Quick Take
- Narration: Elyce Arons reads her own memoir with warmth and the occasional catch in her voice that no hired narrator could fake, the emotional authenticity is the whole point.
- Themes: Female friendship, entrepreneurship in the 1990s, grief and legacy, the Kate Spade brand origin story
- Mood: Warm and bittersweet, like looking through old photographs with someone who loved the same person you did
- Verdict: A tender portrait of a friendship that built an empire and then had to survive the unsurvivable, Arons writes and reads with a candor that makes this one land hard.
I finished We Might Just Make It After All on a Sunday afternoon in late autumn, curled up in the kind of gray light that makes you want to hold onto things. I had not expected to be as moved as I was. I knew the Kate Spade story in the broad strokes the way most people do, through the brand and through the tragedy of her 2018 death. What I had not anticipated was how thoroughly this book would reframe all of that through the lens of a specific, decades-long friendship, and how Elyce Arons, reading her own words, would make the distance between then and now feel both vast and unbearably close.
Arons is not a professional memoirist, and that absence of professional sheen is precisely what makes this work. The prose is direct and warm, occasionally a little rough around the edges in ways that feel honest rather than sloppy. She’s telling you something real. From the opening scene in a University of Kansas dorm room, where she first meets the polo-shirted Missouri girl who would become her life’s most important collaborator, the book carries the specific texture of memory recalled by someone who was actually there and who has spent years trying to figure out what it meant.
Building a Brand in a City That Didn’t Care
The section covering the early New York years is the heart of the book for me. Arons and Katy Brosnahan, not yet Kate Spade, navigating the city on day-job salaries, working on the handbag concept in spare hours, cramming into the Hell’s Kitchen apartments that the memoir describes with the kind of detail that only someone who lived it could conjure. What comes through clearly is how unlikely the whole thing felt, even from the inside. The accessories industry of the early 1990s was not welcoming to two women without fashion school credentials and a pile of simple, structured handbags they believed in against all reasonable evidence.
Arons traces the creative and commercial logic of what made the original Kate Spade bag land with precision. The simplicity was the point, the absence of ornate hardware or obvious luxury signaling, in a market that had decided ostentation was the only language worth speaking. She gives Katy credit for that design instinct without making it hagiographic. The portrait that emerges is of someone with a very clear aesthetic vision and a deep, undefended aversion to anything that felt fake. That alignment between the person and the product is what made the brand; Arons is honest enough to say so.
Reading Your Own Grief Aloud
Author-narrated memoirs live or die on authenticity, and Arons’s narration is remarkable in the most understated way. She doesn’t perform the sadness. There are moments, particularly in the chapters that approach 2018, where you can hear her calibrating her voice to keep moving through material she has clearly read hundreds of times and which still costs her something each time. A professional narrator could make those passages sound polished. Arons makes them sound true, which is worth far more.
The book handles Katy’s suicide with real care. Arons is candid about the fact that her friend struggled with anxiety and depression while presenting a buoyant public self, and she does not pretend she had complete access to those struggles even in a friendship of that depth. One reviewer noted that the book includes a brief mention of the circumstances of Katy’s death, and the frontmatter appropriately flags this for readers who might be sensitive to that material. What Arons refuses to do is let the ending define the whole person. The book’s emotional insistence is that the life was the story, not the death.
The Texture of Female Friendship Over Time
What separates this from a conventional business biography is the emotional granularity of the friendship itself. Arons writes about the ways that close female friendships absorb and survive the usual stresses: romantic entanglements, professional tensions, long periods of distance, the slow accumulation of shared history. She gives the friendship the weight that most business narratives reserve for strategy and revenue, and the result is a book about building something that feels genuinely felt rather than constructed. Reviewers from the Midwest commented on how relatable both women’s personalities felt on the page, that sense of directness and warmth that Arons identifies as something she and Katy shared and that the brand eventually projected globally.
At nine hours and twenty-five minutes, the audiobook is not short, but it earns its length. The pre-war Paris of the synopsis is a slight overstatement of the narrative sweep, this is a more intimate, specific book than those words suggest. But for anyone interested in what friendship actually looks like when it’s also a creative and professional partnership, or in the particular texture of building something female in the 1990s, We Might Just Make It After All delivers something that goes beyond the expected celebrity memoir.
Who Should Listen and Who Should Skip
Listen if you are drawn to the Kate Spade story beyond the brand, interested in female entrepreneurship before the age of social media, or looking for a memoir that treats grief with honest complexity. Skip if you’re looking for a standard business biography with financial architecture and strategic analysis, this is about people, not pivot points. Also note the content surrounding suicide for readers who need to approach that material carefully.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Elyce Arons address Kate Spade’s struggles with mental health directly in the memoir?
Yes, thoughtfully and with care. Arons acknowledges that Katy struggled with anxiety and depression that she often masked from those close to her, while being honest about the limits of what even a close friendship can see. The approach is candid without being exploitative.
Is We Might Just Make It After All primarily a business book or a personal memoir?
It’s firmly a personal memoir. The Kate Spade brand origin story is central, but Arons frames it through the friendship rather than through business strategy. Readers expecting detailed commercial analysis will find it largely absent, the focus is on the human relationship that made the professional one possible.
Does reading her own book affect the emotional quality of Arons’s narration?
Significantly. The chapters that cover Katy’s later years and death carry an audible weight that no hired narrator could replicate. Arons’s controlled restraint in those passages is itself a kind of performance, in the best sense, she’s clearly still working through material that costs her something.
How does the book handle the timeline, is it strictly chronological?
Largely chronological, moving from their Kansas dorm meeting through the New York years, the brand’s rise, and eventually to Katy’s death and its aftermath. There are reflective passages that reach backward and forward, but the overall arc is linear and easy to follow.
