You can’t have it all

“You can’t have it all” is the maxim Edna offers about the cost of a life in journalism, and the pressure point in Tully’s growing conflict between professional success and personal connection. The phrase begins as a hard-earned account of sacrifice; Tully’s response asks whether sacrifice must be accepted as the price of achievement.

Edna’s account of sacrifice

Edna describes a career in which the story came first, without exception. She had married three times but had not stayed married, and she says she could not have both the work and children: even a child’s wedding would not have kept her from a breaking story. She has therefore lived alone, but does not describe that outcome as regret. She says she loved her life and valued being where she wanted to be and doing work that mattered, even if she ended in a nursing home alone.

That history gives the expression its authority and its limits. For Edna’s generation, the choice between journalism and conventional domestic commitments was not abstract: it shaped the marriages she lost and the solitary life she accepted. Yet her account is not simply a lament. She presents the cost as one she knowingly paid for work she found meaningful.

Tully tests the maxim

The expression returns as Tully considers what success means when there is no one to share it with. Approaching forty, she finds the relentless schedule that had once been easy increasingly tiring. Public appearances and red carpets have lost their appeal, while coming home and calling Kate, Mrs. M., or Edna has become more meaningful. Her question to Edna—what success is worth without someone to share it—makes companionship a measure that professional achievement alone cannot satisfy.

Edna answers that this is the bargain Tully has made: success comes with a sacrifice, because one cannot have everything. Tully’s thought immediately presses against that answer. What if everything is precisely what she wants? The expression thus shifts from a rule handed down by a mentor into a dilemma Tully is unwilling to close: Edna’s fulfilled independence is real, but so is Tully’s longing for both consequential work and people who know and care for her.

Meaning in the story

The maxim condenses a generational conflict about women’s work and private life without resolving it into a simple lesson. Edna’s life demonstrates that professional purpose can justify a cost to the person who chooses it; Tully’s restlessness shows that the same cost may feel different when success is no longer enough on its own. The phrase’s force lies in that unresolved tension: it names sacrifice as a fact of Edna’s experience, while Tully’s question keeps open whether the bargain must govern her future.