Anne Hathaway has hinted in the past that her journey to motherhood was a complicated one. Now, the 41-year-old is getting candid about her history of miscarriage.

The Idea of You star opened up to Vanity Fair about what she meant when she shared the news that she was expecting her second 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥 on Facebook in 2019. At the time, Anne wrote, ‘It’s not for a movie…. All kidding aside, for everyone going through infertility and conception hell, please know it was not a straight line to either of my pregnancies. Sending you extra love.’

Anne told Vanity Fair that she felt ‘pain’ when she was trying to get pregnant. ‘It would’ve felt disingenuous to post something all the way happy when I know the story is much more nuanced than that for everyone,’ she explained.

Anne said that she had a miscarriage in 2015 while doing the one-woman off-Broadway show Grounded. ‘The first time it didn’t work out for me,’ she said. ‘I was doing a play and I had to give 𝐛𝐢𝐫𝐭𝐡 onstage every night.’

She said she told friends about what had happened backstage after her performances. ‘It was too much to keep it in when I was onstage pretending everything was fine,’ she said. ‘I had to keep it real otherwise….So when it did go well for me, having been on the other side of it—where you have to have the grace to be happy for someone—I wanted to let my sisters know, “You don’t have to always be grateful. I see you and I’ve been you.”‘

Anne also said her experience with miscarriage made her question if she was to blame. ‘It’s really hard to want something so much and to wonder if you’re doing something wrong,’ she said.

Anne said that she was surprised to learn that many of her friends had also experienced a miscarriage. ‘I thought, Where is this information? Why are we feeling so unnecessarily isolated? That’s where we take on damage. So I decided that I was going to talk about it,’ she said. ‘The thing that broke my heart, blew my mind, and gave me hope was that for three years after, almost daily, a woman came up to me in tears and I would just hold her because she was carrying this [pain] around and suddenly it wasn’t all hers anymore.’

Anne said her experience also made her feel OK being open about what she had been through. ‘I wasn’t going to feel ashamed of something that seemed to me statistically to be quite normal,’ she said.

Anne is now the mother of two boys— sons Jonathan, 8, and Jack, 4—with husband Adam Shulman. She said that being a mom has made her softer.

‘When I was younger, the way that I knew how to improve was by being hard on myself,’ she said. ‘There’s a ceiling to that path. I had to relearn what it means to have drive but to do it in a nurturing way.’