Mary Louise Kelly was thousands of feet in the air, decked out in bulletproof body armor, and crying.
The veteran NPR correspondent had just piled into the last of the Black Hawk helicopters streaking through wartime Iraq, along with then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. On the airstrip minutes before, Kelly had gotten a call from Washington.
It was the nurse at her 4-year-old son’s school. “He’s struggling to breathe,” Kelly remembered hearing. “We need to get him to a doctor or a hospital. Now.”
Seconds later, the line went dead. The helicopter lifted into the air.
“I worked really hard to get this job, and I’m good at this job,” Kelly said. “And I don’t know if my son is breathing — and I’m however many thousand miles away. What am I doing?”
Her son turned out to be OK. But in the air over Baghdad, Kelly began to question everything — including whether it was time to leave the war zones behind.
She tells this story — and the songs that score her life’s turning points — in a new episode of “Life in Seven Songs,” The Standard’s podcast where public figures share the music that shaped them. This episode was recorded live at the Aspen Ideas Festival.
From school paper to national airwaves
Reporting was Kelly’s first dream.
As a high schooler in the late ’80s — the era of Madonna bangles and “earrings that came to our waists” — Kelly landed an interview with her school’s assistant principal and detention czar.
The administration had just unveiled a dress code on earring sizes: “If you pulled it up, it couldn’t come past the top of your ear,” Kelly wrote for the school paper.
The next edition was flooded with letters to the editor opposing the policy. Administrators reversed course.
“ I realized he’s not taking my questions,” said Kelly. “But he will take questions from the Lovett Linotype. And it was the feeling of, ‘I can ask questions on behalf of someone else. I can correct a travesty of justice.’”
Today, Kelly interviews presidents, not assistant principals. But the power of the fourth estate still resonates.
“There is no head of state or cabinet secretary who has to take my questions, but they’ll take them because of the millions of people who will hear the answers on NPR.”
When two loves clash
Years after that school paper exposé, Kelly had risen to the top of her field at NPR, while raising two sons. But the helicopter ride in Iraq forced a reckoning: What happens when your greatest loves — work and family — clash?
Back in D.C., she was still wrestling with it. One evening, inching through traffic after another long day at work, the answer seemed to arrive over the car stereo. It was Natasha Bedingfield’s hit “Unwritten.”
“Today is where your book begins / The rest is still unwritten.”
“Could I write a spy novel? That sounds way more fun than grinding away on deadline every night. Could I do it?”
“I am not a superstitious person,” Kelly said, laughing on the Aspen stage. But the message seemed clear. “Maybe you should go write.”
So she did. She left NPR. She spent her evenings at home, tucking the boys into bed before sitting down to pen spy fiction. Her characters tackled Pakistani nuclear threats and buried secrets in Washington.
In 2015, with her sons older and two bestsellers behind her, Kelly returned to NPR — just in time for the chaos of a new political era.
The case for reinvention
Kelly’s 2023 memoir, “It. Goes. So. Fast.,” reflects on the two decades she spent navigating the impossible math of working motherhood. Its central thesis is one many parents will recognize: Sometimes, there’s no right answer.
“We’ve all had that feeling of ‘I absolutely need to be in two places at the same time, and I absolutely can’t,’” she said. “It’s the solidarity of knowing none of us figured it out.”
But if there’s a trick to surviving it — to living a full life in the face of impossible trade-offs — Kelly may have found it: reinvention.
She’s done it over and over again: from fielding CIA holiday party invites as a national security reporter to launching spy novels on international book tours. From cheering mom in the soccer stands to cohost of “All Things Considered” in the Trump era. Each time, making the best call she could in the moment — and trusting the rest would follow.
Listen to the full episode here for all seven of Kelly’s songs and stories. Find Kelly’s playlist on Spotify and the episode transcript on our website. Email us at [email protected].