“I don’t think there’s ever been a time in my life where I was willing to give up my life to be someone’s wife or girlfriend,” Nia Long tells me from her home in Los Angeles in the middle of September. “Ever. Period.” She’s just walked in the door after a tennis lesson, but now she’s the coach, giving me a master class in how to balance the roles womanhood demands. She rejects the idea that we have to choose between love and work: “I don’t care how difficult the journey has been; I think you can have both. I never wanted to wake up in my 30s or 40s and say, Well, what is the value of my life?”
