Are You a Good Girl? A Video Interview With Amber Rae

The bestselling author who mentors other writers and helps women live in their truth

Hi there,

I’m excited to share this with you today. I interviewed Amber Rae (scroll for video below), and it was such a candid, illuminating conversation. It has 3 parts: We start talking about how her challenges in childhood shaped how she sees love and relationship, then we talk about how she stumbled upon becoming an author and how she started her incredible work helping authors through their writing and marketing - this is a must see for aspiring book authors everywhere! And then we go over her book and her incredible story of leaving a 9 year marriage, how that unfolded, and why this is such an important book for women.

As children, especially as girls, we are taught that trading our honesty for goodness is how we earn safety, acceptance, and warmth. And so we grow up smiling through discomfort, staying quiet, small, pleasant, and compliant, the good girls we were trained to be. In exchange, we are rewarded with words like lovely, polite, sweet, elegant. From the outside, our lives look beautiful, calm, and just right. On the inside, we are burning, outperforming our true selves, muffling our real opinions, shrinking to fit a shape that was never ours to begin with. And this is where so many women quietly disappear.

Amber Rae has spent her career helping women close that gap between the mask we wear and our true selves. She began at Apple in marketing, moved through Omnicom’s first digital agency, dove into the Silicon Valley tech wave, and then did what so few people in that world dare to do: she walked away from all of it to follow her own curiosities wherever they led. What followed was a body of work that defies a single category. She is a USA Today bestselling author of Loveable: One Woman’s Path from Good to Free, Choose Wonder Over Worry, The Answers Are Within You, and The Feelings Journal, a keynote speaker who has taken the stage for Kate Spade, Meta, Microsoft, Merrill Lynch, Lululemon, and TED, a book coach who has guided over a hundred thought leaders to six- and seven-figure book deals, and a writing mentor whose work reaches millions of readers in nearly two hundred countries. She is also, foundationally, a journaler — thirty years of daily practice that she describes as the pathway to her inner truth.

The throughline in all of it is deceptively simple: there is who we are, and there is who we have learned to be — and the work of a life is learning to tell the difference.

And In her book Loveable: One Woman’s Path from Good to Free, Amber finally turned that lens on herself.

Nine years into a marriage that was, by every external measure, a good one, she was quietly hollowed out — emotionally and sexually disconnected, performing okayness for everyone, including herself. It took meeting a man — someone she recognized immediately as the love of her life — to force a reckoning she had been outrunning for years. What followed was not a clean escape. It was the slow, costly, irreversible work of choosing herself over the story she had agreed to live.

I met Amber through our advocacy work at CaringKind — thank you, Melissa Breitbart, for the introduction — and we are co-hosting an event TODAY MAY 21st at Veronica Beard Southampton alongside Pamela Bell, Melissa Breitbart and Maxine Friedman. Amber Rae will sign her book Loveable, and will have a fireside chat with Pamela Bell. 15% of all sales are going to CaringKind, so please come by if you are in town: Veronica Beard, 84B Main Street, Southampton.

I have been so moved by Amber Rae’s humanness, her way of living, and her courage to start again and carve an authentic life for herself. We sat down for an unfiltered conversation about the life that she left behind, people-pleasing, the seduction of the almost-right life, and what it actually feels like to break with your own reality in pursuit of what is true.

Watch our full interview and read Amber’s favorite things below.

My Interview with Amber Rae

How her childhood shaped how she sees love and relationship - until 5:23

How she stumbled upon becoming an author and how she started her incredible work helping authors through their writing and marketing - a must see for aspiring book authors everywhere! 5:24 - 18:26

Her book and her incredible story of leaving a 9 year marriage, how that unfolded, and why this is such an important book for women. 18:27 - until the end

Amber Rae Favorite Things

1. Favorite Book (other than your own): Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed

2. Favorite word: Delicious

3. Favorite thing to do with your son: I’m torn between cuddling and going on adventures together

4. Favorite food: pesto pasta with shrimp

5. Favorite summer spot in the Hamptons: Fresh Pond with my husband and little one

6. Favorite aspect of writing a book: Oof I truly love and obsess over every stage but it’s the unexpected discoveries on the page that stay with me.

7. Favorite part of your personality: I see the best in everyone

8. Favorite wellbeing ritual or habit: Journaling

9. Favorite season: Summer

10. Favorite object you own or covet: An abstract painting of a woman by Mark Wilson, which sadly no longer hangs in our home. We recently threw away every object we owned because of black mold, and my relationship to objects has evolved as a result.

Sending love,

Patricia