You can hard pivot. You can make that shift after putting years into something. You carry it all with you.

Welcome back. Today on Smart Girl Summer, I'm sitting down with the brilliant and wonderful Mary Marantz,

from Yale Law School to running a photography business to becoming a best-selling author.

Mary's story is anything but predictable. We're talking about the power of pivoting, building a

meaningful business, and rewriting your story with purpose. Okay, let's dive in to this Smart Girl's

Summer special with Mary Marantz.

Mary, welcome back to the podcast.

Now, first question for you, as a smart girl summer smart girl, you did go to Yale for law school,

but then you became a wedding photographer and now you are an author who you have a podcast,

you coach women. What did this look like? How did this happen?

What is your journey here? Yeah, I always like to tell people that's a really expensive way to become a

wedding photographer to go to Yale law school. You don't have to do that to become a wedding photographer,

it turns out. Like you mentioned, I was born and raised in a wedding photographer it turns out like you mentioned i was

born and raised in a single-eyed trailer in rural west virginia zero to 18 in this very much like tin can

of a trailer i always like to kind of clarify that because like you know sometimes people can have

a picture in their head of like a nice double wide with like a permanent foundation and that's um it's

just not what we were dealing with here this was like every image you can think

of like a dilapidated trailer it's like a tin can that's what it was and you know we had like the trucks

up on cinder blocks in the yard and like the stray dogs my dad's a logger like very much kind of like

a cliche in some sense west virginia story which made writing my first book dirt a bit challenging

because people in Appalachia get frustrated for always being painted as that picture. And it's like,

well, how do you do that if that is your story? And it does check all those boxes to kind of pull people

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