When I first began learning about Cleopatra, I expected to find the story of an extraordinary beauty. Instead, I found the story of an extraordinary woman. History has never quite known what to do with women like Cleopatra. Women who are intelligent. Women who are ambitious. Women who are charismatic. Women who command attention when they enter a room. Women who are impossible to ignore. For more than two thousand years, people have debated Cleopatra's beauty. Was she breatht

The Woman Who Became a Symbol Before I began writing this series, I unknowingly found myself following the footsteps of these stories. In March, I stood in Florence at the Uffizi Gallery, gazing at Botticelli's Birth of Venus. Like millions before me, I admired one of the most famous images of beauty ever created. Yet what fascinated me most was learning that Venus was not perfect. Her pose is unnatural. Her proportions are not mathematically precise. The painting is filled w

And Why Their Beauty Was Never the Most Interesting Thing About Them There have been billions of women throughout human history. Many were beautiful. Some were likely every bit as beautiful as the women whose names we know today. Yet somehow only a handful became legends. Why? The answer isn't symmetry. It isn't perfect skin. It isn't measurements. It isn't youth. It is story. Helen became the woman for whom kingdoms went to war. Cleopatra became the queen whose intellect res

When we are in the middle of loss, we tend to focus on what is being taken from us. We grieve the future we imagined. We mourn the plans we made. We replay the memories and wonder how something that once felt so right could have ended. But sometimes, years later, we look around and realize that what felt like the end was actually the beginning. I have been thinking a lot lately about how different my life would look today if certain chapters had unfolded the way I wanted. At