The Book That Will Make You Put Down Your Phone and Call Someone You Love
There are books that inform you. There are books that inspire you. And then there are the rare books that actually change something in you — that shift the way you move through your days after you’ve finished the last page.
The Urgent Life: My Story of Love, Loss, and Survival is that kind of book. And we’d be doing this community a disservice by not putting it in front of you.
Bozoma Saint John — one of the most celebrated marketing executives of her generation — could have written a business book. She didn’t. She wrote something far more important.
Who Is Bozoma Saint John?
The professional resume is extraordinary: senior marketing roles at Pepsi, Apple Music, Uber, Endeavor, and Netflix, where she served as Global Chief Marketing Officer. Named Forbes’ #1 most influential CMO. Inducted into both the American Advertising Federation Hall of Achievement and the American Marketing Hall of Fame. Featured on the cover of Adweek as one of the most exciting personalities in advertising.
She is, by any measure, a titan of her field. And none of that prepared her for what this book is actually about.
So, What’s It Actually About?
When Bozoma’s husband, Peter, was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he handed her a short list of instructions: cancel the divorce they had been pursuing, and fix the wrongs immediately. She did. And when he died, she made one defining decision about how to live the rest of her life: urgently.
The Urgent Life is Bozoma’s memoir — deeply honest, sometimes devastating, ultimately radiant — about navigating multiple profound losses and finding her way through each of them with her values intact. She writes about losing her college boyfriend to suicide, about the premature birth of a child and the grief that followed, about the complexity of love and separation and reconciliation and loss, all while building one of the most visible careers in American business.
What makes this book remarkable isn’t the accumulation of hardship — it’s what Bozoma does with it. She doesn’t flinch, she doesn’t moralize, and she doesn’t tie it up with a bow. She shows you what it actually looks like to choose to live fully in the face of the most profound reasons not to. Endorsed by Serena Williams, Gloria Steinem, Glennon Doyle, Gabrielle Union, Adam Grant, and Arianna Huffington — among many others — this is a book that has already touched an enormous number of lives.
It was published in 2023. We’re recommending it now because some books don’t have an expiration date. This is one of them.
What You’ll Take Away
- Urgency is a choice, not a circumstance. The book’s central gift is a reframe: urgency isn’t what happens to you in a crisis. It’s the decision to show up fully for your life before the crisis arrives. Bozoma models what that looks like — not as a productivity hack, but as a deeply human commitment.
- Grief is not a detour from your life. It’s part of it. This is one of the most quietly radical things The Urgent Life does: it refuses to treat loss as something to be gotten through and left behind. Bozoma integrates her grief rather than transcending it, and the result is a portrait of a life that feels more whole, not less.
- Your values are most visible under pressure. Across every chapter, what emerges most clearly about Bozoma is that her values — love, honesty, connection, presence — held even when everything else was uncertain. For leaders and professionals who spend a lot of time performing strength, that kind of integrity under pressure is both instructive and moving.
- The life you want requires decisions, not just intentions. The Urgent Life is full of moments where Bozoma makes a hard call — to reconcile, to show up, to speak the truth, to start again. None of them were easy. All of them were deliberate. It’s a reminder that living fully is an active practice, not a passive outcome.
- You don’t have to have it all figured out to live fully. Perhaps the most sustaining message of the book: Bozoma is gloriously, unapologetically imperfect throughout. She is not a blueprint. She’s a mirror — reflecting back the possibility of a life lived with courage even in the middle of the mess.
Why We’re Recommending It Now
This community is full of women who are exceptional at managing their professional lives and navigating their personal ones. The Urgent Life is a reminder — the kind that lands in the chest, not just the head — that the most important thing we’ll ever build isn’t a career or a strategy or a brand. It’s a life.
Read it slowly. Read it all the way through. And yes — put down your phone afterward and call someone you love.
Get The Book
The Urgent Life: My Story of Love, Loss, and Survival is available wherever books are sold, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, and Books-A-Million.
Learn more about Bozoma Saint John at bozomasaintjohn.com.
