“Fear is universal. It touches us all—but clearly doesn’t stop everyone.”
- Arianna Huffington

SM: Early in your career, you seemed pretty successful following your passion in England. Why the move to the U.S.?
Huffington: Heartbreak. The first great love of my life was Bernard Levin, a brilliant British journalist I fell in love with before I ever met him, through his writing. But after seven years together it was clear that we wanted different things. I wanted to have children. He wanted to have cats. The end of the relationship tapped into my deepest fears of being alone and was so devastating it caused me to move from England to America in an effort to put him behind me.

SM: Fear is actually the focus of your latest book On Becoming Fearless. What motivated you to write it?
Huffington: I was motivated to write the book when, looking at my two teenage daughters, I was stunned to see all the same classic fears I had been burdened with when I was their age: “How attractive am I?” “Do people like me?” “Should I speak up?” I had thought that with all the gains feminism has brought, my daughters would not have to suffer through the fears I did. Yet here is our younger generation, as uncertain, doubting and desperate as we were, trying to fulfill the expectations of others. I set out to explore what had happened to my bold little girls.