My guest today is the award-winning… well what is she? Writer? Content creator? Blogger? Influencer? Ruth Crilly is all of the above. She started her blog A Model Recommends in 2010 - before it was really a thing - and became one of the UK’s first social media stars. She’s got 500k followers on YouTube and instagram and unbelievably she’s - gulp - over 40! I know. Ancient! And before all that, Ruth was a successful model and it’s that experience that forms the basis of her first book How Not To Be A Supermodel. This isn’t a grim story of abuse at the hands of a brutal industry, although it’s no walk in the park. Instead, Ruth somehow manages to find humour in the endless humiliations and inhumanities models are subjected to - being not tall enough, not cool enough, not thin enough to make it to supermodel stardom. Ruth joined me to talk to about being reduced to your looks when looks were never your currency, why there are two Ruths in her life (and one of them has to go!), why she wishes she’d known how perfect she was when she was 20, the trouble with social media and why she’s too lazy, too tight and too chicken to tweak! And while she’s at it she flogs me a beauty gadget to lift my face! * You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including How Not To Be A Supermodel by Ruth Crilly and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me. * If you enjoyed this episode and you fancy buying me a coffee, pop over to my page on buymeacoffee.com. • And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including exclusive transcripts of the podcast, why not join The Shift community, come and have a look around at www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Juliette Nicholls @ Pineapple Audio Production. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My guest today is the creator of the global bestseller and smash hit TV adaptation, The Discovery of Witches, Deborah Harkness. Now, I’m not sure if you know this about me, but I’m a bit obsessed with all things witchy, and I’ve been a devotee ever since the proof of the first book landed on my desk and I tumbled headlong into the world of Diana Bishop. Can you say, ob-sessed? But before all this Deborah was a scholar. A historian who teaches the history of science at the University of Southern California, she is an authority on alchemical manuscripts and for her doctorate researched the history of magic and science in Europe between 1500 and 1700. Sound familiar?  There’s more, just a couple of years ago Deborah discovered she was descended from not one, but two of the Salem women. Deborah joined me to talk about the latest book in the All Souls series - The Black Bird Oracle - which takes us to Salem and the descendants of the witch trials. We discussed also her life changing cancer diagnosis, why women’s pain is endlessly ignored, why she won’t be blunting her sharp pointy edges for anyone and why she loves being the crone of dark academia.  * You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including The Blackbird Oracle by Deborah Harkness and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me. * If you enjoyed this episode and you fancy buying me a coffee, pop over to my page on buymeacoffee.com. • And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including exclusive transcripts of the podcast, why not join The Shift community, come and have a look around at www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Juliette Nicholls @ Pineapple Audio Production. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's season finale time! And my guest today is the whirlwind also known as Kathy Lette. Australian Kathy smashed her way into the global bestseller lists at the age of 17 with the novel Puberty Blues. Since then she has turned her irreverent, en pointe pen on the peaks and troughs, triumphs and total BS of female existence. I first read her with Girls Night Out and The Llama Parlour in my twenties and met Kathy when I was features editor of New Woman (yet another resident of the magazine graveyard). Foetal Attraction and Mad Cow followed, which was made into a film starring Anna Friel and Joanna Lumley. 20 books later, her latest, The Revenge Club, takes hilarious aim at the way women are scrap-heaped (sometimes professionally and personally) in their 50s. Kathy joined me to play pun bingo and talk about why life is in two acts and the key is surviving the perimenopausal interval, reaping the benefits of the invisibility cloak and chipping away at ageing double standards. She also told me about being told off by her teenage daughter, the power of complaining, why divorce isn’t to be feared and why her midlife mantra is, if it doesn’t spark joy, it’s time to toss it away. * You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including The Revenge Club by Kathy Lette and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me. * If you enjoyed this episode and you fancy buying me a coffee, pop over to my page on buymeacoffee.com • And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including exclusive transcripts of the podcast, why not join The Shift community, come and have a look around at www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Juliette Nicholls @ Pineapple Audio Production. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My guest today has packed a helluva lot into her 43 years. Dawn O’Porter started her career in TV production, before finding her way in front of the camera to host a series of attention-grabbing documentaries on everything from polygamy to Dirty Dancing. By the time she hit her 30s, like many women, Dawn was moving faster and faster to stand still. By the time she was married (to the actor Chris O’Dowd) with the first of her two sons, running a vintage fashion label and the refugee charity now known as Choose Love - AND writing books - she realised something had to give! In this case, that was Dawn herself. She is now a full-time author of eight books including the Richard and Judy pick So Lucky and her latest, Cat Lady - a funny and frank look at the boxes we squeeze ourselves into to try to fit other people’s expectations. Dawn joined me from her home in LA to discuss the cats-in-the-bedroom conundrum, what she learnt from launching and losing a business, why the need to be liked is exhausting and how ageing helped her recognise her own value. We also talked Botox, whether perimenopause makes you smell strange and why she’ll never stop advocating for kaftans!  Hankering after a Cat Lady jumper like Dawn's? Visit Joanieclothing.com. * You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including Cat Lady by Dawn O'Porter and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! * And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including transcripts of the podcast, please consider joining The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do I want to age? What does the rest of my life look like? Those are questions I know many of you have given A LOT of thought. Well, my guest today has some answers. Dr Sharon Blackie is a psychologist and folklorist who is passionate about reimagining the ageing process for the better. Her last book If Women Rose Rooted was an ecofeminist sleeper hit about finding your place in the world that was passed from woman to woman with the words “you MUST read this”.  Her new book, Hagitude: reimagining the second half of life, does JUST that. What, she asks, would ageing as a woman in the west be like if we embraced it. If we saw it as an adventure, not something to be dreaded, dodged, denied. At its heart is the radical idea: what if older women knew how to use the power and influence many of us don't know we have. What if we recognised our value? What if we wrote our own narratives? Sharon joined me to talk about the power of myth, embracing your inner hag and why she’d rather be the old woman in the wood than a boring old fairytale princess any day. She also told me what she learnt from THREE midlife crises, her decade of hot flushes and the joy of no longer having skin in the mating game. I found this conversation so motivating and inspiring. I hope you do too. * You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including Hagitude and If Women Rose Rooted by Sharon Blackie and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! * And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including transcripts of the podcast, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You might think you know all there is to know about today’s guest. Posh girl who once dated Princess Margaret’s son. Half of the early noughties style duo Trinny and Susannah. Plus a short-lived and strangely identifiable turn on Strictly as the slightly embarrassing older woman who can’t really dance. (Hands up who over-identified!)  Because that’s what the media has told us.  But look at it another way, Susannah Constantine is a novelist, writer and broadcaster with over 25 years experience. She’s a hit podcaster (My Wardrobe Malfunction is a hoot - check out the episode with Kristin Scott Thomas!) and, on the cusp of 60, she’s just written a game changing memoir that will make you think more than twice about what it really means to be a girl brought up in privilege; a girl brought up to be Ready For Absolutely Nothing. Susannah joined me from her swanky kitchen to talk extremely candidly about hitting rock bottom before she could confront her alcoholism, her complicated relationship with her mother, rediscovering her identity after it was ripped away and how she experienced a mental menopause. PLUS surviving Strictly humiliation, Dolph Lundgren and having tea with the queen. * You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including Ready For Absolutely Nothing by Susannah Constantine and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! * And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including transcripts of the podcast, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One hundred episodes... how did that happen?! The little podcast that started on a whim and a prayer (and no, that's not a typo!) is still here and soaring. So I could not think of a more fitting guest for such a landmark episode than a woman whose life is a tribute to the power of hope... Where do you turn when everything feels hopeless? My guest today knows the answer to better than most. Nine years ago, in the space of one week, Raynor Winn lost her home, and her husband, Moth, was diagnosed with a degenerative disease. In the face of such loss, there was only one thing to do: they packed what little of their life they could carry into their backpacks, and walked. That walk - 630 miles along the South West Coast path - became the bestseller The Salt Path. It sold a million copies, spent more than 90 weeks in the Sunday Times bestseller lists and changed thousands of lives - not least Raynor and Moth’s. Despite defying the medical odds, two years ago Moth’s health began to decline again. Clutching at hope, they set out for one last walk: this time 1000 miles, from Cape Wrath in the far North West of Scotland back home to Cornwall. But in walking back home, could they really walk Moth back to health a second time? Raynor joined me to talk about the book of that epic journey, Landlines, and how walking The Salt Path wiped her clean. We also discuss the power of walking, why nature has always been her safe place, putting yourself in the way of hope and how a shy girl hiding behind the sofa became a public person at 60.  * You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including Landlines by Raynor Winn and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! * Want to take advantage of the offer of 30-day free membership of The Shift newsletter and community? Go to https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ Offer ends 17 October 2022. • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to this special bonus episode of The Shift with Sam Baker. Consider it a taster for season 10, which starts next Tuesday. If you’re in your 40s or 50s (or even 30s or 60s) and feeling a bit what-next, my guest today is just the motivation you need. Seven years ago Deborah Frances-White was sitting in a bar with a comedian friend, when they came up with a crazy idea for a podcast. You might have heard of it. It’s called The Guilty Feminist! Now about to celebrate 100 million downloads, its catch phrase, I’m a feminist but… has become part of internet lingua franca and the standup comedian, podcaster, activist and screenwriter has never been busier. She’s written a bestselling book of the same name and launched a whole host of spin off podcasts under The Guilty Feminist banner. And there’s another book on the way. Deborah joined me to talk about feminism, being diagnosed with ADHD in her 40s, the way we change our behaviour in male-dominated spaces and being true to your own brilliant self (!). We also discussed that old chestnut likability, infertility and the conundrum of wanting a child but wanting the life you would have had without one too, exfoliating your guilt and the doctor who told her that post-menopause women’s skin ages in dog years! Cheers much. *Listen to The Guilty Feminist here. * You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including The Guilty Feminist by Deborah Frances-White and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! * Want to take advantage of the offer of 30-day free membership of The Shift newsletter and community? Go to https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ Offer ends 17 October 2022. • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of my favourite things about making The Shift podcast is all the fascinating women I get to interview - and learn a little bit from. So I’m revisiting a few of my favourite episodes while I finish putting together the new season. I had long been an admirer of Dr Jen Gunter's no-bull approach to women's health before I met her eighteen months ago. She didn't disappoint! Here are the original show notes: The best way I can think of to describe this week’s guest is that she’s a women’s health vigilante. (A vagina vigilante if you will!) Dubbed twitter’s resident gynaecologist, and the nemesis of snake oil salesmen everywhere, Dr Jen Gunter is the living embodiment of “information is power”. She has made it her life’s mission to give you the information you need to make life better for you - and for your vagina.  Best known for her book The Vagina Bible, and publicly taking Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle website Goop to task for, amongst other things, flogging jade eggs. “Dear Ms Paltrow,” she wrote back in 2017, “It is the biggest load of garbage I have read on your site since vaginal steaming.” Now Jen is bringing that same, erm, direct approach to the menopause with her new book, The Menopause Manifesto. A banger of a book that tells you everything you could possibly need to know and plenty of stuff you don’t but will be glad you do. Jen is characteristically no-bull as she talks menopause, mental health, why we all need to know WTF is going on and why women need more menopausal role models. And whatever you do, don’t get her started on manufacturers who think shoving “meno” in front of a product name is a licence to print money…! Join me and Jen as we cross the crimson bridge and throw ourselves a meno partiy! Welcome to the order of menopause! • You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including the book that accompanies this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too by Sam Baker and The Menopause Manifesto by Dr Jen Gunter. * And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including transcripts of the podcast, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of my favourite things about making The Shift podcast is all the fascinating women I get to interview - and learn a little bit from. So I’m revisiting a few of my favourite episodes while I finish putting together the new season. I had never heard of Nana-Ama Danquah before I started The Shift and speaking to her was one of my most enlightening conversations. Nana-Ama's writing has recently found a new audience and was shortlisted for this year's Caine Prize. Here are the original show notes: My guest today is the Ghanaian American writer Nana-Ama Danquah. Nana-Ama found herself in the public eye when, in the late 90s, she published her memoir Willow Weep For Me about suffering from clinical depression - one of the first books to openly discuss black women’s mental health experience. Critically acclaimed by the likes of the late, great Maya Angelou, its description of the shame, dismissal, denial and out and out despair experienced by many black women started a much-needed conversation that was widely credited with “saving lives”. (It's currently not published in the UK - publishers I AM LOOKING AT YOU!) Now 53, Nana-Ama joined me from her home in (sunny) California (grrr) to talk about the double - in fact, make that triple - burden of mental health, menopause and being black, why black women are driving change right now, how menopause turned her into a hot mess and how she’s finally learnt the joy of doing what you do until you die. • You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including the book that accompanies this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too by Sam Baker. Willow Weep For Me by Nana-Ama Danquah is not published in the UK, but you can buy it from amazon.co.uk or abebooks.co.uk. * And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including transcripts of the podcast, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of my favourite things about making The Shift podcast is all the fascinating women I get to interview - and learn a little bit from. So I’m revisiting a few of my favourite episodes while I finish putting together the next season. This is a replay of one of my all time favourites, with the inimitable Anita Rani. I did this interview in June 2021. Here are the original show notes: What even is the “right sort of girl?” That’s a question my guest this week has long struggled to answer. Growing up in Yorkshire, TV presenter and self-proclaimed misfit Anita Rani always felt that she was somehow *wrong* - a feeling that was exacerbated when she moved to London to break into the media - and found herself too brown, too northern, too female. Oh, and too gobby. A triple threat with bells on. Now 43, she co-fronts two national institutions - Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour and BBC’s Country File - and has finally reached a point where she felt able to answer (or at least tackle) the question: who even am I? in her memoir, The Right Sort of Girl. Join Anita and me as we journey from 1970s Bradford to her perch on the top of the media tree via eldest-Punjabi-daughter-guilt, never ever ever talking about periods, grunge and Oprah-worship. On the way, Anita tells me why south asian women are badasses, why shapeshifting to fit other people’s expectations is a waste of energy and how she learnt to own her anger. This is a celebration of being in your 40s, being yourself and finding your purpose and I’m pretty sure that you, like me, will love her for it.  • You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including Anita Rani's memoir, The Right Sort of Girl, and the book that accompanies this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too by me! * And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including transcripts of the podcast, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s guest is one of Britain’s best loved novelists, Lisa Jewell. Her career started with a smash hit debut novel Ralph’s Party - which she started writing as a bet at the age of 27 while she was unemployed, and, according to her, “totally lacking in direction and ambition”. It was the book of the moment and for 14 novels it looked like her career - although ticking along nicely - would never hit those heights again.  Then her writing took a turn for the dark and her career took a turn for the stratospheric. Lisa Jewell, it transpired had a knack for a killer twist. That knack propelled her to the top of the bestseller lists on both sides of the atlantic with And Then She Was Gone. That was six books ago and she’s never been more successful.  I went to see Lisa in her envy-inducing North London home to talk about her latest book, The Family Remains, the debt she owes Bridget Jones and the sequel she wishes had never seen the light of day. We also chatted about hitting “a golden seam” in her 50s, her unexpectedly scary perimenopause symptoms, testosterone overload, and her extremely proactive ovaries! Plus she shares her controversial secret to successfully parenting teenage girls. * You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including The Family Remains by Lisa Jewell and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! * And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including transcripts of the podcast, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My guest today is the writer Hilma Wolitzer. Born in 1930, Hilma had her first poem published at the age of 9. She then shelved that ambition in favour of marriage and children, as women were expected to in the 1950s. 26 years later she had her first short story published. Then there was no stopping her.  Her first novel was published at the age of 44 and since then she has published 14 books. The most recent of which is the career-spanning short story collection - the brilliantly named, Today A Woman Went Mad In The Supermarket. If you, like me, love Elizabeth Strout, I guarantee you will love this.  Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to speak to Hilma from her apartment in New York about writing at 9 and 90, being raised to be a housewife by a housewife and how feminism changed her life. She also talked about losing her husband of 68 years to covid during lockdown, why she can’t think of anything worse than dating again, why she’s not done yet and why she doesn’t mind being an old woman but she definitely doesn’t want to be an old girl. * You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including Today A Woman Went Mad In The Supermarket and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! * And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including transcripts of the podcast, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My guest today is the teacher, musician and writer Molly Roden Winter. Molly hit the headlines earlier this year when her memoir More was published in the United States and caused… let’s just call it “a storm”. Why? Because Molly’s book is an incredibly candid account of her open marriage. Which, lets face it, shouldn’t be that big of a deal in 2024. But something about a woman - a married woman, a mother, and one no longer in the first flushes of youth - talking so frankly about sex and self-discovery seemed to enflame people! More rushed straight to the top of the New York Times bestseller lists and now it’s been published in the UK.  But it’s not just about sex - although there’s plenty of that - it’s about how a lifelong people pleaser, a good girl, “straight As Molly” learnt to put herself first.  As Straight As Sam, I wanted to hear more! Molly joined me from Brooklyn to take us on her journey (sorry!) from monogamous thirtysomething mother of two small boys to unwitting ambassador for polyamory in her mid-50s! We also discussed the importance of owning your mess, becoming a sexual subject on your own terms, the revelation of realising you can love more than one person and the impact of discovering her parents were polyamorous too. I found this conversation a total revelation. Hope you will too.  * You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including More by Molly Roden Winter and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me. * If you enjoyed this episode and you fancy buying me a coffee, pop over to my page on buymeacoffee.com • And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including exclusive transcripts of the podcast, why not join The Shift community, come and have a look around at www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Juliette Nicholls @ Pineapple Audio Production. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I can’t remember the first time I met my friend Clare Grogan. But like many Gen-Xers, I remember the first time I saw her in the cult movie Gregory’s Girl, and then, later the same year, on Top of the Pops with Altered Images, performing the band’s top 10 hits Happy Birthday and I Could Be Happy. (I have a bit of a soft spot for that last one.) Still in her teens, she was living a life the rest of us could only dream of. Until, at 25, with three top ten albums under her belt, she left it all behind so she could, as she puts it, “feel where I came from again”. Since then she has had countless presenting and acting roles in everything from Eastenders to Skins. And now, 38 years after her last outing!, she’s back with a new Altered Images album Mascara Streakz. Clare zoomed in to talk about deciding where you want to go in life, doing every show like it might be your last and being back on the road at 60. We discussed the unexpected impact of her daughter hitting the age she was when Altered Images hit the big time, her “difficult 40s” and why it’s never too late to start a band. *Mascara Streakz is released on 26 August.* * You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! * And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including transcripts of the podcast, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Who hasn’t looked at those things you should have done by the time you’re 30/40/50/whatever lists and rolled their eyes? And yet consciously or not many of us still live our lives according to those timelines.  But what does middle age feel like if you’ve been acing those lists since you were 16 - and then suddenly you’re not? Today’s guest Emma Forrest was an early achiever. She had a newspaper column by the age of 16, had written three novels by 30 and then moved to Hollywood and became a screenwriter. There, she seemingly “had it all” - Big job, famous husband, fabulous house, beautiful daughter. And then she didn’t.  So How does it feel to be hitting 40 and walking away from the dream? Swapping An LA mansion for an attic flat in north London. And A glamorous marriage for a relationship with yourself. Someone who, by Emma’s own admission, she thought she might never get to see again. Emma joined me to talk about her new memoir Busy Being Free and how she freed herself from a lifelong obsession with romantic attachment. We discuss how Trump contributed to her decision to step away from sex post-divorce (sorry, you’ll never unsee that!), rediscovering yourself in your 40s, why women who choose to be alone unnerve people, off-loading the “female factory reset” of gratitude and what an Enfant Terrible looks like at 45. CW: I should warn you there’s also discussion of eating disorders, cutting and suicide. * You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including Busy Being Free by Emma Forrest and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! * And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including transcripts of the podcast, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s guest is the award-winning writer, Kit De Waal. Until she was 21, Kit had never read a book voluntarily. But once she started there was no stopping her. Kit started writing in her mid-40s and published her award-winning debut, My Name Is Leon, at 56. Since then she has used her success to work tirelessly to promote the voices of working class writers. Using some of her advance to set up the Kit de Waal Creative Writing Fellowship (aka the Fat Chance scholarship!) and editing Common People, an anthology of working class writing. Now she’s turned her attention to her own childhood. Her memoir, Without Warning And Only Sometimes, is the story of growing up in poverty, one of five children with a Black father and Irish mother who brought them up Jehovah’s Witness… Kit joined me from possibly the most envy-inducing workroom I’ve ever ogled via zoom (and I’ve ogled a few!) to talk being single and reclaiming your own space at 60. We discussed race, class, privilege, the impact of a childhood spent not stepping on the cracks and why she hates that “fucking overused word resilience”. Plus why she’s not interested in a man on the downward slide, being a Tuesday friend and her exceedingly cool hair * You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including Without Warning And Only Sometimes by Kit de Waal and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! * And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including transcripts of the podcast, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My guest today is the author of the cult bestseller The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron. Part book, part tool-kit, part spiritual guide, The Artists Way has sold over 4 million copies globally and has inspired countless artists, writers, and creatives including Elizabeth Gilbert, Alicia Keyes, Pete Townshend and many more. In the 30 years since that was published, Julia has written a movie, 7 plays and 23 books, including her memoir Floor Sample. Written in her late 50s she looked back over the first half(ish) of her life: her catholic education, alcoholism and drug abuse, her brief marriage to director Martin Scorsese, and her subsequent search for meaning, for herself, for home, ultimately for a way to be comfortably sober. Speaking from her home in Santa Fe, Julia shared her incredible journey from “just a girl” at Catholic school to The Artists Way by way of leaving Washington a writer and landing in Hollywood a wife. She spoke candidly about losing the love of her life, getting and staying sober, how the nuns were her introduction to women with power and how the morning pages transformed her life. Now 74 and 45 years dry, she says, she’s braver than ever. * You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including The Artists Way by Julia Cameron and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! Julia's recommendation, Creative Ideas by Ernest Holmes is out of print, but you can buy it here. * And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including transcripts of the podcast, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you always wanted to wreak revenge on your worst enemies? Those who’ve wronged you, conned you or just crossed you? Well, if you’ve ever lain in the bath (or on the sofa or wherever) fantasising about how you’d get your own back, my guest today is your woman! Jane Fallon - aka the mistress of the revenge romp!  Formerly a TV producer (Jane gave us the era-defining This Life amongst other things), she did a massive handbrake turn at 45 after a flash of overnight inspiration (lucky her!) And chucked it all in to write a novel. Her debut Getting Rid Of Matthew was a hit and 12 novels later she hasn’t looked back. Her latest Just Got Real, looks at what it means to be unexpectedly single again in mid-life and tackles the world of online dating. Jane joined me to talk about giving voice to women over 40, how perimenopause induced her creative midlife crisis, why, for some reason, she thought she could get through menopause without telling anyone (hoho), the liberation of embracing 60, being a Botox holdout and how she trained herself to stop catastrophising. I’m grateful to Jane for telling me about the decision not to have children and her deeply held belief that she would have made a terrible mother. Oh, and BTW Jane, I'm still waiting for photographic evidence of that cartwheel! * You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including JUST. GOT. REAL. by Jane Fallon and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! * And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including transcripts of the podcast, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How does it feel to be catapulted to Internet fame, literally overnight. My guest this week, CJ Hauser, found out when she wrote a little essay back in 2019 about cranes (as in, the birds, not the machines!). Except CJ had just called off her wedding and The Crane Wife wasn’t about cranes, so much as the shapes we contort ourselves into in order to please other people. about denying our own needs and accepting LESS. Forty eight hours after it was published The Crane Wife had gone viral, been read millions of times and identified with by just about everyone who read it. I read it. I couldn’t believe how much it spoke to me. Nor, it seemed, could anyone else. Now CJ has written a memoir in essays - also called The Crane Wife - about love, relationships and the stories we tell ourselves, not, it seems, in order to survive, but in order to set the bar so high we spend the rest of our lives failing to reach it. CJ (and her dog Moriarty @thedogphilosopher on instagram...) joined me to talk about the unnerving impact of overnight success, being “a breakup pro” and learning to live your own dreams, not other people’s. We also discussed her Schrodingers biological clock, the life lessons she’s learnt from Dr Who, she introduced me to the concept of "bucking" and her unified theory of shitty men! * Read CJ’s original essay The Crane Wife here. * You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including THE CRANE WIFE by CJ Hauser and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! * And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including transcripts of the podcast, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everyone! I just wanted to let you know about a new initiative coming from The Shift. I launched The Shift with Sam Baker podcast 18 months ago on a hunch: I figured that if the way women's voices were silenced after 40 bugged me (OK, bugged is a bit of an understatement!) then the chances were it bugged you, too. I had no idea how right I was. Now, thanks to you, my regular listeners, The Shift is approaching a million downloads and is growing fast. As well as a podcast and a book, The Shift is now (drum roll) a newsletter and a community! The reasons for this are two-fold: 1) You keep telling me you want more of The Shift - more women's voices, more stories, more content about the issues that affect you - and I want to give you more. Rather than four short seasons a year, my plan is to make The Shift podcast a weekly affair landing every Tuesday morning, with breaks for Christmas and summer holidays. As well as that, there will be a weekly newsletter and a community, plus access to podcast transcripts, early bird access to events, live podcast recordings and more. 2) Making The Shift takes time and money and I need your help. If you value The Shift and would like to support the work that goes into it - as well as getting a newsletter in your inbox every week, membership of The Shift bookclub, community and more - I'd love it if you'd consider becoming a member and being part of The Shift as it grows. Interested? You can find out more and join at steady.media/theshift Thanks for listening Samx Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

By her own admission, today’s guest, award winning journalist Poorna Bell, wasn’t looking forward to 40. She feared, as society had taught her, that it might be the beginning of the end. And so, she set out to prove herself wrong.  Poorna has written two memoirs about grief and mental health in the wake of her husband, Rob’s death by suicide. And followed those up with Stronger, an inspiring reevaluation of women’s strength interwoven with her own discovery of power lifting (I kid you not. This woman could bench press Johnny Depp - but I fear she’d have to join the queue.) It’s no surprise that Poorna has become an advocate for diversity, mental health and body image.  Now she’s turned her hand to fiction. Her debut novel, In Case Of Emergency is a warm, funny, immensely entertaining story of friendship, sisterhood, being single in a couples world and a brown woman in a white world. Poorna joined me to talk about taking back power, finding her strength and how fitness changed her. Why she’s all in favour of marriage but has no plans to get back on the relationship escalator, why ageing is her superpower, finding clarity post-40, her search for midlife role models as a brown woman and embracing being a 40something goddess. You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including IN CASE OF EMERGENCY by Poorna Bell, and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including transcripts of the podcast, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. podchaser token: 0XeeihrspYQYlmZOFLzt Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My guest this week is never happier than when she’s making her readers feel uncomfortable. Lisa Taddeo was a skint journalist when she wrote the groundbreaking book, Three Women - the true story of the intimate desires of three American women.  A bestseller on both sides of the atlantic, it is now being made into a TV series starring Shailene Woodley as the author. But more than that, Three Women made millions of women take a long hard look at their own wants, needs and desires and the many ways they’d sublimated them. Lisa followed that up with her first novel, Animal, and has now published a collection of short stories, Ghost Lover, in which she analyses, love, grief, obsession, ageing, body image, and, of course, sex. I’ve interviewed Lisa before, so I thought I knew what to expect: sex, rage, more sex, more rage. But this was not the chat I expected to have. Lisa was in a contemplative mood and we found ourselves dissecting women and power - or the lack of it (and this was before the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade); the way power is given with one hand and taken with the other and how success stitches up women or families. Lisa also opened up about how her mother’s fear of ageing affected her and learning not to be afraid to put a value on herself. You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including GHOST LOVER by Lisa Taddeo, and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including transcripts of the podcast, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My guest today is the “queen of Scottish comedy”, Janey Godley. Janey has played Broadway, won loads of awards and written a bestselling memoir, Handstands in The Dark about her grim childhood. But you might know her for the viral VoiceOver videos she did of Nicola Sturgeon during lockdown. (If you haven’t seen them, check out her twitter.) Now Janey has turned her hand to fiction, with Nothing Left Unsaid, a moving but coffee-snortingly hilarious story of five single mums struggling to survive in 70s Glasgow. Think Big Little Lies set in 1970s Govan! I inhaled it in one sitting. Last November, Janey was diagnosed with stage 3 ovarian cancer - and covid, on the same day. Ever since, in true Janey style, she has shared her ups and downs on social media, on a mission to make sure everyone knows more about the signs of ovarian cancer than she did.  Janey joined me from her home in Glasgow not long after what was hopefully her last chemo to talk about the shock of ovarian cancer, writing a love letter to her mammy Annie and the wee warrior women she grew up with, feeling like a hand grenade in the family, how she finally kicked the compulsion to say “I’m fine”, not wearing a wig to make anyone else feel comfortable and why she’ll always be proud to be gallus. You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including NOTHING LEFT UNSAID by Janey Godley, and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including transcripts of the podcast, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

CONTENT WARNING: There are many moments of joy in this conversation, but please be aware that Liz talks candidly about grief and the sudden death of her son, which some listeners may find upsetting. My guest today is the writer and climate activist Liz Jensen. Half Danish and half-anglo Moroccan, Liz started out as a journalist, working in radio before becoming a BBC producer. Then, Liz turned her hand to novels. She has now written nine, perhaps the best known of which is The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, which was turned into a movie starring Jamie Dornan. Now she has written memoir, one no-one would ever want to write. Your Wild and Precious Life, is, at its heart the devastating story of the nine months after her youngest son Raphael died suddenly at the age of 25. Raph was a zoologist and climate activist, and this is also the story of Liz’s own awakening. She is a founder of Extinction Rebellion Writers Rebel, which combines words and action to highlight the climate and ecological emergency. Liz joined me to talk about surviving the loss of a child, translating grief into hope and opening herself up to the natural world. We also discussed magical thinking, the concept of kairos, the unexpected solace of being part of the terrible club and why she used to want to marry an ape! A note: The episode of The Shift Liz and I discuss in the first five minutes is my conversation with 103-year-old Dr Gladys McGarey, you can listen to it here. * You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Your Wild and Precious Life by Liz Jensen and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me. * If you enjoyed this episode and you fancy buying me a coffee, pop over to my page on buymeacoffee.com • And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including exclusive transcripts of the podcast, why not join The Shift community, come and have a look around at www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Juliette Nicholls @ Pineapple Audio Production. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week’s guest will make you wonder what you do with your time! Sabrina Pace-Humphreys is an award-winning business woman, a social justice activist, an ultra-runner, a mother of four and grandmother of three. (And as if that wasn't enough, right now, as of June 19th, she's running 268 miles along The Spine of the UK!) Not bad going for 44.  But it is none of those things that led her to write her memoir, Black Sheep - a story of growing up Black, on the poverty line, in small town England. As a child, and the only Black person in that town, she experienced constant bullying, verbal and physical racist abuse. She didn’t know who she was, or where she belonged. Sabrina joined me to talk about why she’s decided it’s time to speak out about rural racism. The impact of growing up in a place where literally no-one looked like her and How she finally found the identity she craved. Sabrina is incredibly frank about burying herself in workaholism and alcoholism, her battles with anxiety, and how learning to run - after a lifetime of mocking runners! - saved her. If you’re looking for motivation to start running look no further. In fact, if you’re looking for motivation full stop, you’ve found it. You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including BLACK SHEEP by Sabrina Pace-Humphreys, and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including transcripts of the podcast, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Last night Ruth won the Women's Prize for her wonderful novel, The Book Of Form And Emptiness, so I thought I'd give this another listen. Here are the original show notes: My guest this week is a novelist, film-maker - and Zen Buddhist priest. Ruth Ozeki was born in Conneticut in the 1950s to a Japanese mother and, as she puts it, caucasian anthropologist father. Despite always wanting to write, she didn’t publish her first novel until she was 40, because, in part, she “didn’t feel entitled to”. She needn’t have worried. That novel, My Year Of Meats, won the Kiriyama Prize and the American Book Award, and her third A Tale For The Time Being, was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2013. Her latest novel, The Book Of Form And Emptiness, looks destined to go the same way. But buddhism has informed Ruth’s life just as much as - if not more than - writing. She joined me to run the conversational gamut! We talked meditation, ageing, grief, living through the death of our parents, writing out her teenage mental health crises, why objects mean so much to us, the appeal of Marie Kondo, coming to terms with our ageing face and why menopause and adolescence have so much in common. • You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including The Book Of Form And Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including transcripts of the podcast, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I’ve lost count of the number of women I’ve spoken to who were taken totally by surprise by perimenopause but, to date, none of them actually had medical training. Todays guest changes all that. Before she was an award winning writer, Christie watson was a nurse. She spent 20 years on children’s intensive care before her debut won the Costa first novel award and altered the trajectory of her life. Since then Christie has written two bestselling nursing memoirs, including the wonderful The Language of Kindness, and a second novel. Then, aged 42, perimenopause totally floored her. A single mum of two teenagers, she suddenly found herself a “blubbering snot crying wreck” in Sainsburys car park - a stranger, inside and out. Sound familiar?! I met Christie to talk about her memoir about that experience, Quilt On Fire, in a no-man’s land opposite the US embassy. As you do. We discussed being blindsided by menopause, grey pubic hairs, biblical bleeding, and the impact of unresolved trauma. Plus Being single in midlife and braving the dating shark tank, her own personal menopause club (lucky woman), having a vulva the size of Brazil, the joy of becoming visible to older women and why nobody really has their shit together. Oh and an unexpected use for frozen fish fingers.  You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including QUILT ON FIRE by Christie Watson, and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including transcripts of the podcast, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s guest is nothing less than an acting legend. Although she probably wouldn’t have any truck with that. Dame Sheila Hancock is that rare thing – a successful actor with working class roots, an 89 year old who’s still beating off offers with a stick and a woman who refuses to be afraid to speak her mind. Sheila has done EVERYTHING from Shakespeare to sitcoms. A member of the National Theatre Company, she was the first woman to direct at the Olivier Theatre in her 50s and has been nominated for 6 Olivier Awards, written two novels and a loose trilogy of memoirs (the second of which was about her marriage to Morse and Sweeney legend, John Thaw). The third is Old Rage, which started out as a book about the wisdom and fulfilment of old age ended up…. not! Ninety next year, Sheila is taking less prisoners than ever. She joined me from her living room to talk education and inequality, corruption, climate change and Brexit, suffering from the empathy “disease” and why being seen as a strong woman is a double-edged sword. She also told me what it was like being a working class woman in TV in the 1970s, how she learnt the consequences of speaking out the hard way and why she’s no longer bothering to conceal her rage. Sheila Hancock for PM! You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including OLD RAGE by Sheila Hancock, Sheila's book recommendation, Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including transcripts of the podcast, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My guest today is a 42-year-old mum of two on a mission to kick sexual shame into touch. Natalie Lee was just like many of the rest of us. Not mad keen on her body, not as familiar with orgasm as she’d have liked to be and, by her own admission, a latecomer to masturbation. Hands up if that sounds familiar. (And don’t worry, no-one can see you!) That is until she had her daughters and realised that if she wanted them to grow up free of sexual shame, she needed to sort out her own first. After a long, hard look at herself, Natalie started her body- and sex-positive instagram account @stylemesunday and took her first semi-naked ‘this is my body, like it or lump it’ photo. Now, 110k followers later, she has shared her own journey to sexual freedom in Feeling Myself (clue’s in the name), in the hope it will help you start yours. Nat joined me in a full and frank (!) conversation about finding the confidence to end her marriage, how she overcame self-loathing, sexual experimentation, why it’s so important to talk to our children about sex (no matter how much they wish you wouldn’t!), embracing pansexuality and why the jeans don’t fit you, not the other way around You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including Feeling Myself by Natalie Lee and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including transcripts of the podcast, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you enter a relationship, you rarely consider how it might end. Let’s face it, how many of us would ever do anything if we crossed THAT bridge before we came to it. For today’s guest, writer and therapist Amy Bloom, THAT BRIDGE came all too soon when her husband Brian was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimers and decided he would rather “die on his feet than live on his knees”. It was a decision that sent the couple on a journey from the East coast of America to Dignitas in Switzerland. Amy’s memoir In Love is the heartbreaking account of that journey. But as the book’s title suggests this is also a tender, hopeful and passionate love letter to a man whose belief in human agency extended to his own death. CW: Just in case it doesn’t go without saying - in parts, this is not the easiest listen, Amy talks openly about the reality of an early dementia diagnosis, the right to die and living with her husband’s decision to do so. But ALSO the advantages of being older when you fall in love, why you should marry because of each other’s faults not in spite of them, why women often blow up their lives in their 50s plus her lifelong love of tarot You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including In Love by Amy Bloom, her book recommendation, Childhood, Youth, Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen, and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to this special bonus episode of The Shift, the podcast that aims to tell the no-holds barred truth about being a woman post 40. Created and hosted by me, writer and broadcaster, Sam baker.  Listeners often ask why I don’t put myself on the receiving end of The Shift!? Well, a couple of weeks ago I did just that. When I was interviewed about menopause, misogyny, the HRT lottery and all things midlife by my friend Jennifer Crichton, creator of The Flock, at Edinburgh Wellbeing Festival. As you will hear, it’s not the highest quality, as it was recorded in an auditorium with a live audience, but I hope it gives you a taster of what The Shift Live could be like. (Watch this space for more on that!) And if you enjoy this, why not sign up to The Shift newsletter for features about everything from menopause and midlife to money, relationships, sex, you name it. Plus you'll get first dibs on exclusive podcasts, transcripts of your favourite episodes, book recommendations and much more. Find out more and sign up at steady.media/theshift • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My guest this week is one of the most enduring movie actresses of our (by which I mean my!) generation. Minnie Driver made her first film, Circle of Friends in 1995, and went on to follow that with a lead role in Stanley Tucci’s gorgeous ode to Italian food, Big Night, an Oscar nominated turn in Goodwill Hunting. And my personal favourite Grosse Point Blank.  Now 52, with a 13yo son, Henry, and over fifty roles under her belt, Minnie is still “doing Hollywood” very much her own way. As well as two albums and a podcast (Minnie’s Questions), she’s now written a memoir, Managing Expectations, a book about how things not working out for her inevitably led to other things working out. Minnie joined me from her LA home to tell me why being called outspoken makes her want to punch walls, overcoming the curse of other people’s expectations (and her own!), why she always felt like a failure for not being married, how getting fired never feels any less unjust and embracing her vengeful streak! She also introduces me to the concept of is-ness, shares her big hair survival tips and has things to say about why Hollywood dudes can be creased, but women can’t! You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including Managing Expectations by Minnie Driver, Minnie's book recommendation Send Nudes by Saba Sams and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s guest is a woman I’ve admired for the longest time: stage and screenwriter Abi Morgan. Throughout her thirty year career Abi has written some of our most memorable drama: Shame, Sex Traffic, The Queen, Iron Lady, The Hour (for which she won an Emmy), Suffragette and, most recently, the BBCone hit, The Split. In her work, female characters took centre stage long before that became the fashionable thing to do. But now, Abi has been forced to take centre stage herself. Four years ago, she returned home one lunchtime to find her partner of 20 years, Jakob, collapsed on the bathroom floor. It was the start of a sequence of events that would upend their family forever. And it’s the subject of perhaps the most extraordinary memoir I have ever read - This is Not a Pity memoir. And it isn’t. It’s about love, trauma and ultimately - weirdly! - about hope. Abi joined me to talk candidly about the cataclysmic impact of Jake’s illness, the long - and ongoing - journey to rebuild their family and how, in the midst of all that, she coped with her own breast cancer diagnosis. She also told me about being a lone woman in a world of white men in leather jackets, budging up to make room at the table and why she’s done with being “user-friendly”. You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including This Is Not A Pity Memoir by Abi Morgan and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My guest this week is the award-winning journalist Chitra Ramaswamy. And, lucky me, Chitra lives in Edinburgh so - before I go any further - let me revel in the joy that was recording this episode IRL! With an actual RL person! I know… Anyway, back to Chitra. Her first book, Expecting: the inner life of pregnancy was garlanded with praise and won the Saltire First Book award. Her new memoir-come-social-history, Homelands, is the moving story of a most unlikely friendship - between Chitra, who was born in London in the 1970s to Indian immigrant parents, and Henry Wuga, a 98 year old jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany in 1939.  Sitting in Chitra’s kitchen (with her rescue dog, Daphne, who you will hear plenty of snoring in the background!) we discussed the importance of finding commonalities, learning to talk about shame, living with a mother-shaped hole and what her friendship with Henry taught her about a talent for happiness. We also talked about the midlife “gift” of responsibility, the tyranny of the life list, and why she hopes she’ll age eccentrically. You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including Homelands by Chitra Ramaswamy and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I first came across today’s guest, Dr Emily Nagoski, on this very podcast, when my then guest Sarah Knight (creator of the NoFucks Given franchise) raved about the transformational power of her runaway bestseller, Come As You Are. I hunted it down and, like millions of women the world over, I was blown away. A sex expert speaking our language? Taking the pressure off, rather than piling it on? Never! So when I heard that the Kinsey-educated sex educator had turned her attention to long term relationships in her new book, Come Together, I was obsessed. Not least because it turns out that sex experts are human too and Emily had experienced her own fallow period. But instead of wallowing in it or panicking or buying uncomfortable knickers, Emily used her own story of sexual disconnection and reconnection as an opportunity to look at what makes and breaks sexual connections. And guess what: it’s not what you think. Emily joined me from her home in New England to discuss coming out as a sex expert who lost her sex drive, taking the shoulds out of your sex life, why passion is overrated, how to get the weeds out of your sexual garden! being told she no longer had a “young vagina” And Why she only has one inarguable piece of advice: lube is good! * You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Come As You Are and Come Together by Emily Nagoski and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me. * If you enjoyed this episode and you fancy buying me a coffee, pop over to my page on buymeacoffee.com • And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including exclusive transcripts of the podcast, why not join The Shift community, come and have a look around at www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Juliette Nicholls @ Pineapple Audio Production. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What happens when “one of the great comic writers of our time” hits menopause? That’s the conundrum that faced this week’s guest, award-winning novelist Nina Stibbe when she sat down to write her new novel.  With five bestselling books under her belt, including her memoir, Love Nina, which was turned into a hit TV series starring Helena Bonham Carter. And three novels centred around the turbulent teens and twenties of her alter-ego Lizzie Vogel, Nina decided it was time to turn her hand to middle age.  In One Day I Shall Astonish The World, Nina examines the heartbreak, hilarity and occasional hatred of a friendship that stretches from late teens to mid-50s by way of very different love, life and career choices. Nina joined me from Cornwall to talk about being hit by the menopause truck, the pressure to be always funny and why her greatest midlife inspiration has come from comedy women. She also said she looks older than her mum and shared her ultimate midlife relationship-saver: the sofa bed. You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including One Day I Shall Astonish The World by Nina Stibbe and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Back in the before times, I had an idea to launch a podcast that celebrated the achievements and lives of women over 40. With a couple of friends and an idiot-proof microphone I recorded the first series of what was to become The Shift. This is a replay of one of the first episodes I ever recorded - with my friend Jojo Moyes. Little did we know that two and a half years later we would only have seen each other a handful of times and EVERYTHING would have changed irrevocably. It's a real blast from the past in so many ways. Here are the original show notes: How does it feel to suddenly become ultra-visible just as the world is trying to invisible you? That’s what happened to this week’s guest, mega-selling novelist Jojo Moyes, when the book her old publishers didn't want to publish - Me Before You - became a global bestseller and smash-hit movie in her mid-40s.  Since then every book Jojo has written has been a bestseller and she’s sold the movie rights to pretty much everything she’s ever written. (Not remotely jealous.) Her latest, The Giver Of Stars, the transporting story of a group of women setting up a horseback library in the Appalachians is currently at the top of the bestseller lists and a movie is underway.  But life wasn’t always like that. Far from it. Jojo is funny and frank about the impact of stratospheric success on her professional and personal life. How it felt to be suddenly visible in her late forties. Health, fitness, freedom, a new found love of clothes and why she feels better than ever at 50. She also reveals how she finally overcame Imposter Syndrome, why she no longer suffers fools and how making new friends at 50 has been a revelation.  The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker, edited by Emily Sandford. I’d love to hear what you think - please let me know on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ The Shift: How I (lost and) found myself after 40 - and you can too by Sam Baker is out now in hardback and available to buy here. The Giver Of Stars by Jojo Moyes is out now in paperback and available to buy here. Jojo's book recommendation: Three Women by Lisa Taddeo, out now in paperback and available to buy here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since I recorded this episode with Philippa Perry she's gone from strength to strength. Her already bestselling book has spent even more weeks at number one, she's got a new problem page in The Observer magazine - and it's brilliant. And now she's back on our screens with husband Grayson (and more importantly, Kevin the cat) in Grayson's Art Club. (It should be Grayson and Philippa's Art Club, but hey ho...) Here are the original show notes: How's 2021 for you so far?! I know, right? Well, who better to grab us by the scruff of the neck at just the point our meagre enthusiasm is starting to wear off than Philippa Perry? Philippa has been a psychotherapist for 20 years. She’s also an agony aunt, presenter and author of the bestseller, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and your children will be glad you did) - a clever, funny - and SANE - guide that acknowledges ‘they f*ck you up, your mum and dad’, and then helps you try not to do the same. Philippa is completely fascinating as she talks about “getting hold of the steering wheel of life”, why plummeting oestrogen levels made her “homicidal not suicidal”, why women should stop playing “mine’s smaller than yours” and her own battle to silence her inner critic. And if you want to know how to make a sweary cushion you’ve come to the right place. The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. I'd love to hear what you think - please rate and review or let me know on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including the book that accompanies this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too and The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read and Couch Fiction. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of my favourite things about making The Shift podcast is all the fascinating women I get to interview - and learn a little bit from. This is a replay of one of my all time favourites. I was in awe of the indomitable Channel 4 international editor Lindsey Hilsum when I interviewed her 15 months ago and even more so now, as we watch her daily reporting from the devastation that has been wrought on Ukraine by Russian troops. Here are the original show notes: You know when people say you’re “brave” because you’ve got a few grey hairs?! Well, my guest this week is the living proof - as if it were needed - that that is a right old load of BS. Channel 4 International Editor Lindsey Hilsum is an acclaimed foreign correspondent who has reported from all over the world including Iraq, Syria, Gaza, Kosovo and Rwanda. She also won the James Tait Black Award for In Extremis, her devastating biography of her friend, the foreign reporter, Marie Colvin who was killed reporting from Syria in 2012. Lindsey is just as bold as her job might lead you to expect. She takes no prisoners as she talks about managing menopause symptoms in a war zone, being in a minority on the box and why there needs to be more “old trouts on TV” (and, no, she’s not bloody brave for going grey on screen), and how she finally found the perfect answer to “Give us a smile love”. Only took forty years… You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including the book that accompanies this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too by Sam Baker and In Extremis: the life of war correspondent Marie Colvin by Lindsey Hilsum. The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. I'd love to hear what you think - please rate and review, or let me know on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My final guest of the season is the acclaimed screenwriter and bestselling author, Delia Ephron. Unfailingly wise, warm and witty, Delia is perhaps best known as co-writer of the Meg Ryan-Tom Hanks smash hit You’ve Got Mail, with her sister, the writer and director Nora Ephron,. Delia’s new memoir, Left On Tenth, is the kind of story that would out-rom if not out-com - anything Nora could have come up with. Except… every word is true. At 72, Delia found herself quite literally left on Tenth street in Manhattan, when her husband of 37 years, Jerry, died of cancer, just three years after the death of her beloved big sister Nora. A year later Delia reconnected with Peter, a man she didn’t even remember dating in college. It was love at second sight. But that was only the start of the story. Because just four months later, Delia was diagnosed with the same cancer that killed her sister. Now 77, and recovering from a successful bone marrow transplant, Delia joined me from California to talk about getting a second chance at life and love in your 70s, the imperfection of sisterhood, being a lifelong worrier, why friendship is her superpower and shy she's addicted to blow dries (and pastries!). Oh, and, “if someone wants to crush your dreams with their big fat foot get out!”.  You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including Left On Tenth by Delia Ephron and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Totally lost sight of your personal style? Feel like your clothes hate you? Whether it’s the result of two years in and out of lockdown, emerging from the motherhood tunnel or the advent of menopause, many of us no longer have a clue how to get dressed. Enter this week’s guest: Kat Farmer, better known by her instagram handle @doesmybumlook40 - best friend to every woman with nothing to wear for who they want to be today. But scroll back a decade and Kat wasn’t a style savvy influencer with hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers, she was a mum of three small children, in her late thirties, who had completely lost her way. Kat’s now written a book - Get Changed, finding the new you through fashion - a typically friendly and low-key guide to just that. TBH I was hoping that when I spoke to Kat I’d also get a free wardrobe detox - bloody covid! Instead, we ended up on zoom talking everything from reinventing your career to why clothes are the key to our identity, how the fashion industry is finally wising up to older women and why her rule of three will put an end to all your shopping mistakes. You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including Get Changed by Kat Farmer and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When was the last time you read a book where the central character was not just perimenopausal but also talked and thought about menopause and its impact on her life. And she wasn’t a laughing stock? I’m prepared to bet never. That was the driving force for my guest this week, novelist Dana Spiotta. What if, she asked herself, the lead characters of some of her favourite books had had a hot flush? Think Mrs Dalloway on HRT. The resulting novel, Wayward, is the story of 53 year old Sam who, in the midst of the chaos and perverse clarity of perimenopause falls in love with a rundown house, buys it and leaves her husband, teenage daughter and the suburban security of married life in pursuit of a new her. Wayward is a blast of fresh air; funny, furious and extremely close to home! Dana joined me from her home in Syracuse, upstate New York, to talk about accidentally writing a “menopause novel”, how her own perimenopause informed her characters (cue, rage, insomnia and midlife misogyny), what happens when menopause and puberty collide and why people are still grossed out by the truth about female bodies. • You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including Wayward by Dana Spiotta and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It takes courage to lay yourself bare on the page the way today’s guest does. Journalist Clover Stroud has written three memoirs - The Wild Other, My Wild and Sleepless Nights and, now, The Red of My Blood. Each more visceral, more exposing, than the last. But then Clover has lived no ordinary life (whatever that is). Hers features adventure, divorce, trauma, lots of sex, depression and five kids aged between 21 and 5. But before that, when Clover was 16, her mother suffered a catastrophic fall from a horse which left her permanently brain damaged. A state in which she remained until her death 22 years later. Then, two years ago her sister Nell Gifford, to whom Clover was exceptionally close, died of breast cancer, aged 46.  The darkness that descended in the wake of Nell’s death informed The Red of My Blood - an emotional read about living with and learning from grief. Clover joins me from her bedroom in Oxfordshire (excellent wallpaper!) to talk - extremely candidly, so please brace yourself if you’re feeling vulnerable - about grief and trauma, bearing the unbearable and how, out of loss, she’s finding a new person to be. But It’s not all sadness. We also discussed midlife sex, sobriety, looking forward to menopause and why we’re bloody lucky to be middle-aged. You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including The Red Of My Blood by Clover Stroud and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My guest today is the Jamaican author, journalist, film maker and (no exaggeration) living legend Barbara Blake Hannah. Already an experienced journalist when she arrived in London in 1964, Barbara was shocked to discover her achievements counted for nothing because of the colour of her skin. But she made headlines anyway, in 1968, when she became the first Black TV journalist in the UK. She lasted nine months before being dismissed - almost certainly as a result of a racist backlash, in which her employers sided with the racists… It was several years before another black journalist appeared in a news role on British screens. Without Barbara, arguably, there would have been no Moira Stuart or Trevor Macdonald. Now 80, Barbara has led a pioneering life, so it’s a joy to celebrate it with the republication of her groundbreaking 1982 memoir, Growing Out - Black Hair And Black Pride in The Swinging Sixties, as part of Bernardine Evaristo’s Black Britain Writing Back series. From her home in Kingston, Jamaica, which she shares with her son, Barbara told me what she learnt from being at the sharp end of racism, why the Black Lives Matter movement gives her hope, feeling new again at 80 and how she learnt to love herself as a Black woman. She also talks about the power and politics of hair and how she has the skin of a 12 year old! Plus she introduced me to my new mantra: time is longer than rope.  • You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including Growing Out, Black Hair and Black Pride in the Swinging Sixties by Barbara Blake Hannah and all the other books in Bernardine Evaristo's Black Britain Writing Back series. You can also get the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

By the time we hit our 50s, most of us have… let’s just say… lived a little. But few have been through the mill to quite the extent that Christina Patterson has. Christina was 49 and recovering from breast cancer when she lost the job that she not just loved but that defined her. Rebuilding her life and career in her 50s formed the basis for her first book - memoir-come-survival manual, The Art of Not Falling Apart. As if that wasn’t enough for one person to cope with, on top of this crushing loss, she has lived through a second cancer diagnosis and multiple family deaths. She is, in her own words, the last one standing. Her new memoir, Outside, The Sky Is Blue tells of the dynamics of a family in the grip of one child’s mental health crisis; it’s a story of love and loss, but ultimately, unexpectedly, a celebration.  Christina and I talked about all the big stuff: success and failure, guilt and grief, the lifelong impact of family dynamics... Plus how to cope when your body starts saying the things your mind can’t, failing at relationships and then finding love in your 50s and why there is nothing but NOTHING like a good party. • You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including Outside The Sky Is Blue by Christina Patterson and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My guest today is a fashion editor on a mission to improve the representation of all women over 40 - not just the thin white ones with a ton of spare cash! Anna Cascarina has worked in the fashion industry for over 25 years, first as a fashion editor and stylist, then as a teacher. But as she got older and so did her body, something rankled. Yep - she was starting to feel like she and women like her (ie women over 40 and not a size 10) were not welcome here. In the stores she’d always shopped at, in the magazines she’d worked for, in ad campaigns and on screen. And so Anna started her Instagram account to help women who didn’t fit the mould feel empowered through fashion. 120,000 followers later it seems like she’s not the only one who’s hacked off with the fashion industry for invisibling her. Anna joined me to talk about her new book The Forever Wardrobe, Being a size 16 woman who loves fashion when it doesn’t love her back, The impact the fashion industry has had on her Body image and the responsibility she feels not to pass it on to her daughter. We also discussed how her epilepsy has impacted perimenopause and some ugly truths about ageing that no-one wants to tell you (hello arthritis!). * You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including The Forever Wardrobe by Anna Cascarina and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me. * If you enjoyed this episode and you fancy buying me a coffee, pop over to my page on buymeacoffee.com • And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including exclusive transcripts of the podcast, why not join The Shift community, come and have a look around at www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Juliette Nicholls @ Pineapple Audio Production. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week’s guest needs zero introduction - and not just because she’s been here before. Marian Keyes was one of the first guests on The Shift and her episode [episode 2 if you’re interested!] is still one of the most popular. So I’m delighted that she’s agreed to come back to chat about her new book - the long awaited sequel to her smash hit Rachel’s Holiday. The wonderful Again, Rachel revisits Rachel Walsh, the Walsh family and everybody’s favourite fictional fantasy, LUKE COSTELLO, 25 years after we saw her leave rehab and it’s no spoiler to say that, like its main characters, it’s older, wiser and hotter than ever. So I’m not going to wang on about the fact she’s sold over 39million copies globally and still worries she’s not good enough. (My heart). OR that she’s just launched a podcast Now You’re Asking with her friend Tara Flynn, I’m going to let Marian do the talking. And boy did we TALK. With typical generosity, wisdom and humour, Marian opened up about infertility, addiction, embracing change, how it feels to revisit your best loved character - and yourself! - 25 years on and fecking Fitbit addiction. She also throws in body shaming, self-forgiveness, mid-life sexuality, falling in love with your mother in your 50s and the many many joys of being “unyoung”. CONTENT WARNING: infertility. To hear Marian's earlier episode on menopause etc listen to episode 2 here. You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including Again, Rachel by Marian Keyes and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We all tackle ageing in different ways but very few of us do it the way this week’s guest did - by packing up her entire life and moving thousands of miles to a new city and a new life.  Until her mid-forties, writer Jami Attenberg sofa-surfed her way around America - the year she turned 40 she slept in 26 different beds in seven months! Even for the daughter of a travelling salesman, Jami’s litany of sofas, spare beds and floors is enough to give even the most nomadic back ache! The author of seven novels, including four bestsellers, I Came All This Way To Meet You, is Jami’s first memoir. A moving, candid, unexpectedly funny look at becoming grown up (ish), stopping running and how she, quite literally, wrote herself home. Jami joined me from New Orleans to tell me how she finally stopped moving, being the daughter of a motherless mother and how she was scarred by summer camp! She also talked about embracing the mid-life move, why you don’t always have to give people what they want, just because they ask, and the life changing impact of having a hysterectomy. Oh and that “neck thing”? It’s real… • You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including I Came All This Way To Meet You by Jami Attenberg and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My guest today is the international bestseller Dorothy Koomson. She started young - she had her first stab at writing a book at 13 - and, like me, worked on Just Seventeen, amongst many other magazines, before actually publishing her first novel at 30. She has now written 16 Sunday Times bestsellers and is the biggest selling Black author of adult fiction in the UK - not bad for a woman whose debut novel was turned down for, amongst other things, having a Black character but not being about “the Black experience”. Her latest, I know what you’ve done, is just out in paperback and has been described as “Desperate Housewives but darker”. It’s also completely stuffed with brilliant parts for midlife women - ITV, I’m looking at you! Dorothy joined me from Brighton to talk about feeling like you’re “enough”, 80s TV crushes, the gynae and thyroid hell that gave her constant hot flushes, facing up to grey pubic hair and why there’s still A LOT of work to do when it comes to telling all women’s stories. Oh and why we need to bring back Golden Girls. I’m here for that! • You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including I Know What You've Done by Dorothy Koomson and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices