USA TODAY’s Women of the Year honoree Melinda French Gates won’t wait for equality
Global advocate and philanthropist Melinda French Gates has spent years serving others but credits her earliest role models for where she is today.
USA TODAY
- On letting go: “It isn’t necessarily easy. We like comfort. We like routine. But it makes space for something else I might not know yet.”
- On aging: “We used to think of women in that they got to a certain age and they are over the hill or something … but we have so much wisdom in this age.”
- On parenting: “I finally learned the good enough parent, I always had this concept of this perfect parent. But the perfect parent is a myth.”
- On Mom guilt: “I learned rupture and repair. Even times I make mistakes, I have to take responsibility for them.”
When Melinda French Gates shares a story, she makes you feel like a best friend is letting you in on a secret.
Her new book, “The Next Day: Transitions, Changes and Moving Forward,” (Flatiron, 176 pp. out now) isn’t so much a memoir or an advice book, but what feels like a walk with a smart friend, one who takes counsel and shares hard-won advice. She also doesn’t feel the need to tidy it all up or offer all the answers.
“I wrote this in the middle,” she tells USA TODAY in a call from her office outside Seattle. “I’ve gone through some difficult times, and rather than writing safely from the other side, I wanted to write about when you are in those transitions.”
Her book tells stories from what she calls the hardest decision of her life: The end of her 27-year marriage to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. It also covers leaving for college, motherhood and guilt, her departure from the Gates Foundation last year, and why Alexis Carrington from “Dynasty” was a childhood role model.
The book is honest but doesn’t feel confessional. It isn’t a tell-all. She shares without oversharing. And she shares with the intent of helping. It’s the perfect book club book.
French Gates is a philanthropist, businesswoman and advocate for women and girls. In 2019, she committed $1 billion over 10 years to expand women’s power and influence. Last May, French Gates announced that as the first step in the next chapter of her philanthropy, she is committing an additional $1 billion through 2026 to advance women’s power globally. Her three children are now grown and she is a grandmother to two.
And at 60, she says, she’s still in transition – and that’s exciting.
“Even on your darkest and hardest days, even when it’s scary or it feels horrible, there will be a better time. There will be a time when I will look back at this, and there must be something in here that will be beautiful,” she says. “Maybe I’m learning something. I try to say to myself now in the uncomfortable transitions, ‘It’s good to be uncomfortable.’ I have been through this before. I’ve been through change, not this kind of change. But I was better last time when I came out the other side.”
In life’s challenges, there are women who say “I had to go through it, so you should too,” and there are women who say, “I had to go through it, so I’ll work to make sure you don’t.” In her new book, French Gates shows she clearly is the latter. She hopes the book is helpful.
The thrill, she says, is in hearing what happens after she writes her books. “The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World,” published in 2019, spawned a series of books sharing more stories of inspiring women.
She seems genuinely excited when told that her last book inspired a nonprofit that helps girls graduate from high school in Guatemala to add more education about family planning and contraception.
“I love this,” she says. “You never know how you inspire something when you put a book in the world.”
While at first “The Next Day” might feel geared toward women in midlife transitions, it actually started as the 2024 Stanford University commencement speech.
“Life comes along, it happens to you and things change,” she says. “There is a lot of beauty and lessons we can learn when the change comes and when transitions happen. I thought, ‘I’ve been through a fair number of transitions now. I’ll take the speech and be much more specific.’ ”
The book feels as applicable to new graduates as it does to someone looking for a mid-career change. It feels both personal and universal. And once again, French Gates is eager to hear from readers: “I hope you’ll let me know in a year what comes from this.”
She also shares stories from her childhood that illustrate both her resilience and her ambition. One came from what might seem an unlikely source: Alexis Carrington.
French Gates grew up in Dallas, where she remembers watching evening soap operas “Dynasty” and “Dallas,” which aired back-to-back.
“Alexis Carrington was a flawed character. She had sharp elbows. She was ruthless. But I liked that she was a business woman in a man’s world. There weren’t that many female characters who were business women on TV,” she says. “She was also a mom, but what I liked about her was the other women would get dressed up for dinner, and their clothes were beautiful, but she was out in the real world every day. She was competing. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. And I thought, ‘I want to be a working woman like her.’ ”
Now it’s her friends who inspire her, many she’s known for more than two decades.
“Every Monday morning, whoever is in town, we walk. They have been like truth counsel over time. If I was afraid to take something to them Monday morning, I had to ask myself what is it about my values or what I did that made me uncomfortable with doing that,” she says.
She writes of some of those personal moments in the book, including the loss of her friend John Neilson, whose wife Emmy is a close friend. All proceeds from the book will support computer science education in honor of her parents and immunotherapy cancer research in memory of Neilson.
“I think I helped carry her to the other side of her grief. … (Emmy) is one of the people who helped me cross the chasm of my grief when I made the very difficult decision that I needed to leave my marriage,” she says. “There is a vulnerability in deep, deep friends of being known. The fact that you can be known by them and still be loved and still be OK even in some of your worst moments.”
While her ex-husband has talked more extensively about their divorce, calling it his biggest regret, French Gates has been more introspective and quiet.
She knew she needed to address it in the book, not only because the divorce was very public but because it has shaped her. “I put it from my perspective of what was helpful to me, in hopes to be helpful to others going through it,” she says.
She writes more about the decision to leave her marriage than the divorce itself.
“There was a whisper that kept coming. I knew things weren’t right… When more things and more came up or came to light later, in my case, I would have liked to have turned away from them. It would have been easier, it would have been convenient,” she says. “But there was just this whisper there. This is not OK. I knew at some point in the deep place that I would be betraying myself if I didn’t at least pay attention to that whisper. What the whisper was saying to me was you need separation to make sense.”
She writes of the fear of telling her parents, who had been married 63 years, the panic attack when she thought about how “Bill has a reputation for being one of the toughest negotiators in the world.”
And she writes of curling up in bed with her youngest daughter Phoebe when the news broke, and how they looked at memes and “laughed a little, but I wasn’t really in a celebratory mood.”
She writes about sharing her story with journalist Gayle King as a lesson for others to listen to their inner voice.
Now, she looks forward to continuing her work for equality and pushing for women to step into their full power.
“I never thought that when I got to 60 that I’d be so vibrant and wanting to work so much and wanting to take on new things,” she says. “It’s actually really, really exciting.”
And, mostly, she says, to take the time in these changing times, to not be in a rush.
“Make yourself pause and see the clearing. What is it I really want to do next?” she says. “We have to be purposeful enough to let the pause come and not be afraid of it to rush to the other side.”
Leave a Reply