Lady Business: The newsletter I never expected, or wanted, to write
Several years ago, working at a magazine where I sat facing the woman who was quickly becoming my best friend, Steph and I developed a shorthand phrase for the journalism we most admired. We wanted more stories about women, and news that affects women, emphasizing rigorous reporting and analysis instead of empty positivity and PR fluff; we shared an editorial sensibility that the concerns of women should be relevant and mainstream and reflected in everyday Business News and Financial News and Tech News and Stuff, not confined to special packages about Women in [fill-in-the-blank] Male-Dominated Field.
Steph dubbed this sort of journalism Lady Business—a joke, and also an eye roll at how stigmatized it could be. Occasionally, over deliciously overpriced Manhattans or one of her beloved cheese plates, we would fantasize about starting our own publication with that name. She even researched the potential domain names we could buy to establish a Lady Business website.
We never quite got around to it. (Correction: I never quite got around to it; if I had seriously wanted to go all-in on my own publication, Steph would have immediately handed me a fully-formed business plan, refused to let me procrastinate, and had my back every single step of the way.) But in 2017, when my reporting needs and personal interests in starting a newsletter dovetailed, I had the perfect name—and a perfect, if unofficial, cofounder. Steph would text me links to news stories she thought I’d want to write about—or that we both just wanted to scream about. Sometimes I asked her to read my issues before I sent them. Sometimes what I wrote was pretty much just an edited transcription of our latest conversation.
A former book editor turned social-media executive, Steph has always been one of my best editors and professional advisers, even after we stopped officially working together. She’s also one of my closest friends, the woman who’s cheered on my every success, supported me through some serious traumas, listened to my every minor complaint and was always, always in my corner. She’s at the center of so many of my stories—making me ride camels in Morocco and climb glaciers in Iceland and spend weeks in a delightful Chicago AirBNB last summer, reveling in finding the joy even amid an awful, life-halting pandemic. She’s as foundational to my life today as she was to this newsletter.
Steph died on April 21. I still can’t quite believe I have to type those words. Or that those words are real.
I wrote a bit more about Steph’s death, apparently from a pulmonary embolism, and her extraordinary life, on Medium this week:
She was just 37. Smart, strategic, thoughtful, funny, kind but no-bullshit, positive but practical, fanciful but responsible. Annoyingly prompt and utterly reliable, Steph was the person you wanted running any project, party, or zombie-apocalypse survival strategy. She loved creating elegant, sly plans to achieve her long-term goals, and then flawlessly executing them. She did that for her own career ambitions and those of her employees; for anything her family and friends needed; and for her health, which she ruthlessly managed. When it came to navigating health care, Steph was the most conscientious, informed, and proactive person I’ve ever known. Yet she died of undiagnosed blood clots.
She was happy. She was hot. She would want me to include that, less for vanity — although she always looked flawless — and more because New Year’s resolutions were a religion for Steph, along with shopping for cute dresses. And one of her resolutions for 2021 was to emerge from the year of elastic pants into a summer of great hair and sharp clothes. She was already strategizing about her outfit for a friend’s August wedding.
There were so many bigger things Steph was planning to do, now that the end of the pandemic was in sight. She was about to leave her longtime media job to start a new phase of her career in the tech industry, to finally use the MBA that she dedicated three years’ worth of nights and weekends to earn. She graduated in May 2020–and though she had to postpone the bigger celebrations she was planning, she never complained very much. She was the most cautious and responsible person I knew during the pandemic, and she didn’t want her behavior to put herself or anyone else at risk. But she was so happy to get vaccinated. She was so excited to get her future back.
Steph leaves behind her father, her brother, and a heartbroken circle of close friends, many of whom have posted or will be posting their own tributes. All of our words can only capture a small part of who she was to us, how hard she worked to always make the world brighter, and everything that she could have accomplished with the life she had ahead of her.
Donations in her full name—Stephanie Meyers—can also be made in her honor to Girls Write Now, a non-profit dedicated to providing mentorship and writing opportunities to underserved young women and gender-nonconforming teens. Those are missions deeply aligned with Steph’s experience as a onetime book editor who cared deeply about supporting writers, and a terrific manager and mentor to her employees and colleagues.
I’ve been overwhelmed by messages of support and condolence from so many people who knew and loved Steph—as well as those who she only impressed by reputation—and I’m so grateful for all of them. I’m also numb, shocked, bereft, and angry—and trying to help her family and friends sort through a mountain of logistics. Please forgive me if it takes longer than usual to reply to your notes.
This is more private emotion and personal tragedy than I’m usually comfortable sharing publicly. (Although it feels horrifically appropriate after this year of global death and grief.) Lady Business will continue, although it may be sporadic in the coming weeks, as I try to figure out how to mourn its cofounder—and how to continue writing clearly about a world that has suddenly become inexplicably, irrevocably darker.
