left Big – At 31, Lauren Khan left her New York City law job while pregnant with her first child after a move to her Florida hometown on the Space Coast. The cost-of-living shift, family support, and a series of publishing steps—from a remote internship to agency outreac
The day Lauren Khan signed the contract for a home on Florida’s Space Coast, the decision felt both ordinary and seismic. A week before her due date, she and her husband put an offer on a house in her small beach hometown—down the street from where her parents still live.
She had grown up in Florida with New York City in her imagination. She attended law school in Manhattan and worked her way up after graduation. building a career in Big Law that wasn’t her dream but felt stable. For a while, stability won. Then she began to notice how badly the job fit her life. Over time. working as a literary agent came into sharper focus as the better match—her “sharp editorial eye” and the negotiation and client-management skills she’d gained as a lawyer.
Still, the pivot had to be realistic. She spent a year learning as much as she could about the publishing industry while working full-time. Then a workshop on becoming an agent stopped her in her tracks. The lesson was direct: the only way she could realistically make a career change was to become an intern or an assistant first.
As a Big Law associate, there weren’t enough hours in the day to add an internship. And she couldn’t afford the risk of starting over as an assistant while saving for their new baby in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
So, at 31—eight months pregnant with their first child—she sat down for a lunch with her husband and told him she was giving up on pursuing her dream job.
Everything changed when she gave birth to their son in October 2023. Khan says being closer to family suddenly outweighed her love for Manhattan. The offer on the Space Coast house became the pivot point: her hometown was “everything we could’ve wanted for our growing family. ” with the warmth and sense of community she and her husband had been searching for.
But there was one immediate snag. She couldn’t keep her New York-based legal job after moving. Her husband’s job was remote, which gave them room to maneuver while she figured out her next steps. With the financial pressure of New York City’s higher cost of living removed. she and her family could afford for her to not work for a while. She devoted herself to caring for her son and writing.
The publishing dreams she’d pushed aside began returning fast. With her lower cost of living and her mother helping with childcare, becoming a literary agent was suddenly on the table again. She started a remote publishing internship, saying it only increased her passion for the career path.
When that internship wrapped up, she was pregnant with her second child. She began emailing literary agencies in search of a full-time agenting role. The breakthrough came the morning she woke up to an email from the CEO of what she calls her dream agency asking for a call. Her family had plans to visit New York. so she followed up the call with an in-person meeting with the VP.
At the end of that meeting, she was offered a remote job as a literary agent.
Two weeks after giving birth to her daughter in July 2025. she opened up to queries from writers looking for representation and says she never looked back. The agency had told her to take her time after having the baby, but she was too excited to wait. Her postpartum months became a sprint of reading manuscripts and signing new clients. She described the challenge of being a mom of two under 2 while also managing her dream career—and said she had never felt more fulfilled.
About a year later, she represents over a dozen clients across fiction and non-fiction, with multiple book deals closed or in the works.
For years, she said, the path out of New York was unplanned. When she left her hometown for college and then law school in New York City. she never planned to head back. Now she says her hometown has allowed her to achieve the impossible: a dream career in publishing as a literary agent. and. alongside that. an agented author writing the stories she spent a decade dreaming about.
Two and a half years after giving up on her dream, she’s living it.
New York City Florida law to publishing Big Law literary agent Space Coast remote work cost of living entrepreneurship publishing industry childcare support book deals