From Entrepreneur to Best-selling Novelist

Talk about reinvention! She tackled a wildly ambitious goal—and redefined her sense of self along the way. Part 2 of 6 They Said I Was Crazy stories.

Karen Quinn

Who: Karen Quinn, 53, Miami Beach, Florida
What: Sold her business to write; her first novel was a best seller.

When:
In 2001, when she was 45, Karen Quinn was unexpectedly laid off after working for 15 years in advertising at American Express. This didn't cause a financial crisis; her husband was a lawyer at a brokerage firm, and she received a substantial severance package. Still, she says, "I was devastated. I remember thinking, I've had this job for so long. How am I ever going to do anything else?" Then she realized she did have one qualification that could translate into paying work: She had gotten her kids accepted into private schools in Manhattan.

To most parents, that doesn't sound like a major accomplishment. But anyone going through the process in New York City knows that competition for spots is unbelievably tight. "You feel so judged," Quinn says. "I hated the experience. I thought, if I can help people through this and make it better for them, maybe there's a business in it."

She paired up with another mother at her children's school, and together they got the business up and running. But after a couple of years, Quinn could no longer stand the drama and the excess she witnessed. She remembers one woman, a single mother, who hired an actor to pretend to be her husband as she went through the process. "It worked," Quinn says, "but the next fall she had to pretend to go through a divorce." On another occasion, Quinn was helping a little girl cram for an entrance exam when the child held up her hands and said, "Stop! Can't you see I'm only 4?"

Quinn sold her share of the company to her partner and started casting about for another career. She had always fantasized about being a writer, and it occurred to her that she had a lot of juicy material from her school adventures. "The Nanny Diaries had just come out," she says, "And I figured, well, that was a best seller, maybe I can write one too."