Bit of a smaller one than usual, for germ reasons. In this week’s issue: Easy tips to increase your healthspan. Is it time to stop trying to run your life from your head? Stalked by sneakers. Amy Adams, Geena Davies and Kanya King. Travelling alone. Bellies. The key divorce danger zone. Are you living an ultra-processed life. Midsommar. Cat ladies. Short men. A rare sighting of a man who credits his wife with just about everything. (And a much more common one of a man who blames her…) Fancy a Menage a Moi? I’ve found binge-listening heaven. And much more.

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• It’s not just food, our entire world is ultra-processed. (Gift link)
• Men who lie about their height.
• When is the most common time in a woman’s life to leave her marriage? (Have a guess!)
• Absolutely love this interview with actor Peter Capaldi and his producer wife, Elaine Collins, in which he credits her with just about everything! (Gift link)
• My 92-year-old grandmother was one of the first women to get her own Amex.

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In the meantime, here’s a pic of Sausage the cat moonlighting in the somewhat esoteric library on the street behind our flat… (He’s anyone’s for a Dreamie!)

Sx

My guest today is the woman who put Cleanse & Polish cleanser and muslin cloths in bathroom cabinets all over the country, Liz Earle.

Back in the 1980s, Liz started her career as a beauty editor, before going on to found a skincare empire that started with the aforementioned Cleanse & Polish - and grew beyond her wildest expectations.

In her own words, she then spent 15 years ‘travelling the world selling face cream’. As you can imagine, the friction between who she spent her days and who she felt she was led to… let’s just say, a period of intense personal upheaval. And consequently, a total rethink. Look at her now - and then look at a picture of her in her mid/late 40s and you’d hardly recognise her. She went back to her roots, became one of the first women in the public eye to challenge the narrative on menopause (or in fact talk about it at all), and is now a trusted authority on wellbeing.

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Her last book, A Better Second Half topped the Sunday Times bestseller list and now she’s followed that up with How To Age, an authoritative look at the science of ageing and how to do it better, which also shot to the top of the Sunday Times bestseller list. And there is no better ad for the art of pro-ageing than Liz herself. Who is now 63 but has a biological age of - wait for it - 39.

Liz joined me to discuss surviving her 40s shitshow and how learning about mitochondria changed her approach to her health, why sunlight gets a bad rap and why biohacking isn’t just for techbros. We also discussed HRT, the supplements you really do need and, hello research community! Women are not just small men!

Listen to the full episode here:

If you enjoyed this episode with Liz, you might also like my conversations with:

DR LIZ O’RIORDAN on what happens when breast cancer surgeon becomes breast cancer patient:

And DR LOUISE NEWSON on being reprimanded for prescribing HRT:

• For more info on all the books mentioned in every episode of The Shift with Sam Baker podcast, visit The Shift bookshop on bookshop.org.

* A note: this post contains affiliate links, which means that a very small percentage of any sale goes to help fund The Shift. Thank you, as always, for your support.

In this week’s issue: Adult ghosting. Finding your feet. The night my marriage fell apart. Are we ever going to be allowed to ‘let ourselves go’? The artist getting her break at 101. Maggie O’Farrell, Jill Biden, and Ann Patchett. How to unclench your jaw. The envy cure. Don’t tell me I look ‘good for my age’. The Sarah Everard drama backlash. Changing your friendship group’s financial culture. The urgent drama you need to watch. Why midlife women need pleasure education. And much more.

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• Stop telling me I look ‘good for my age’. 😡
• ‘Above all, whatever you do, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.’ It’s 30 years since Nora Ephron immortalised those words in her legendary Wellesley College commencement speech.
• Love this by on adult ghosting.
• How to build a marriage where you both get to be a whole person.
• Over 400 female screenwriters wrote to the BBC over their decision to commission a man to write a drama about Sarah Everard. (Whether it should have been commissioned at all yet is a whole other question.)
• Maggie O’Farrell on Hamnet, Land and how midlife shapes the way you write.
• Jenny Odell (whose book How To Do Nothing is a keeper) on living in an alive world.
• reads between the lines in Jill Biden’s book.
• The importance of ‘finding your feet’.
• ‘The night my marriage fell apart.’
• When your friend group's financial culture doesn’t match your own. (Gift link)
• Ann Patchett on her three fathers.
• ‘Dammit, I was kind of looking forward to letting myself go!’
• Taffy Brodesser-Akner profiles celebrities for a living, but nothing could have prepared her for ‘AI actress’ Tilly Norwood. (Gift link)
• ‘I thought wine was my problem. It turned out I didn’t know what to do with myself.’
• on her endometriosis.
• This FT piece on aiming for the floor instead of the ceiling is a real ‘sit up and take notice’ read. £
• At 101, this artist is finally – finally! – getting her break.
• Mental health IS physical health.
• How tamed her envy of almost everyone!
• If you are clenched of jaw (like me) you need this!
• The myth of the 30-minute meal.
• makes the case for cats!
• The dissonance of the holiday home swap.
• Are handbags over? (Gift link)
• I’m so glad I’m not the only one who finds themselves inexorably drawn to Oliver Bonas in train stations !
(Some links are free, some are gift links and some are behind a paywall. Almost all allow a few free articles if you register. Those that definitely don’t are marked £.)

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READING

Two enjoyably engrossing new reads out this week
Hands up, I’m not unbiased here! I’m a big fan of both of these great women – is my brilliant literary agent, and I love ’s every word. That’s just in the interests of transparency but, honestly, it’s not so relevant, because both of these books are that pitch perfect blend of laugh-out-loud fun reads that are bell-ringing thought-provokers too. And both have plenty to say about denial and grief, coping with change when it’s forced upon us. In The Players Club, Beth meets a secret group of women whose mission is to help each other live their dreams. Always wanted to live in someone else’s shoes? They’re here to make it happen. (Ask yourself, who would you be, if you could be anyone or anything? How could you not be intrigued?) Then something happens to tip Beth’s seemingly balanced life off kilter and the line between invention and delusion starts to blur… Meanwhile, in All Grown Up, Daisy has taken the much-loved classic Little Women and re-envisaged it for the early 21st century from the point of view of the much-maligned mother, Louisa. Just about to get her life back on track and get back out there after divorce and bereavement, Louisa suddenly finds her blissfully empty nest full again. Think new gen Marian Keyes and you won’t be far wrong.
• The Players Club by Rachel Mills is published by Simon & Schuster in the UK and Atria in the US, in hardback. You can get it from amazon, Waterstones, The Shift Bookshop on Bookshop.org or order it from your local indie.
• All Grown Up by Daisy Buchanan is published by Century, in hardback. You can get it from amazon, Waterstones, The Shift Bookshop on Bookshop.org or order it from your local indie.

Browse The Shift Bookshop

WATCHING

Tip Toe, Channel 4
Russell T Davies is the top of the pile when it comes to state of the nation dramas (Queer as Folk, Years and Years, It’s a Sin), so it shouldn’t be a surprise that his new five parter, Tip Toe, goes straight to the heart of our remorselessly regressive times. And it isn’t. A surprise, that is. But it is a gut punch. (It wouldn’t be a spoiler to tell you, since it’s literally the first unforgettable scene, but I’d rather leave it to you to find out.) From that devastating opener, we flash back ten days to the same street, the same neighbours, the same ordinary terraced houses. Alan Cumming (right) and David Morrissey (left) are both brilliant as neighbours Leo and Clive who tentatively co-exist on a nodding and grunting basis, until Leo is locked out (in his pants - a very Cumming scene) and finds himself giving Clive not just his spare key but his security code, ‘just in case’. When Clive, whose racism and homophobia is thinly veiled at best, asks his neighbour for work, whilst simultaneously not bothering to hide his contempt, the abrasion between the two is only going to go one way. Unease is probably the best word to describe the two men’s initial response to each other, and it’s how you will feel, at best, in the grips of this tough, occasionally tender and utterly necessary watch. As Melba (Paul Rhys), the Cassandra of Canal Street, says: ‘I used to walk into a room and go - ta-da! Now I tip toe, just in case.’ (Check out ’s excellent review on her substack, Womansplaining.)

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AND ON THE SHIFT PODCAST THIS WEEK…

… historian and vocal advocate for better sex for women, Dr Kate Lister talks slut shaming, virginity and how sex has been used for millennia to control women. We also discussed her perimenopausal period hell, why midlife women could benefit from pleasure education, the price of doing all the emotional labour in the bedroom and why she wouldn’t recommend putting vaginal oestrogen cream on your face!

• What are you reading, watching, listening to right now? Let’s build a list of recs!

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* A note: this post contains affiliate links, which means that a very small percentage of any sale goes to help fund The Shift. Thank you, as always, for your support.

Back at the end of March I met up with the bestselling author of Hamnet (BAFTA winning! Oscar nominated!) Maggie O’Farrell at a cafe midway between our respective homes in Edinburgh to interview her for Country Living magazine about her new novel Land (out this week in hardback - and all I can tell you is IMHO it’s her best yet, which is saying something). You can read the full profile in the current issue, which is on newsstands now, but as a special treat for subscribers of The Shift, I thought you might like to see our full unexpurgated conversation. (I’ve tidied it up, but apologies in advance for any typos or weird punctuation I’ve missed!)

For the full experience, imagine the hissing of a coffee machine, audible chatter, Maggie and me chewing (her shakshuka, me cheese and mushroom omelette) and Abba’s greatest hits playing on repeat in the background!

[Money Money Money]

Sam: First of all, let’s talk about Hamnet’s insane unstoppable trajectory. What has that been like? It’s not really your MO, is it, all that red carpet glamour?

Maggie: No, not at all. It wasn’t that fast to me. Hamnet (the book) came out in 2020 - and I’m gesturing with my Oscar nails! They’re looking a bit scruffy now! It’s not like it’s been constant. I’ve written two other books [The Marriage Portrait and Land] in that time and there was the play - which was really strange and amazing. Also before we actually started filming there’s always that thought that it’s probably not going to happen. The usual story is that you can even get to the point at which the sets are built and the costumes are ready and somehow it all falls apart. That’s the usual story. So I really wasn’t counting on it at all. I just thought this is an interesting experience and I’ll see what happens.

I remember the first day on set, I was on set in Wales - a Tudor village called Weobley, and they put straw and mud all over the kerbs and tarmac. All those black and white Tudor houses you see are there, they just had to get rid of all the yellow lines and the pavements and the streetlights.

They had to grubby it up?

They Tudored it up! I called my husband about something else and he said to me, ‘do you admit now that it it is happening?!’ And I was like, yeah, OK, all right.

[Voulez Vous]

Even after Paul and Jessie were cast and Chloe was on board…?

I think you have to. I know so many people who’ve been quite broken hearted by believing in it and then, somehow, the financing or something happens, or the major star has to go off and do something else. Who knows? There are so many stories. So I just thought all the way along it might happen but if not it’s an interesting process.

It’s been so surreal and so weird but you have to go along for the ride. And it’s been a very wild ride certainly. I think it’s really important to try new things, especially in your 50s. When Chloe [Zhao] first asked me to write the script with her I initially thought ‘no, I don’t think I can do that, I’m writing more novels, I’ve got other things to do…’ then part of me thought, ‘you know, when you hit whatever I am, 50, you should be challenging yourself to do new things.’ So I thought why the hell not?

And also, she seemed like somebody I could work with. When I had my first ever Zoom call with her - you know, you’re about to have a call with an Oscar-winning director and I thought I was going to see a Bel Air mansion, an infinity pool, probably a butler - but actually no. She’s not like that at all. She came on screen and she’d just been surfing and she had all this wet salty hair and a hoodie pulled up and she was in some kind of mobile home and there were lots of dogs in the background and I thought, actually, I can work with this person. I can get on with you.

Was it the dogs that did it?

She had me at the dogs. Three very beautiful rescue dogs of various sizes and breeds.

From the outside Hamnet looks like a really collaborative process.

That comes all the way down from Chloe. It’s the way she works. She’s an extraordinary person. It’s like she’s got these invisible antennae that come off her head. She’s always listening. She’s very attuned to how people around her are thinking and feeling. She fosters an atmosphere on set where everyone is listened to and everyone’s opinion - the cast, the crew, the cinematographer - everyone’s opinion is taken into account. Which I don’t think is normal. I mean, I haven’t been on many film sets at all but the ones I have been on, the director is a big presence. They are there and imposing and everything they say goes. Whereas Chloe on set is practically invisible, you hardly even see her. She’s like a cat who creeps in and out. Everything is set up and the actors are in and she’ll come in very silently and whisper something in someone’s ear and then disappear again. She deliberately makes herself a very quiet presence. It’s interesting.

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My guest this week is a historian/ columnist/ television presenter and vocal advocate for better sex for women!

I first encountered Dr Kate Lister when I stumbled across her brilliant Instagram account @whoresofyore. In a world where, even back in the late 20-teens, we thought the work was, if not done, then at least going in the right direction - laughs hollowly - it was still radical for someone to stand up and say that women demanding better sex didn’t arrive with the 21st century. It has, as Kate has dedicated her life to proving, been a very long fight indeed.

Kate is the host of the award winning history podcast Betwixt The Sheets, she writes a weekly column in inews and has appeared on countless history programmes including House Through Time and Victorian Murder Club.

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Kate’s brilliant new book Flick: the story of female pleasure - takes us from Mesopotamia to trad wives by way of orgasms, oral sex, masturbation, frigidity, sexual fluidity and much more. It is a 300-page battle cry against the idea that when it comes to sex women want to just ‘lie back and think of England’.

Kate joined me to talk about sex as the great leveller, slut shaming, virginity and how sex has been used for millennia to control women. We also discussed her perimenopausal period hell, why midlife women could benefit from pleasure education, the price of doing all the emotional labour in the bedroom and why she wouldn’t recommend putting vaginal oestrogen cream on your face!

Listen to the full episode here:

If you enjoyed this episode with KATE, you might also like my conversations with:

EMILY NAGOSKI on maintaining long term intimacy:

And NATALIE LEE talks breaking free from shame and finding sexual freedom:

• For more info on all the books mentioned in every episode of The Shift with Sam Baker podcast, visit The Shift bookshop on bookshop.org.

* A note: this post contains affiliate links, which means that a very small percentage of any sale goes to help fund The Shift. Thank you, as always, for your support.

In this week’s issue: Why are we still talking about hairy pits? The curse of parental disappointment. Big little penis panic. Embryo custody. A tale of midlife unravelling. No Plan B. Jennifer Saunders would rather be in the garden. Ozempification. The Pixies are back. Why younger men are obsessed with older women. Maria Semple’s midlife metabolisation. A love letter to analogue. Separate vacations, school reunions, spiritual raves and much more.

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• Why are we still so bothered by female body hair?
• The quiet grief of adult friendship.
• on writing mothers when you’re not a mother.
• The internet went off on Belle Burden this week. Here’s the New Yorker piece that sparked the inevitable backlash, and here are a couple of interesting takes on it. asks if Strangers is another fake memoir, while dissects the story.
• Who gets custody of the embryos? (Gift link)

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“I have never tried to have children, but I think about being a mother all the time,” Daisy writes.

“At 41, I’m surrounded by mothers and not-mothers. I have nieces and nephews, biological and honorary. I have friends who haven’t been able to conceive the children they have longed for, and who have tried until their hearts broke with the effort. I have friends who don’t want them, who say that they’re allergic to kids and the very idea of having children of their own fills them with the urge to book a long-haul holiday, or to buy a big bag of cocaine. I have friends who have children and tell me they feel alienated and overwhelmed at the school gates, friends who talk about how hard it is, practically and emotionally, to supply endless love and care, how hard it is to make the money work, and how they’re sorry, they don’t mean to whine, they just need some sleep, they really need some sleep, they haven’t had an unbroken night of sleep since 2022.

“I don’t see myself - my un-mother self - reflected back to me very often. When a magazine shows me a photo of a woman who doesn’t want children, she seems to have great confidence in her convictions. I expect to see words like ‘unapologetic’ and ‘defiant’. The woman is sometimes defending herself against pre-empted accusations of selfishness. She might have her hands on her hips. She might be wearing a structured, jewel toned frock – someone will have dressed her like an Apprentice contestant or a cabinet minister.

“But I long to hear from someone like me – a woman who might love to have children, if circumstances were slightly different. Someone else who dreams about what it might be like, if only they were a different person. Less anxious, less traumatised, less prone to catastrophising. Someone who knows they just don’t have the energy or the ability to maintain the required level of equilibrium. I love spending time with children, and I find them funny and clever, charming and brave. But parenting requires a Premier League level of talent, when I am, at best, a decent member of a Thursday-night five a side squad.

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My guest on The Shift podcast this week is Maria Semple, the author of one of my favourite books of all time, Where’d You Go Bernadette.

Once encountered, Bernadette Fox is never forgotten. I wasn’t alone in my obsession, Bernadette was translated into 40 languages, sold over 1.5million copies in the states and 200k copies in the UK alone, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize and was made into a movie starring Cate Blanchett. Phew!

Maria, who was previously a TV writer for Saturday Night Live and Arrested Development, amongst others, has written two other novels (Today Will Be Different and This One Is Mine), and is now back with a fourth, Go Gentle. Already an Oprah Bookclub pick, it’s the story of midlife transformation, mothers, daughters, art theft, stoicism and Upper West side covens!

Like all Maria’s novels, Go Gentle is stuffed full of home truths and big ideas, and it’s riotously, snortingly funny.

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I met Maria on a flying visit to the UK to talk about midlife’s ‘dirty little secret’, the freedom she found post-divorce, the joy of not having to ask permission and doing a geographical. We also discussed her experience of working in the toxic writers rooms of nineties and noughties TV, why midlife is a time of metabolisation (is that a word?), how stoicism kept her sane when her coping mechanisms packed up and why her favourite company is other women.

• If you’re in the UK, Maria will be at Blackwells Oxford on Tuesday 26 May (today!) and Hay Festival on Weds 27^th - there are still a few tickets available for both.

Listen to the full episode here:

If you enjoyed this episode with Maria, you might also like my conversations with:

NINA STIBBE on menopause, middle age and midlife sex scenes:

And CURTIS SITTENFELD nixes the rubbish notion that ageing is somehow shameful:

• For more info on all the books mentioned in every episode of The Shift with Sam Baker podcast, visit The Shift bookshop on bookshop.org.

* A note: this post contains affiliate links, which means that a very small percentage of any sale goes to help fund The Shift. Thank you, as always, for your support.

Just a quick extra one this morning because a press release landed in my inbox at the end of last week that was embargoed until today and I cannot let it pass!

In a surprise to no-one, a new poll from Age Without Limits (the anti-ageism campaign run by the national charity the Centre for Ageing Better) has found that men named Chris are more likely to be cast in a lead role* than women over 60.

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In this week’s issue: Talking about rejection. Quiet quitting alcohol. Tinnitus. Negging. Martin Short, Kristin Scott Thomas and Zoe Ball walk into a bar… Stepmothers. Surviving the 90s. The sad wives of AI. Performing friendship. Vaginal wellness (hmmm). A shockingly easy way to make good decisions. The Scottish writer who’s finally having a moment, a hundred years after her birth. More hot priests. And much more.

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• My piece of the week is this gorgeous self-examination of how Frida Kahlo and Tracey Emin inspired Kat Lister to make meaning out of pain as she underwent a serious operation.
• Love this by on her father’s last words to her.
• Why you’re sorry for being sorry.
• It took 50-some years to finally recognise negging.
• The advice that made me a better decision-maker.

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This time last week (as I write this) I found myself thrown back into my old life. I was taking the stage at a Talent Festival put on in Edinburgh by WACL, an organisation that supports women working in advertising, communications and marketing and helps them grow their careers, something I last did probably nine, ten years ago. Although this time I was there to talk about life after and adapting skills learnt in a now largely defunct industry to a whole new career. (TLDR: with difficulty and a lot of luck, perseverance and curiosity!) I used to attend this kind of conference reasonably frequently in my old life, but in my new one, not so much.

I was nervous, TBH, not about sitting on stage, I’m used to that (I would go so far as to say I enjoy it. Perverse, I know), but at the prospect of sitting on stage and talking about myself. I much prefer to be the one doing the grilling. But also about being back in a slightly more corporate environment after so many years. How would I fit in? What the hell could I possibly have to say to the several hundred women in the room? After all, I have been self-employed so long I now qualify as feral. Certainly unemployable, from a corporate perspective. Hell, I can’t even dress ‘properly’ any more. Nor do I want to.

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Long story short, I went into the conference room with a knot of anxiety in my stomach and came out, several hours later, with that knot non-surgically removed. (Btw I’ve stolen this knot analogy from the wonderful poet who was poet in residence for the day and rounded the whole thing off with something so moving and gorgeous I could happily have the whole thing tattooed.) Anyway, it turns out I had forgotten what happens when a group of women come together and share their hard-won learnings. The room was crackling with energy and curiosity; ears, eyes and hearts were open; words were hung on. It was infectious. It was invigorating. It was fire.

But one talk in particular had me scribbling furiously, torn between hanging on every word and getting every word down. Yes, if I’d had half a brain I would have recorded it on my phone but, like I said, my brain was largely tangled in that anxious knot in my stomach.

The talk (on choice, intent and values) was given by the brilliantly human-speaking executive coach . Yes, I know. I, too, often see the words ‘executive coach’ and ‘values’ and prepare to zone out. But how grateful am I that I didn’t, because every word was a gem. I’ve been thinking about Gemma’s advice ever since, and within 24 hours something she said had already impacted a decision I had made about this very newsletter.

Gemma gave us three pieces of advice that have forever changed the way I will make decisions (and yes, of course, this is where I will put the paywall…)

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Today’s episode will take you ricocheting back to the 90s - in all the ways.

Canadian singer, songwriter, photographer and producer is best known as the bassist of Hole throughout the  mid/late 90s, and consequently had a front row seat at the pillorying of Hole’s legendary front woman Courtney Love. As she puts it: ‘I watched society burn a woman at the stake’.

For a few years, she was at the heart of two of the era’s biggest bands - moving from Hole to the Smashing Pumpkins - before releasing several solo albums. In 2007 she was named one of the 100 Greatest women in rock and roll, then she stepped away from the music scene when she had her daughter. 

It’s those years, the ‘fever dream of the 90s’ that Melissa revisits in her memoir, Even The Good Girls Will Cry - which takes us on a journey through the good, the bad and the ugly of what it meant to be a woman making music in the 90s. It will take you back, it will give you chills. It will make you cringe, it will make you rage.

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Melissa joined me from upstate New York to talk about her big midlife resurrection. what it cost to revisit those years of glamour and destruction, falling back in love with music in her 50s, discovering her redhead superpower, being an annoying mother, re-establishing joyful sisterhood with Courtney and reclaiming the innocence of the girl who started it all. As Melissa puts it, The Shift is real!

Listen to the full episode here:

• You can buy all the books featured and recommended in every episode of the podcast at The Shift Bookshop on bookshop.org.

If you enjoyed this episode with Melissa, you might also like my conversations with:

Fellow musician MARTHA WAINWRIGHT on music, motherhood and the curse of the nepobaby

And TRACEY THORN on being a woman in a macho world, and going statement grey

• For more info on all the books mentioned in every episode of The Shift with Sam Baker podcast, visit The Shift bookshop on bookshop.org.

In this week’s issue: The Betty Broderick effect. Is your skincare routine OTT? Dawn French, Taraji P Henson and Elizabeth Strout (again) walk into a bar (this is my equivalent of fantasy dinner party!). Why unsupported brain fog cures keep going viral. No, you aren’t low on libido. Hair loss help. Why Tess Daly wants to go travelling on her own. Running away from your feelings. The pros and cons of having younger friends. Women dressing for women (and themselves). What one woman learnt from reading 1000 self-help books. And much more.

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• Shakira (49) and Madonna (67) are headlining the Men’s World Cup final, supported by some little boy band called BTS and I AM HERE FOR IT.
• What if exhaustion is the correct response to a frankly insane world?
• Has your skincare routine gone too far?
• shared 11 pieces of creative life advice from her 78-year-old mum.
• The beauty ideal of extreme thinness is the polar opposite of longevity.

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Earlier this week there was a small but mighty breakthrough in women’s gynaecological health. After more than a decade of campaigning and consultation with medical professionals and patients, polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) - a condition that affects one in eight women - has been renamed polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS). (Not catchy, but vastly more accurate.) Experts finally agreed that for too long the misleading nature of ‘polycystic’ had led to misdiagnosis and delayed or inadequate treatment. (You can read more here.)

It is the tip of the iceberg in terms of the conversation around women’s health, particularly gynaecological health, and a real landmark in terms of listening to women when they speak about their bodies.

It brought me back to a conversation I had last year with British broadcaster Naga Munchetty, a high profile sufferer of the much-suffered but little-talked-about adenomyosis. Despite the fact that it’s under-diagnosed and usually only those diagnosed have even heard of it, it is believed to affect between 1 in 10 and 1 in 5 (I know!) women, particularly those in their 40s and 50s.

When Naga first spoke out about being diagnosed with adenomyosis, I did a double take, because I too have adeno and, like Naga, it took me well over two decades, almost three, to get diagnosed. But also, until that diagnosis, I had never heard of it - nor had I heard of anyone else who had it. I felt like I had gone from being alone, to being in a gang of two.

I wrote about my own experience here:

How wrong I was.

Naga was overwhelmed by tens of thousands of women sharing their stories of lifelong pain, massive bleeding and having their concerns dismissed, ignored and belittled; of being told that the way they were having to live their lives was just normal. (And since then the stories have come thick and fast - for instance, @anniemacmanus wrote about her own recent diagnosis only a few weeks ago.)

Naga was shocked and she was furious, and she was determined to do something about the way women’s health issues are sidelined and women’s knowledge of their own bodies is dismissed by professionals. Hence, her new book, It’s Probably Nothing, which let’s face it, is a phrase most of us have heard over and over again. It is a book to empower you, to help you advocate for yourself when the medical world feels oblivious at best and stacked against you at worst.

Naga and I talked about everything from painful periods and bleeding buckets, to choosing to be child-free and her decision to be sterilised in her late 40s, to why women’s sexual wellbeing is so often overlooked. And what the hell we’re going to do about it.

Sam: Before we do go any further, I just want to say, really, really, really, thank you for writing it really. I don’t know. I honestly think I’m just like, I go, honestly I’m going to tear up now. I honestly think that If this book had existed 20, 30, years ago, it would have changed my life.

Naga: I feel like crying now. Yeah, I think you’re totally right. Why haven’t we been told this stuff? Why did they keep it from us?

Were they keeping it from us? Or did they just not know? Because they weren’t interested enough to find out?

They didn’t want to hear us. No, they wanted us to just be dismissed and go away and accept that they knew best when we knew something was wrong. I’m angry about that.

I think so many women are. It’s not a surprise that we’re angry, is it?

No, not at all, not at all. This book won’t leave you thinking of rainbows, unicorns and flowers, but I do think you leave feeling angry, but at least knowing why you’re angry. And I think for some time we didn’t know why we were so frustrated, or why it felt as if we were banging our heads against a brick wall, or just having to fight all the time, not just to be heard, but just to work, to play, to be the best people we could be. We just didn’t know why it was so hard.

Exactly. You know that Ginger Rogers thing that she did everything Fred Astaire did backwards in high heels? I have thought for such a long time, yeah, but she probably also did it whilst losing buckets of blood and in loads of pain. And that’s how so many women have been through their lives. I remember when you first spoke up about adenomyosis. At that point, I had been diagnosed, but I still didn’t really know what it was, even though I’d been treated by then. I’d never met or spoken to anybody else who had it.

Me neither. Never heard of it. Not a clue.

Can you tell us a bit about your own experience of getting that diagnosis?

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Every single month I tell you how great this mon…

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My guest on The Shift podcast this week is Dr Katriona O’Sullivan.

Katriona grew up in Coventry and her early life was marked by poverty, addiction and abuse. She became pregnant and subsequently homeless at 15, let down and written off by the adults who were meant to care for her.

In 1998 she moved to Dublin with her son and entered Trinity College through the access programme. There she earnt a Phd in psychology and is now a professor at Maynooth university, directs the National Centre for inclusive higher education and writes a regular column for the Irish Independent. Amongst other things.

Katriona’s debut memoir, Poor, an intimate personal examination of the complexities of growing up in poverty, spent an incredible 114 weeks in the bestseller lists. Now she’s written Hungry, a fierce and moving examination of her own battle with body image and the way trauma, class and gender shape the way women see themselves.

Katriona joined me to talk about spending a lifetime trying to shrink herself to fit and how the world benefits from women hating our bodies. We also discussed why over yogaing is a class issue, holding mothers to a different standard, ambition hunger, parenting boys, really bad sex, how hunger comes from the soul not the stomach and why no longer being an object of sexual interest is a bloody enormous relief. (With a big shout out to whose interview with Katriona about Poor is well worth a listen.)

Listen to the full episode here:

If you enjoyed this episode with Katriona, you might also like my conversations with:

Writer and campaigner, NATASHA CARTHEW, on class, poverty and refusing to stay in her lane:

And ultra-runner SABRINA PACE-HUMPHREYS on rural racism, alcoholism and the life saving power of running:

• For more info on all the books mentioned in every episode of The Shift with Sam Baker podcast, visit The Shift bookshop on bookshop.org.

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In this week’s issue: Risk aversion. When did being a good person become cringe. The death of women’s magazines. Choosing peace over partnership. Menopause boobs. Overdue hair. Why women garden. Did school PE lessons ruin exercise? Elizabeth Strout, Zadie Smith and Yoko Ono. Miranda Priestley was perimenopausal. Downsizing your friends. Why are season twos so… mediocre? Neighbours are having a moment. The grief memoir guaranteed to become a classic. And much more.

SCROLLING
• My mum broke the rules, my grandmother followed them – both paid for it.
• The gift of getting weirder with age. (And loving it!) (Gift link)
• Uncomfortably numb. I’m hoping the Brits overcame their numbness to vote yesterday, but…
• When did being a good person become cringe?
• Love love love this by on risk aversion and debating change. I know so many of you will feel it.
• The devil wears Estradiol.
• A psychiatrist makes the case for downsizing your friends. (gift link)
• on letting yourself actually be who you’ve become.
• How Elizabeth Strout gets inside people’s heads.
• What a desert rave taught me about looking after myself.
• Is your man doing the dishes, or is he actually doing the work?
• Zadie Smith doesn’t read men any more.
• Grief, deception and why I garden.
• Welcome to the insecurity industrial complex.
• Good piece by on the death of women’s magazines and why it’s a loss. £
• Couple of good menopause pieces: What’s the deal with menopause boobs? and Women, wine and the 3am wakeup.
• Why Yoko Ono’s work feels more relevant than ever. (Gift link)
• The twins with different dads.
• on sequels versus originals.
• Why more midlife women are choosing peace over partnership.
• Moving piece by , a year on from the loss of her best friend.
• Loved on what ‘the internet’ really means when it says ‘looks unrecognisable’.
• Getting to know your neighbours is having a moment. £
• wrote about wolves and I enjoyed it.
• School PE lessons ruined exercise for me, too.
• Overdue hair is a thing. Finally, I’m on trend.
• I’m a big fan of Gemma Correll, so loved this extract of her new book, Anxietyland: ‘I used alcohol to hide my fear, but booze became a very bad friend.’
(Some links are free, some are gift links and some are behind a paywall. Almost all allow a few free articles if you register. Those that definitely don’t are marked £.)

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READING

Ghost Stories, Siri Hustvedt
Sometimes a book crosses your path and you just know you are destined to be entwined in each other’s lives forever. A book. A person. An event. That’s how I felt when an ARC of Ghost Stories landed on my desk, I picked it up and found myself held captive by its pages; and it’s how Siri Hustvedt felt when she met fellow writer Paul Auster, at a poetry reading in the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, February 1981. They rapidly became ‘Siri and Paul’ and were together until his death in Spring 2024. This memoir is the story of them, the story of a long long love and how it moulds those who live in it. It’s a story of grief, loss and the ghosts the beloved leaves behind. It is the first book Siri has written that Paul didn’t read first, but Paul is present on every page – through Siri’s memories and through his own writing, letters he had begun to write to their grandson, who was just a few months old when Paul died. This book is a thing of beauty, both inside and out (as you can see from the pictures above). Tender, hopeful, heartbreaking, softly humorous. Do yourself a favour, buy it, read it, gift it, treasure it. (Hear Siri talk about it and them on this week’s episode of The Shift podcast, below.)
• Ghost Stories by Siri Hustvedt (Sceptre, hardback) is available from amazon, Waterstones, The Shift bookshop on bookshop.org or order it from your local indie.

DON’T FORGET… Monday’s The Shift Bookclub Live with Angela Flournoy, author of our April pick, The Wilderness, at 7pm BST. I’ll send a link first thing Monday so keep an eye on your inbox. And in the meantime, let us know how you’re getting on in the chat.

WATCHING

An assortment of season twos
Really, I am all about waiting for Falling (starring my favourite Keeley Hawes and written by Jack ‘Adolescence’ Thorne) to drop on Channel 4 (Tuesday 19 May) and I can’t quite get excited about much else. So, in the meantime, I’m doing a desultory watch of a few season twos: the John Hamm vehicle, Your Friends & Neighbours, is half way through its second season on apple TV+, this time with a scene-stealing turn from James Marsden (above centre) as an insanely (and questionably) loaded Owen Ashe, who calls Coop’s bluff and shags his ex. Shame the screenwriters have turned Amanda Peet’s excellent Mel into a ranting, moaning, sweating menopause bore. (This was not what we meant when we demanded more visibility…) On Netflix, if you’ve got the stomach for high quality Nordic-grim, The Chestnut Man is back with season two, Hide & Seek, in which a serial killer puts a ‘twist’ on playground games; and, also on Netflix, Anne Rice’s The Mayfair Witches is back (this time loosely based on book two of her trilogy, Lasher), in which baby Lasher becomes adult Lasher within about five minutes and inevitably wreaks murderous havoc. (You either know what I’m talking about or you don’t, and if you don’t I’m pretty sure you won’t be interested.) If this all sounds a bit bleak and you need more fun in your life, in the UK Amandaland is back on BBC1!

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AND ON THE SHIFT PODCAST THIS WEEK…

… the acclaimed writer (and lecturer in psychiatry) SIRI HUSTVEDT talks about her stunning new memoir about love and loss, Ghost Stories. Siri joined me from her home in Brooklyn to talk about her 43 year love affair with her husband Paul Auster, how it felt to lose her ‘everyday’ and the way an enduring relationship moulds those who dwell in it. We also discussed why happiness is not a goal, writing to keep ‘Paul and Siri’ alive, how grief made her creaky and why her experiences since his death have her believing in ghosts. Sort of.

WHAT YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED…

• What are you reading, watching and listening to right now? I’d love to hear your recs.

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* A note: this post contains affiliate links, which means that a very small percentage of any sale goes to help fund The Shift. Thank you, as always, for your support.

I have been hooked on the work of , ever since I stumbled across her word of mouth sleeper hit, If Women Rose Rooted, Sharon’s memoir/manifesto that’s an unignorable rallying cry for the rewilding of womanhood. Sharon followed that up with Hagitude, a blistering reimagining of the second half of life. (You can hear her discussing embracing your ‘inner hag’ on The Shift podcast, and I am so here for it.) (Wise Women, her collection of myths and fairytales for midlife and beyond was our bookclub pick for October 2024, catch up here.)

Sharon is a neuroscientist and psychologist with a background in mythology and folklore, so it’s hardly surprising that as the world gets harder to navigate, both globally and personally, she would return to her roots; to fairytales, the truths that lie at the heart of them and how we can use them to guide us. Her new book, Ripening, Why Women Need Fairytales Now, takes the stories that have been handed down through generations of women and asks what we can learn from them now. Forget fair-of-face princesses and wizened old hags, says Sharon, fairytales speak to our soul, in times of strife, whatever our life stage. Ripening is divided into five sections, five life stages: Budding, Flowering, Fruiting, Ripening, Seeding. I’ve chosen an exclusive extract for you from ‘ripening’, one that examines what midlife means, why it is often accompanied by so much upheaval and how we can use it to come home to our selves.

‘Most of us, in the largely unfathomable years of our early forties, will experience more than one morning when we’ll lie in bed wondering how we’ve suddenly managed to wake up in a completely different movie. Our old backstory will have disappeared through a crack in the ground. We’ll feel as if we’ve tripped and fallen all the way out of our own life and crash-landed onto someone else’s very rocky path – someone we don’t know and frankly, judging by the state she seems to be in, aren’t entirely sure we want to know. That’s what happens at midlife. The story we’ve been living in – the neat and tidy narrative we’ve spent so long constructing to explain who we are and how we got here – begins to disintegrate and all the old certainties fade away.

Just as we were beginning to imagine that, after all the turmoil and strivings of our twenties and thirties, we might finally think of ourselves as ‘grown-ups’, might finally be settling into some kind of stability; just at the moment when what we’re supposed to want and what we actually do want finally begin to coincide – midlife arrives to gatecrash the party. Its inconvenient gifts are strange longings and impossible questions. Try, if you like, to chase it away; wave it back on down the garden path if you can – but it’ll only come around again. At this time of life, profound change is both inevitable and irresistible. It’ll get you eventually, try as you might to say it isn’t so.

I’m not going to tell you that this isn’t bewildering at best and shattering at worst, but it’s necessary, nevertheless. It’s a natural passage from one stage of life to another. Once upon a time we called this transformation a ‘midlife crisis’; recently, it’s become better known as the ‘midlife transition’. The change in terminology is helpful: most people don’t experience an actual crisis in midlife, in the sense of the word as an acute, catastrophic event.

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Midlife transition, on the other hand, implies a process. It might be a short process, or it might drag on and on, or we might experience a sequence of times of turmoil with periods of relative calm in between. It happens both to men and to women, but for most women, the period of midlife transition coincides with perimenopause, and the physical cataclysms that so often characterise that time of our lives amplify the experience of dislocation and disruption. It’s a period of existential angst, of soul-searching, as we begin to question – and ultimately to discover – who we believe we really are, and just what we believe all this life is for.

The positive side of all this upheaval is that whenever it occurs and in whatever form, the midlife transition has a developmental purpose: that purpose is quite simply to wake us up, so that we can begin to ripen into the person we always were meant to be. The midlife transition, then, is really a midlife awakening.

The term ‘midlife crisis’ was first coined by Canadian physician and psychoanalyst Elliot Jaques, while he was researching several artists throughout history who had experienced significant shifts in their life and creative work in their mid to late thirties. In a 1965 paper entitled ‘Death and the Mid-life Crisis’, Jaques wrote about these transformations, pointing out that the creative output of artists seemed to change dramatically during these years. He suggested that midlife metamorphoses can be accompanied by religious or other spiritual awakenings, promiscuity, a sudden inability to enjoy life, ‘hypochondriacal concern over health and appearance’ and compulsive attempts to cling to youth at all costs. People, he wrote, find that they’re suddenly overwhelmed by depression or anxiety and a sense of impending loss related to the approach of death – as well as a new under- standing of its inevitability.

After Jaques had so precisely defined it, others wrote about this experience of upheaval at midlife, most notably Gail Sheehy in her bestselling 1976 book Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life. In it, she says: ‘A sense of stagnation, disequilibrium, and depression is predictable as we enter the passage to midlife.’ People can expect to feel ‘sometimes momentous changes of perspective, often mysterious dissatisfactions with the course they had been pursuing with enthusiasm only a few years before’, and she roundly declares that the years between thirty-seven and forty-two are ‘peak years of anxiety for practically everyone.’

There’s a strange old Siberian story which beautifully illuminates this time of profound change. A woman and a man – a one-eyed man – have been married for a long time. Every day at dawn, the man walks out of the house and doesn’t come home again till evening. His wife has absolutely no idea where he goes or what he does all day. One morning, she just can’t stand it any more: she follows him and watches as he strides into the icy forest, comes to a clearing and sits down there on a log. That’s where he stays. All day. She watches, utterly perplexed, as his face darkens and changes, and realises not only that he has become a stranger to her, but that she has become a stranger to herself and her own life. She makes a decision: she returns home, slips a few small belongings into her coat pockets, and leaves.

She hasn’t walked very far before she meets a giant who, without saying a word, slings her over his shoulder (as a giant will do) and runs with her up to the top of a snow-clad mountain, where he throws her onto the floor of a cold, dark cave and promptly leaves. This wasn’t entirely what she’d had in mind for herself, and the woman is weeping loudly when she hears a voice say, ‘Look up! – and you’ll see the skins of land birds above you.’ Sure enough, when she looks up, she finds a basket hanging from a hook; it contains a beautiful coat made of crow skins – but it’s too small and doesn’t fit her. She cries some more but then hears the voice again: ‘Look up! – and you’ll see the skins of land animals above you.’ She pulls down from a ledge a coat made of fox skins – and this one fits perfectly. It warms her and gives her courage, and she decides to make a run for it before the giant returns.

She trots down the mountain and stops to drink from a pool – and is shocked to see in its reflection that she has now acquired a fine pair of russet-coloured fox-ears. By the time she gets to the bottom, she has a fluffy, white-tipped foxtail too. The newly forged vixen wanders into her old village and finds her father launching his boat to go fishing. After he’s gone, she walks over to his cabin, longing for the warmth and safety of an old, familiar shelter. But every time she tries to step through the door of her father’s house, her head swings sharply to one side and the rest of her body follows. Eventually, she gives up trying to go home again; she turns around of her own volition and walks forward, leaving again, trotting across the snow-laden fields into the wild new fox-life which lies beyond.

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In highlighting this story, I’m certainly not suggesting that in order to progress at midlife, you need to leave your partner – or even physically to leave the place you live. But this story provides a powerful metaphor for the journey-stage we pass through at midlife, as the woman gives in to the sudden but strong instinct that compels her to walk out of her old life and leave it behind. She’s lost sight of herself, living as she has done: the same way, every day, year after year. She has stopped asking questions and she’s stuck in a life of drudgery, a meaningless rut; one day, she realises it. So she walks away from that old life, and crashes into the arms of the unexpected giant who propels her, ready or not, into a new one.

At midlife, many of us will find ourselves growing out of relationships that seem to be holding us back. Even for those of us who treasure our long-term partnerships, the question always arises at some point: who do I belong to now – myself or my partner? Myself or my family? Some part of us is never quite married, and stories like this one reflect that ambiguity. At this time of turmoil, even those of us whose relationships survive will feel compelled to leave something behind, to shed a load that we didn’t realise had become such an unbearable burden. We won’t be able to help ourselves: we’ll feel the strongest urge to shrug it off, step across the threshold, put one foot in front of the other and just walk. We might have no idea where we’re walking to, but we’ll trust in whatever we think Destiny to be, or whatever we think God to be – or a chance encounter with a stony-faced giant – to point us in the direction of a new story.

The fox-woman in this story walks away, then – and once she has left, she can’t go back. Her head tells her she should take shelter in her father’s house, retreat to a place of safe familiarity to lick the accumulated wounds of this strange new day. But no matter how much she fears the consequences of this choice that she really didn’t quite plan to make, the wisdom of her new, animal body insists that she can’t go home again. She can’t return to what she once was. She can’t unsee what she saw or unfeel what she felt when she stood in the forest and watched as her husband sat motionless all day on a log. She’s shifted into a new phase and is now in the process of coming home to her instinctual, embodied self, embracing the Wild Woman archetype that didn’t just come politely knocking – but tore down the well-barricaded door of her psyche at midlife.’

What’s your experience of midlife so far? Does this sense of wanting to blow everything up resonate with you? (I know it did with me!)

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• Ripening by is published in hardback by September Publishing, next Thursday, 14 May. You can preorder it from amazon, Waterstones, The Shift bookshop on bookshop.org or your local indie.

* A note: this post contains affiliate links, which means that a very (very!) small percentage of any sale goes to help fund The Shift. Thank you, as always, for your support.