Gabby Logan on resilience, reclaiming middle age – and why equality begins at home

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

30 Aug 202253min

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

23 Aug 202255min

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

16 Aug 202250min

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

9 Aug 202257min

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

2 Aug 202238min

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

26 Jul 202250min

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

19 Jul 202249min

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

13 Jul 20222min