More Than Enough

Elaine Welteroth's memoir traces her path from a predominantly White suburb in Northern California to the top of the fashion media world, where she became one of the youngest and only the second African American to lead a magazine published by Condé Nast, the prestigious company behind titles such as Vogue and Teen Vogue. She recounts how she learned to claim space for her identity in rooms that were never built for someone like her.

Welteroth was born in 1986 to an unlikely couple: Debra, a Black gospel singer from Rochester, New York, whose great-grandmother Maggie's parents were the first generation removed from slavery, and Jack, a blue-eyed White carpenter from Saratoga, California, who loved B.B. King and Dionne Warwick records. They met at an aerospace company where Debra worked alongside Jack's mother, Patricia, a spirited Irish woman who matchmade them. They married in 1982 at a Black Baptist church and agreed to raise their children as Black, understanding the world would see them that way. Debra immersed the family in Black culture through soul food, Ebony and Essence magazines, church on Sundays, and Saturday trips to the Black hair salon. Welteroth's older brother, Eric, a nonconformist drawn to punk rock, faced bullying and racist incidents at school, and their father fiercely advocated for him.

A preschool collage assignment provided Welteroth's earliest racial reckoning. Asked to cut out magazine images resembling her family, she found no Black women in the available magazines and constructed an all-White paper family. Her mother responded by sitting her children down with Black magazines to redo the project, taping the new collage beside Elaine's bed for five years. This effort ran alongside quieter struggles at home: Jack's depression and alcohol use following his brother's death and a career-ending back injury fueled in Elaine a drive toward perfectionism that followed her into adulthood.

As a child, Welteroth channeled her energy into entrepreneurial play with best friend Claudia Ortega, building a backyard beauty salon and creating a mock magazine from construction paper. She idolized the Black women in her Aunt Janet's hair salon and devoured Essence magazine. Her father discovered her writing talent in third grade, shifting her ambitions toward storytelling.

Through elementary and junior high, Welteroth struggled with beauty standards that favored petite blond girls. Comparison crept in where confidence once lived. Her hair became a mirror for her internal state: she experimented with gels, flat irons, and even a clothing iron to straighten her curls, shrinking parts of herself to fit in. In high school, where the student body was more diverse, she received attention from Black boys but felt uncomfortable with the premium placed on being a "mixed girl" with light skin.

At 14, she began dating a boy she calls First Love. Their early romance was sweet, but his behavior grew erratic: grand gestures alternated with coldness, and he walked past her in a parking lot to leave with an older female coworker. Conditioned by pop culture's "ride or die" messaging and her mother's example of loyalty through dysfunction, Welteroth stayed. She followed him to Sacramento State University instead of applying to Stanford. His anger escalated: in a dorm stairwell, he slammed his fists through a window behind her head. He was arrested on felony charges during her freshman year, and too ashamed to tell anyone, she spent months hiding his incarceration. After five and a half years, she ended the relationship.

College also became a space for self-discovery. Dr. Michele Foss-Snowden, a professor of rhetorical criticism who shared Welteroth's biracial background, became her mentor and helped her develop critical tools for analyzing race and media. A semester-long paper on singer India.Arie's "I Am Not My Hair" awakened Welteroth to her own light-skin privilege and the ways beauty standards uphold White supremacy. Being called a racial slur at a college party cemented what her parents always taught her: Blackness was bonded not only by shared culture but by the painful experience of exclusion.

As graduation approached a semester early, Welteroth discovered Harriette Cole, a Black media executive whose career spanning Essence, Ebony, books, and television became a blueprint for her own path. She pursued Cole relentlessly, securing a 45-minute phone call two days before graduation. On a plane ride from a conference, she whispered her dream of becoming a magazine editor to her professor and a fellow student, who enthusiastically affirmed her.

Thirty days before an Essence internship was set to begin, Cole called with an offer to work on an Ebony cover shoot featuring tennis champion Serena Williams. On set, Welteroth whispered a styling suggestion that made the cover, and Cole hired her. At Ebony's underfunded New York offices, she started at the bottom but hustled relentlessly: extending her own internship, changing her email signature to promote herself, and negotiating a raise during the 2008 recession. She worked on a cover featuring future first lady Michelle Obama and interviewed fashion designer Oscar de la Renta at Fashion Week. When Cole was abruptly fired despite revitalizing the brand, Welteroth absorbed a hard lesson: Even high performers are disposable.

After years of trying to cross into mainstream publishing, she landed a beauty editor position at Glamour, a Condé Nast magazine. During this period, she entered a relationship with a Harvard-educated banker she calls Future Husband, whose controlling behavior gradually eroded her confidence. He critiqued her intelligence, tested her homemaking abilities, and berated her over trivial domestic matters. After a breakup and reconciliation, an anonymous email exposed his affair with a coworker, including a secret pregnancy. Her mother flew to New York and told her never to call him again. Welteroth obeyed and refocused on reclaiming the identity she had lost.

She was recruited for the beauty director role at Teen Vogue, becoming the first Black beauty director in Condé Nast's 107-year history. She wrote her first story about her natural hair journey, hired Phillip Picardi as her beauty assistant and ally in pushing for inclusive content, and began carving out space for conversations about race and identity. A story celebrating Afrocentric hairstyles generated backlash when readers assumed the biracial model was White, teaching Welteroth a painful lesson about the stakes of representation. A subsequent cover featuring three Black models became the highest-selling issue of the year, and a landmark cover with actor and activist Amandla Stenberg, interviewed by musician Solange, earned widespread praise.

When Anna Wintour, the powerful editor-in-chief of Vogue, tapped Welteroth to lead Teen Vogue, the promotion came with complications: a below-market salary, a shared leadership structure she did not request, and no time to negotiate before the press release went out. Publicly, she was celebrated. Privately, she felt railroaded. Over the following year, the team transformed Teen Vogue into a politically engaged platform. Teen Vogue writer Lauren Duca's viral article "Trump Is Gaslighting America" became a watershed moment, digital traffic surged from 2 million to 12 million, and Welteroth eventually secured the official editor-in-chief title and a commensurate salary.

The relentless pace took a toll. She lost weight, developed anxiety-related symptoms, and could not stop working. Her fiancé Jonathan, a Stanford-educated Black man she had known since her church choir as a teenager, grounded her personal life even as they navigated the daily indignities of racial profiling. When the CEO decided to close the print magazine, Welteroth presented a roll-off strategy. Wintour spoke in her defense, but the CEO rejected any compromise.

The first Teen Vogue Summit became the crowning achievement of her magazine career. More than 500 young readers attended career excursions, heard keynotes from former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, filmmaker Ava DuVernay, and Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and received surprise scholarships. Days later, DuVernay invited Welteroth to her home and offered the clarity she had been seeking: "I think the universe is calling you to be a little bit braver right now." On a sunny day in January 2018, Welteroth resigned from Condé Nast. Wintour was gracious and supportive. Welteroth walked out feeling lighter, her mission fulfilled: She had made young people whose voices had been marginalized feel seen, centered, and celebrated. The book closes with her affirmation that job titles are temporary, but purpose is infinite.