Elise Loehnen Would Like Mothers to Give Themselves a Break

If you know Elise Loehnen by name, you probably know she built her career providing the words for Gwyneth Paltrow and other luminaries. An alumna of Lucky magazine, Loehnen has enjoyed a successful ghostwriting career, penning books in the self-help, business, and style categories, among others; she’s watched many of those titles climb the New York Times bestseller list sans her name on their covers. And she burnished that largely behind-the-scenes career as the chief content officer of Goop, where articles often didn’t have bylines. 

Loehnen began to step out from behind the curtain at the end of her tenure at Goop, but now that she has fully left the company, she’s speaking completely for herself. Besides hosting her own interview podcast, Pulling the Thread, Loehnen will soon publish her first book with her name squarely on the cover, On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good, out May 23.

“It’s very scary to be on the front lines and to be visible for your ideas as a woman,” Loehnen said. “I don’t know if it’s entirely gendered, but I certainly know that we don’t have very many examples of women who have put themselves forward and not been casually destroyed.”

In it, Loehnen examines the seven deadly sins—pride, lust, envy, gluttony, greed, wrath, and sloth—and how they often diminish the experience of living. Not a traditionally religious person, Loehnen comes at them as a student discovering how, even if one lives a secular life, the seven deadly sins inform modern women’s and especially modern mothers’ lives. Vanity Fair spoke with Loehnen about writing her first book under her own name, giving oneself a break, and daughters’ complicated relationships with mothers.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Vanity Fair: You’ve interviewed, I don’t know, everybody. How does it feel to be in the hot seat?

Elise Loehnen: I think I’m entering the postpartum period. My brother is the book editor, and I had drinks with him, and he was like, “This is when every writer becomes intolerable and I wanna hit the mute button.”

I write about this in “Pride,” but where you sort of want to be seen—obviously, I really want people to read and receive the book—and then ultimately this desire to hide. And I’m like, I just wanna get a job and be anonymous. Both of those things are very alive in me right now.

Well, I wanted to talk to you about that because I know that you’ve done a lot of ghostwriting. And then of course you were the chief content officer at Goop, and so this is the first time [you’re promoting] your own book. How’s it sitting with you? 

I started working on this book when I was 40, but it took me 40 years, in a sense, to feel like I had something to say. Well, that’s not even accurate. It’s not that I knew I had things to say, but I just preferred funneling them through other people for my whole life. 

I started at a brand with no bylines. There’s a lot of continuity in my life around this, like, “Here is the thing, but I don’t wanna be the one to say the thing, so who can say the thing?” This preference, I know I share with many, many women, because I’ve written about this in newsletters and heard sort of a chorus of, like, “Oh, my God, I feel the same.” It’s very scary to be on the front lines and to be visible for your ideas as a woman. I don’t know if it’s entirely gendered, but I certainly know, as women, that we don’t have very many examples of women who have put themselves forward and not been casually destroyed. That’s the playbook that we see culturally. As much as we can say that’s not us, that’s Taylor Swift or Princess Diana or whatever, I can relate. This is what we see and this is what we know.

Well, congratulations for stepping bravely forward. How the seven deadly sins sort of specifically burden women is an absolutely huge topic that you explore in the book. But I’m curious, you said you started writing when you were 40, but when did you realize that this was the book?

There were a couple of themes in my life. One was this persistent anxiety disorder that I developed in my 20s for the first time. It’s chronic hyperventilation. And people think of hyperventilation as like a bag and a frantic activity. But the way that it shows up for me—it’s this idea that you can’t take a deep breath, and so your body starts overbreathing and you work yourself into a real state because you feel like you’re dying.