When LAURA BROWN and KRISTINA O'NEILL were FIRED from their top-of-the-masthead FASHION jobs, they could have WALLOWED. They could have stayed QUIET. Instead, they OWNED IT. And now, they've WRITTEN the BOOK on it.

There was a chunk of time in the last decade when ambitious women were encouraged to lean in: to work later and harder and be better than their male counterparts—to do whatever they needed to do to get that seat at the table, regardless of whatever else might be going on in their life, including raising kids.

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Laura Brown and Kristina O'Neill ascended the corporate ladder right on schedule. They had each worked at Harper's Bazaar for more than a decade and gone on to land the final boss roles as editors in chief of InStyle and The Wall Street Journal's style supplement, WSJ Magazine, respectively. There they were, in the front row at every fashion show, hosting extravagant celebrity-filled events, wielding their influence across every platform. And then they got fired. And then... they decided to write about it.

Editors to their cores, they knew they had a juicy—and important—story on their hands. In their new book, All the Cool Girls Get Fired, which is out this month, Brown and O'Neill provide a much-needed coda to all of the “lean in” exhortations. Featuring revealing essays from wildly successful women who have also been fired, sometimes in spectacularly public ways, including Oprah Winfrey and Katie Couric—as well as actionable information for what to do if you find yourself in the same boat—the book is a salve and a solve for anyone who has gotten kicked off the ladder, only to find the ladder no longer exists. Part manual, part career-oriented memoir, All the Cool Girls Get Fired reframes the narrative around losing your job and provides a road map for what to do next.

Brown and O'Neill swiftly found their way back to steady employment, though they both emphasize that getting canned gave them the time to find jobs that better fit into their lives.

Brown founded her own company, LB Media, which pairs the arts with the global community to benefit health and culture. O'Neill is the head of Sotheby's Media and an editor in chief once again, this time for Sotheby's Magazine.

Here, Brown and O'Neill talk about what went down for each of them, the way they dealt with it, and how they hope the book helps shift the conversation around an all-too-common experience.