The Shift is a podcast that aims to tell the truth about being a woman post-40, created and hosted by writer and broadcaster, Sam Baker.
Did you ever wonder why you stop hearing so many women's voices once they pass 40? That's where The Shift comes in - a frank, funny, sometimes heartbreaking, always honest look at what it means to be a woman in midlife and beyond. Work, life, love, health, sex, money, identity, body image... What does it all mean when everything around you (and inside you...) is changing? Each week, award-winning author and journalist Sam Baker asks a different woman how she got here, where she's going - and how it feels to be where she is right now. Expect intimate conversation, big laughs, occasional tears and an awful lot of ripping up the rule book and stamping on it... Past guests have included Nicola Sturgeon, Marian Keyes, Guilty Feminist Deborah Frances-White, Minnie Driver, Philippa Perry, Anita Rani, Tracey Thorn, Isabel Allende, Bobbi Brown, Barbara Blake-Hannah and many more, talking everything from confidence to career reinvention, mental health, menopause and so much more.
If you enjoy The Shift podcast, and you'd like to show the love, you can buy me a coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theshiftwithsambaker
And if you really love The Shift and would like to hear more conversations with women over 40, why not become a member of our community and receive a weekly newsletter, get exclusive transcripts, join The Shift bookclub and so much more, please visit https://theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com/
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The Shift is a podcast that aims to tell the truth about being a woman post-40, created and hosted by writer and broadcaster, Sam Baker.
Did you ever wonder why you stop hearing so many women's voices once they pass 40? That's where The Shift comes in - a frank, funny, sometimes heartbreaking, always honest look at what it means to be a woman in midlife and beyond. Work, life, love, health, sex, money, identity, body image... What does it all mean when everything around you (and inside you...) is changing? Each week, award-winning author and journalist Sam Baker asks a different woman how she got here, where she's going - and how it feels to be where she is right now. Expect intimate conversation, big laughs, occasional tears and an awful lot of ripping up the rule book and stamping on it... Past guests have included Nicola Sturgeon, Marian Keyes, Guilty Feminist Deborah Frances-White, Minnie Driver, Philippa Perry, Anita Rani, Tracey Thorn, Isabel Allende, Bobbi Brown, Barbara Blake-Hannah and many more, talking everything from confidence to career reinvention, mental health, menopause and so much more.
If you enjoy The Shift podcast, and you'd like to show the love, you can buy me a coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theshiftwithsambaker
And if you really love The Shift and would like to hear more conversations with women over 40, why not become a member of our community and receive a weekly newsletter, get exclusive transcripts, join The Shift bookclub and so much more, please visit https://theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com/
For advertising enquiries, email sales@auddy.co
(This episode was first published in November 2022.)
Today's guest is one of my personal heroes, Caryn Franklin. Caryn started her career in the 80s as a fashion editor before moving into TV where she presented, amongst other things, BBC’s The Clothes Show. Always outspoken, Caryn has spent four decades being a thorn in the fashion industry’s side. Championing diversity of all forms LONG before it became the cool thing to do.
She cofounded All Walks Beyond The Catwalk to promote body equality in fashion, chaired Fashion Targets Breast Cancer and was awarded an MBE for her services to fashion. Now she’s written Skewed, with Professor Keon West, to examine how media bias distorts our views of others.
To bring it back down to my usual level, She is also the owner of my fantasy hair!
Caryn joined me by popular demand to talk 40 years of fighting for diversity, why the fashion industry is still so bloody bad at catering for older women and why clothes should be a superpower. She also shared her experiencing of being a carer to her first daughter’s father in her 30s and how that changed the way she felt about ageing, how going grey nearly cost her her job and how HRT gave her her life back.
* You can buy You can buy Skewed by Caryn Franklin and Professor Keon West from audible. All the other books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on 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.
* 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 at Pineapple 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 Bluesky @theothersambaker.bsky.social or instagram @theothersambaker or message me on substack The Shift with Sam Baker.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
(This episode first aired in September 2022.)
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 The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Don't Let Him In by Lisa Jewell as well as 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 at Pineapple 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 Bluesky @theothersambaker.bsky.social or instagram @theothersambaker or message me on substack The Shift with Sam Baker.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hello and welcome to the final episode of season 18. 18!!!!
My guest today is the cook, Thomasina Miers.
Despite being taught to cook as a child, Tommi didn’t really embrace her love of food until her late 20s when a trip to Mexico inspired a love of Mexican food that was to change her life.
In 2005, she became the first person ever to win Masterchef and two years later she co-founded the successful Mexican restaurant chain Wahaca. Tommi has also cheffed in Michelin star kitchens, set up Chefs in Schools and also works with the soil association. She was awarded an OBE in 2019 for her services to the food industry.
She has also written nine cookbooks, the latest of which is Mexican Table which celebrates the flavour, culture and ingredients of the country she loves and has been visiting for over 30 years.
Tommi and I talked feeling a failure in your twenties, being diagnosed with ADHD in your 40s, finding herself through cooking, how she learnt to stop using work to self medicate, recovering from the perimenopause crash, how a midlife family flit to Mexico rebuilt her and why she hopes she’ll still be in hot pants at 80.
CW alcoholism mental health and passing reference to suicide
* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Mexican Table by Thomasina Miers as well as 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 at Pineapple 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 Bluesky @theothersambaker.bsky.social or instagram @theothersambaker or message me on substack The Shift with Sam Baker.
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A few weeks ago, I was pootling around on substack where The Shift newsletter lives - https://theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com/ - and I noticed I had a DM from a new subscriber. It turned out to be from one of my favourite crime writers - the award winning Laura Lippmann, who some of you might know from the recent apple TV+ series of her novel, The Lady In The Lake.
Laura had been brought to The Shift by a piece I wrote a year or so ago about how all of my friends were getting divorced.
“I feel like such a schmuck,” she wrote “because I stuck it out like the Good Girl I was raised to be, only to be dumped 9 days after my 61st birthday (and one month before the Covid lockdowns). I didn’t even have the triumphant narrative of: “Reader, I left him.” But, five years out, I think I’m happier than I’ve ever been.”
That happiness is evident in her immensely enjoyable new book, her 20th, I think!, Murder Takes A Vacation, about a woman in her 60s slowly realising that life is full of possibility. (And dead bodies, of course!)
Laura joined me from Baltimore to talk about her second coming, why not everyone is good at marriage, the dissonance of divorce, making bad choices, the death of the good girl and how she finally gave up diets. Laura is living her best old lady life and I’m here for it.
* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Shred Sisters by Betsy Lerner as well as 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 at Pineapple 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 Bluesky @theothersambaker.bsky.social or instagram @theothersambaker or message me on substack The Shift with Sam Baker.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This season is dedicated to helping you pick your summer reads and my guest today is the novelist Charlotte Mendelson whose writing has been compared to “late Shakespeare meets Modern family!” So you know where to turn if you’re looking for a painfully funny, on the nose look at the dynamics of love and marriage.
Charlotte worked as a publisher for twenty years before becoming an award winning novelist. She’s written seven bestselling novels, the most recent of which are The Exhibitionist and Wife, both out now in paperback, which are kind of a pair in that they both deal with the reality of being married to monsters!
She has also been gardening correspondent for the New Yorker and now writes for The Observer.
I met Charlotte at her home in North London to snoop around her houseplants and her bookshelves while we discussed how to go grey without looking like you’re looking after chickens in the wood, the puberty midlife confluence, the disproportionate stress of deciding what to wear, the lifelong impact of growing up nerd, being a pre internet lesbian, internalised homophobia, finding love as a grown up, perimenopausal horniness and so so so much more.
It’s chaos but delightful chaos!
* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Shred Sisters by Betsy Lerner as well as 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 at Pineapple 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 Bluesky @theothersambaker.bsky.social or instagram @theothersambaker or message me on substack The Shift with Sam Baker.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
My guest this week is the novelist Betsy Lerner.
Now Betsy is here to talk about her critically acclaimed debut novel, Shred Sisters, which takes us from the 1970s to the 90s and tells us the story of two troubled sisters, Amy and Ollie. No less a legend than Patti Smith described it as “moving like a souped up pick up truck” - and who am I to argue with Patti, it does! I loved it.
Betsy only turned to fiction in her early sixties. Before that she had a prolific career in the publishing industry spanning thirty years as an editor and literary agent working on such classics as Prozac Nation, Autobiography of a Face and Just Kids.
But she hasn’t stopped there, Betsy has also built a large following on TikTok, where she shares passages from her diaries or the 'chronicles of disappointment, depression and loneliness' as she calls them, that she kept in her 20s when she was cycling through the highs and lows of bipolar disorder.
Betsy joined me to talk about sibling rivalry, ageing, heartbreak and the family secret that shaped her. We also discussed escaping the maternal mantle of judgement, her personal mission to destigmatise mental illness, disordered eating, gratitude and why she loves “her twenty somethings” on TikTok.
CW: bereavement, mental health, miscarriage.
* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Shred Sisters by Betsy Lerner as well as 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 at Pineapple 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 Bluesky @theothersambaker.bsky.social or instagram @theothersambaker or message me on substack The Shift with Sam Baker.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This week I’m delighted to welcome back to The Shift one of my most listened-to guests, Nicola Sturgeon.
When we last spoke, at the start of 2022, Nicola was First Minister of Scotland - the first woman to hold the role, the first woman in 600 years to be the keeper of the seal. And During her tenure, she was widely acknowledged to be one of the most impactful politicians of her generation.
During our last conversation, she spoke for the first time about how it felt to experience menopausal symptoms in the corridors of power. Her candour was one of the things that opened the floodgates of the menopause conversation.
But that was then. A year later she shocked the world by resigning from the role she had been working towards since she was 16, in an attempt to build a life outside politics and away from the public glare.
Now she’s written a book, Frankly, a personal and political memoir about her life in politics. And, like it’s title suggests, she’s tried not to pull any punches or side step any issues - personal or political.
Nicola came to hang out in my living room in Edinburgh to discuss the decision to leave (and why she can't see a man making the same call) and the impact of spending the next two years under a cloud of suspicion. We also discussed class, confidence, turning back the clock, the price of success for women, learning to drive at 53, and finally having the freedom to get a tattoo!
* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Frankly by Nicola Sturgeon as well as 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 at Pineapple 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 Bluesky @theothersambaker.bsky.social or instagram @theothersambaker or message me on substack The Shift with Sam Baker.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
My guest today is the award-winning novelist Sarah Perry.
Sarah is the internationally bestselling author of four novels, but the one you will almost definitely heard of (and may well have watched) is The Essex Serpent. Published in 2016, it sold over half a million copies, and won both British Book of the Year and Waterstones book of the year before being made into an apple tv+ series starring Clare Danes and Tom Hiddleston (Sarah was an extra!). Sarah has also been nominated for the booker prize, the women’s prize for fiction and the costa novel award, amongst others.
Born and brought up in Essex, Sarah is chancellor of Essex University, where her latest novel Enlightenment is set. Enlightenment - a novel about the presence and absence of faith draws more directly on her own life than usual - because Sarah, as you may or not know grew up in a closed religious community.
I met Sarah at her publisher’s office in South London to talk about being brought up in the equivalent of 1860, leaving the church, and coming out of the womb as a 45 year old novelist! We also discussed the success that led to incurable illness, the surprisingly difficult transition from a woman who doesn’t have children to a woman who didn’t have children, premature menopause and why she doesn’t want to look like someone who hasn’t seen death.
Btw, I've made that sound really depressing - I promise it isn't!
* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including I'm Mostly Here To Enjoy Myself as well as 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 at Pineapple 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 Bluesky @theothersambaker.bsky.social or instagram @theothersambaker or message me on substack The Shift with Sam Baker.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What happens when the life you find yourself leading in midlife doesn’t tick all the supposed boxes?
That’s the situation today’s guest found herself in. Glynnis MacNicol was 46 - a woman of a so-called certain age who found herself living life without a roadmap when, in august 2021, after almost 18 months spent alone in lockdown, she picked herself up and packed herself off to Paris for a month of living, loving and, well, pleasure.
I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself is the story of that month - a month spent in search of friendship, food, community, contact and sex. Plenty of sex.
While she was at it Glynnis discovered that far from being, as she puts it, “past cultural appeal and expectation:, everything she’d been told about living life as a middle aged single woman was a lie.
Glynnis joined me to talk pleasure, confidence, agency, learning to enjoy your body in midlife, knowing what you want and asking for it, sex, cycling, The joy and freedom of living life without a narrative and why she’d rather have a piece of prime Manhattan real estate than a husband!
* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including I'm Mostly Here To Enjoy Myself as well as 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 at Pineapple 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 Bluesky @theothersambaker.bsky.social or instagram @theothersambaker or message me on substack The Shift with Sam Baker.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Crime novels might not be the first thing that springs to mind when you hear the name Steph McGovern. Steph is an award-winning broadcaster who is currently co-host of The Rest Is Money podcast with Robert Peston. At the start of her career in journalism, Steph worked for BBC news behind the scenes (despite having been told that “people like you don’t work for the BBC”), before moving in front of the camera as the business reporter on BBC Breakfast.
She went on to present her own show, Steph’s Packed Lunch and can often be seen on Have I Got News, amongst other places.
But apart from getting us more clued up about money, Steph has another passion: She is an obsessive crime reader who has now written one of her own Deadline, which takes us behind the scenes of a broadcaster thrown into a hostage situation live on air while a scandal waits to subsume Westminster.
Steph joined me for a full-on free range chat. We talked money, motivation, fame, the power of being underestimated and what she learnt from interviewing Donald Trump. Plus the menopause learning curve, flooding the breakfast telly sofa live on air, being a two mum family and why you should never ever let them make you stay in your lane.
* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Deadline by Steph McGovern as well as 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 at Pineapple 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 Bluesky @theothersambaker.bsky.social or instagram @theothersambaker or message me on substack The Shift with Sam Baker.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The last of our archive episodes this time around is the cartoonist Alison Bechdel. Spent, Alison's new graphic novel-come-memoir, reminded me of the conversation we had back in 2021. Here it is...
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My guest this week is the cartoonist Alison Bechdel. Probably best known for the Bechdel test - a tongue in cheek method she came up with in the 80s for assessing gender bias in movies. She became a household name when Fun Home, her graphic novel/memoir about coming out and her father’s death, became a bestseller and was turned into an award-winning musical.
Her new autobiographical graphic novel, The Secret To Superhuman Strength is a funny-not funny exploration of her own search for inner and outer strength through the lens of 60 years of fitness fads.
Alison and I go on a “rambling stroll” through the six decades of her life as we chat about everything from tarot to very much not being a team player. Alison talks candidly about escaping self-consciousness, coming to terms with ageing, why men are scared of women who can do push ups and why she’s forever nine years old.
And together we come up with a Bechdel test for women over 40. Challenge you to come up with a movie that passes it.
* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift Bookshop on bookshop.org including Spent and The Secret To Superhuman Strength 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 https://theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com.
• The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker. This episode was 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.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This week we're going way back in The Shift archives, to one of the earliest episodes I recorded with novelist Esther Freud. This summer Esther will be a guest of The Shift bookclub, to talk about her new novel, My Sister and Other Lovers - her long-awaited sort-of-sequel to her smash hit autofiction, Hideous Kinky, about her childhood with her sister Bella Freud (who was on The Shift podcast last autumn - listen here). Here's the chat Esther and I had back in 2021...
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How does it feel to come from a family with a legend? If you’re today’s guest, novelist and playwright Esther Freud (daughter of painter Lucian Freud and great granddaughter of Sigmund Freud) you work with that legacy to produce some of the finest novels of the last thirty years. Her first Hideous Kinky, based on her unusual childhood, was made into a film starring Kate Winslet and after the follow-up, Peerless Flats, she was named one of Granta’s Best Young Novelists. Scroll forward a couple of decades and her ninth novel, I Couldn’t Love You More, comes full circle, this time exploring aspects of her family’s history through the lens of three generations of mothers. (Bring tissues!)
Over the next 40 minutes Esther talks candidly about motherhood, guilt, shame, the way women are constantly judged, her own entangled family history, how the onset of menopause made her question everything and why now 57 she’s happier than ever.
CONTENT WARNING: There’s some conversation about forced adoption and Ireland’s mother and baby homes that some people may find upsetting.
* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift Bookshop on bookshop.org including I Couldn't Love You More and My Sister and Other Lovers 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 https://theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com.
• The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker. This episode was 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.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
We're heading back to the archives for the next few weeks and first up here's one of my favourite episodes. With the desperately overdue publication of her brilliant diaries, How To End A Story, in the US and UK, the Australian novelist Helen Garner is finally, finally getting some of the credit she's due up here in the Northern hemisphere. Here's our chat...
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My guest today is the writer Helen Garner. I’m pretty sure that right now you are either going, wow I LOVE her, or looking a bit vague. Because despite being one of Australia’s greatest living writers she is surprisingly little known here.
But not for much longer because, at the age of 81, she is finally about to see almost all her books in print in the UK and US for the first time.
Born in 1941 in Geelong, Victoria, the eldest of six, Helen has lived a fascinating life and one that has found its way into her 13 books. Her debut Monkey Grip, published in 1977 when she was a single mother, is still in print today; her second novel, The Children’s Bach (which is where I recommend you start if you’ve never read her), has been compared with Hemingway and Fitzgerald; and, her true crime classic, This House of Grief, has been declared one of the best books of the 21st century.
Not bad for a regular kid from, as she puts it, “an ordinary Australian home - not many books and not much talk.”
I was lucky enough to get to chat to Helen (and her chooks) from her home near Melbourne. In fact she kept me up long past my bedtime (!) as we discussed the difficult father-daughter relationship, making peace with the older generations and the emotional impact of being a war baby. She also told me why getting married a fourth time would have been the definition of madness, how she couldn’t give a monkeys about the withdrawal of the erotic gaze and why grandmothering has been the greatest pleasure of her life.
* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift Bookshop on bookshop.org including How To End A Story, Monkey Grip, The Children's Bach and This House of Grief by Helen Garner 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 https://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.
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My guest today is the journalist Molly Jong Fast. The author of four books, Molly started writing about politics in 2016. She’s now a special correspondent for Vanity Fair, a political analyst for MSNBC News and host of the Fast Politics Podcast.
But she is also the daughter of the novelist Erica Jong, who in the 1970s wrote a novel that became synonymous with the sexual revolution. Fear of Flying, featuring Jong’s alter ego Isadora Wing, sold 20 million copies and coined the phrase the zipless fuck.
Molly was born into a world of fame and celebrity. As she puts it she grew up with her mother everywhere - on television, the answer to a question in games shows, in the newspaper. But rarely at home. Now Molly has written How To Lose Your Mother, a daughter’s memoir about middle age and losing your mother to dementia when actually you never had her. It’s funny candid, gossipy, entertaining a story of love, frustration and, occasionally, despair.
Molly joined me from New York to talk about how she survived when everyone started dying around her, ageing without a guidebook, how algorithms shape misogyny, why you can never escape being a nepo baby, being a bad daughter, why it’s ok to lie to your kids and only learning she could be right about things in her 40s.
* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including How to lose your mother by Molly Jong Fast as well as 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 at Pineapple 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
This is a really special episode and one I’m honoured to be trusted with.
Because my guest today is Jo Hamilton, one of more than 700 British sub postmasters who was prosecuted between 2000 and 2014 by the Post Office.
Falsely accused of stealing £36,000 Jo was ordered to put right a wrong she hadn’t committed, forced to remortgage her house and borrow from anyone she could in order to repay money that she had never taken. But it wasn’t just money. Jo lost so much more. Her confidence, her trust, her reputation, and ultimately, she believes, her parents.
Last year, Jo was immortalised by Monica Dolan who played her in the
Groundbreaking TV drama, Mr Bates v The Post Office.
It was a drama that achieved what only the very best TV can - it put the plight of the sub postmasters at the heart of every conversation - on TV, in the papers, on line, at the bus stop, by the coffee machine. Suddenly Everyone was talking about it.
Now her conviction overturned and her debts paid off, Jo has written Why Are You Here Mrs Hamilton? It’s an extraordinary first hand account of how she built a local shop and post office which became the heart of her community and how it was stolen from her.
Jo joined me to talk candidly about the life upending experience and how the last twenty years have changed her. From an ordinary woman who loved people and horses to a ferocious campaigner who will not stop fighting until every last sub postmaster is paid.
* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Why Are You Here Mrs Hamilton? as well as 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 at Pineapple 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 Ukrainian chef, food writer and activist Olia Hercules.
Olia was born in the South of Ukraine and has lived in the UK since her late teens. After working in journalism she decided to follow her heart, her stomach and arguably her heritage, and become a chef.
She trained at Leith’s School of Food and Wine, worked in kitchens, including as chef de partie for Yotam Ottolenghi and as a recipe developer.
But her mission is to make people rethink their attitude to eastern european - and particularly Ukrainian - food. She has written three cookbooks, including Mamushka, which won the fortnum’s award for best debut.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, life changed forever for Olia and her family who lived in the Kherson region. As olia says, ‘They lost their homes and their livelihoods, but they are all still alive.”
Her brother signed up ti fight and Olia turned activist, launching Cook for Ukraine and raising over £1million for supplies for Ukrainians.
I was fortunate enough to visit Olia for lunch at home in East London to talk about her new book, Strong Roots, a moving portrait of the history of Ukraine through generations of her family, being descended from a long line of powerful women, making the decision to retrain as a chef and how it felt to discover she is a carrier of fragile X syndrome which meant that she was unexpectedly plunged into premature menopause (and everything that entails) at just 38.
* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Strong Roots by Olia Hercules as well as 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 at Pineapple 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 author and essayist, Melissa Febos.
Melissa has written four award winning books - Whip Smart, Abandon Me, Girlhood (which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the states) and Body Work. She’s won too many prizes to mention here and her writing has appeared all over the place!
In her mid thirties, after, let’s just say a pretty horrific two year relationship, Melissa decided to step away not just from sex, but love, relationships, intimacy in general. At first for three months, then six, then ultimately for a year.
Three months? Hardly a big deal, You might think. But for someone who’d been in one relationship or another since she was 15, it was the start of a long road to breaking a 20 year serial monogamy habit.
Soon she realised she was not just taking a break, but making a change. One that would affect not just her relationships with friends family and lovers, but with herself, her work and the way she lived her life. The result is her new memoir, The Dry Season.
Melissa joined me from Iowa to talk about that year of celibacy and what it taught her about independence, creativity, sexuality and above all herself. We also discussed shaking off the soup of sexual prescription, the happy ever after narrative, women’s celibacy in history, sexual fluidity in midlife and why she’s obsessed with the TV detective Vera!
* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including The Dry Season by Melissa Febos as well as 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 at Pineapple 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 this week is the journalist and broadcaster Reeta Chakrabarti.
After two decades producing and reporting for the BBC, Reeta became a news presenter at the age of 49. She was the main BBC presenter in Lviv in Western Ukraine and is now one of the chief presenters of BBC news at 6 and BBC news at 10.
Brought up in Birmingham, as a teenager Reeta went to school in Calcutta before returning to the UK to go to university.
She joined the BBC in 1992 where she started on Radio One Newsbeat and presented news bulletins for the legendary Radio 2 DJ Steve Wright in the Afternoon. (Just talk amongst yourself kids!)
Heading into 50 she took an a whole new role and at 60 she’s done it again, only this time she’s written a book, a novel, Finding Belle, that takes us from Mombassa to Milton Keynes to Calcutta.
Reeta (and the builders next door!) joined me to talk about family, belonging, growing up the only brown girl in the class and being a lifelong good girl. We also discussed the importance of failure, learning to become a yes person, in the best possible way, getting bolder as she gets older and why she has no plans to be in the newsroom at 70.
* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Finding Belle by Reeta Chakrabarti as well as 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 at Pineapple 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 bestselling novelist Jeanine Cummins.
You might think you haven’t heard of her, but I’ll be pretty surprised if you haven’t heard of the book that catapulted her into the public eye, American Dirt. A story about a Mexican mother and son escaping to America after their entire family is massacred by a drug cartel, which Oprah said, “humanised the migration process in a way nothing else I’d ever felt or seen had,”
Jeanine was in her mid-40s, with two novels and a memoir under her belt, when American Dirt caught light. After a massive bidding war, the book was sold for millions of dollars in 38 countries. But when it was published, Jeanine found herself at the heart of a furore that questioned her right to have written it at all.
Despite topping the bestseller lists on both sides of the atlantic and selling almost 4 million copies, for a long time Jeanine questioned whether she’d be able to write another word.
Now she has.
Speak to Me of Home is the story of three generations of women who are, like jeanine, of Puerto Rican descent. It’s an engrossing cross-generational family saga and a heartfelt look at identity and what it means to belong.
Jeanine joined me from her home on the east coast to talk candidly about living through the eye of the storm, the meaning of home, developing empathy for our grandmothers, the life changing power of female friends, turning 50 and finally learning the holiness of No.
* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Speak to me of Home by Jeanine Cummins as well as 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 at Pineapple 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 bestselling American novelist Jennifer Weiner.
I first encountered Jen When her debut novel, Good In Bed, was thrust into my hands by someone I worked with on Company magazine. It was the first time I’d ever read a mainstream novel whose lead character was a fat woman who didn’t need fixing. Good In Bed was a smash hit on both sides of the atlantic but for some reason it has taken until now to make its way to the big screen. It’s being adapted for HBO and starring Mindy Kaling.
Jen followed that up with In Her Shoes which was also made into a movie, starring Cameron Diaz, Toni Collette and Shirley Maclaine. And since then she’s written 15 more novels, and an essay collection, as a well as writing a column for the New York Times.
Like Jojo Moyes and Marian Keyes Jen has an unerring talent for being able to make you laugh and cry and nod in recognition all on the very same page.
Her latest, The Griffin Sister’s Greatest Hits, is another surefire hit, tackling sisterhood, our relationships with our bodies, how we’re endlessly judged on our looks and the way the world - and the music industry - treats women.
Jen joined me from home in Philadelphia to talk so much good stuff. We discussed Trump, Nora Ephron, body image, ageing, her mum coming out, wishing she had her daughter’s boundaries, why she loves writing middle aged women and so much more.
* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including The Griffin Sisters Greatest Hits by Jennifer Weiner as well as 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 at Pineapple 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
The Shift is a podcast that aims to tell the truth about being a woman post-40, created and hosted by writer and broadcaster, Sam Baker.
Did you ever wonder why you stop hearing so many women's voices once they pass 40? That's where The Shift comes in - a frank, funny, sometimes heartbreaking, always honest look at what it means to be a woman in midlife and beyond. Work, life, love, health, sex, money, identity, body image... What does it all mean when everything around you (and inside you...) is changing? Each week, award-winning author and journalist Sam Baker asks a different woman how she got here, where she's going - and how it feels to be where she is right now. Expect intimate conversation, big laughs, occasional tears and an awful lot of ripping up the rule book and stamping on it... Past guests have included Nicola Sturgeon, Marian Keyes, Guilty Feminist Deborah Frances-White, Minnie Driver, Philippa Perry, Anita Rani, Tracey Thorn, Isabel Allende, Bobbi Brown, Barbara Blake-Hannah and many more, talking everything from confidence to career reinvention, mental health, menopause and so much more.
If you enjoy The Shift podcast, and you'd like to show the love, you can buy me a coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theshiftwithsambaker
And if you really love The Shift and would like to hear more conversations with women over 40, why not become a member of our community and receive a weekly newsletter, get exclusive transcripts, join The Shift bookclub and so much more, please visit https://theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com/
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