In We Might Just Make It After All: My Best Friendship with Kate Spade, Elyce Arons offers an intimate portrait of creative partnership and enduring friendship behind one of fashion’s most beloved brands. In Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, Elizabeth Beller reveals the depth and complexity of a woman whose elegance defined an era. Expanding the conversation through fiction, Karen Essex’s Run, Darling reimagines the lives of the Gabor sisters, exploring how glamour, ambition, and myth-making shape both public image and private identity. Together, these writers examine how stories—both lived and imagined—construct female icons, the tension between perception and reality, and the emotional labor of maintaining visibility in the public eye. This conversation considers how biography, memoir, and historical fiction each offer powerful ways to reclaim nuance, agency and humanity behind the image.

Publishing insiders Amanda "Binky" Urban, partner at ICM Partners, Priscilla Painton, Vice President and Editor-in-Chief at Simon & Schuster, and Lauren Spiegel, Vice President and Executive Editor at Gallery Books, give a behind-the-scenes look at how a great idea becomes a great book.