantly, that it will validate and honor their struggles to overcome them.

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    We don’t always have the wisdom we require at the time we need it. We struggle. We worry. Often, only later do our choices make sense to us. What kind of advice would successful women like Senator Barbara Boxer, actress Olympia Dukakis or activist Heather Mills McCartney give to their younger selves?

    The answers are in your hands, in the form of letters back in time--and they may surprise you. As I helped the contributors plan their missives, I noticed that as a rule they had no difficulty coming up with a message to convey. More often my task was to help them pick which challenging moment in their lives to focus on, out of so many.

    These interviews were strikingly different from most of the ones I’ve conducted during nearly twenty-five years as a journalist. They were personal, of course, but that only begins to explain their emotional texture. I was asking terribly smart, talented women with enormous demands on their time to pause and reflect upon hidden aspects of their lives—their mistakes, vulnerabilities or fears. The conversation would often lead to one anecdote after another as we teased out the knot of circumstances wrapped around a dark moment in a woman’s life. That’s revealing a lot to a perfect stranger. But they did so with candor and generosity and I am honored by their trust.

    Though their advice, and the age at which it’s aimed, varies widely, you may notice some common elements. Each of the contributors felt real kindness for the girl, young adult or middle-aged woman she had been. There were remarkably few messages that were strategic or action-oriented, such as Quit that job or Move to Montana. Instead, for most women the essential information they wanted to convey had to do with how to navigate intense emotions. For them, the battle wasn’t on the outside, it was on the inside. I think of Today’s Ann Curry sensing that her true self was being erased in her first job, or Olympic gymnast Shannon Miller feeling that the world expected an eye-popping encore after she retired from competition.

    In many cases, it’s possible to see a connection between a woman’s ostensible weakness, revealed in her letter, and a current strength in her life or work. After being burdened with free-floating phobias and foibles as a child, cartoonist Roz Chast now makes her living by turning fear and foibles into pictures we can laugh at. Having suffered in an oppressive relationship rather than be alone with herself, Eileen Fisher now makes clothing for women who are, above all else, centered and at ease with themselves.

    Only in hindsight can we see that our fears and worries were unwarranted, that insecurities and doubts were just illusions or that we should have taken a risk or dared something new sooner. It’s humbling to compare yourself to the women in this book. But at the same time, it’s encouraging to know that even women at the top of their fields suffered private fears, longings and missteps. To know that these talented women didn’t enter the world as finished products—confident, successful, glamorous—is to understand that it’s within our grasp to reach loftier levels than we might have dreamed of.

    Choosing to grow during trying life passages can be lonely work. I hope this book will make that choice less solitary because you’ll be in the company of great women.