Conversations with women (over 40): Taffy Brodesser-Akner, 48

"I can't believe how everybody taught me to be afraid of middle age. I wish I could have started in it. My whole life would have been so much better."

If there is anything more daunting than interviewing a professional interviewer, it's interviewing an award-winning professional interviewer. Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer on the New York Times, and a legend amongst journalists who often find themselves on the monosyllabic side of a celebrity. Her interview with Bradley Cooper refusing to be interviewed is a masterclass. But she’s also responsible for one of the most seminal images of the last year – Claire Danes screaming the house down as Rachel Fleishman in Apple TV+’s adaption of Taffy’s debut novel, New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, Fleishman is in Trouble. Having never written a script before, she wrote this one and won an Emmy.

Her new novel Long Island Compromise has also just been bought by Apple TV and looks set to go exactly the same way. It follows four decades in the life of a wealthy Jewish Long Island family whose patriarch is kidnapped in 1980. The fallout is the story; wealth, plus privilege, trauma BDSM, controlling mothers, they all abound.

I met Taffy back in June to talk about realizing that the thing she had been taught to fear – middle age – was actually her ticket to freedom, the mystifying effects of money, the unlikely promise she's made her Mum and reading reviews but learning not to carry them with you…