Today I’m delighted to welcome back one of The Shift’s very first guests, journalist and mental health campaigner Bryony Gordon.

Bryony has been a columnist on the Telegraph for over 20 years and for ten of those she has been writing candidly about her own experiences of addiction and mental illness. She is the best selling author of Mad Girl and The Wrong Knickers and in 2016 she founded Mental Health Mates a global peer support network that encourages people with mental health issues to connect, for which she has won several awards. She also, FWIW, ran the London marathon in her knickers. 

Three years after her first visit to The Shift, Bryony is back - older, wiser (yes really) - and with a new book, the pertinently titled, Mad Woman, which discusses her struggles with burnout, binge eating and, yep, you guessed it, fluctuating hormones.

Bryony joined me from bed in south London to talk about maintaining a public facade when you’re privately falling apart, finally learning to feed herself properly at 43, discovering all the women in her family went into menopause in their early 40s, why she’s done with feeling like she’s the problem and how Davina McCall saved her life!

If you'd like to sponsor Bryony's Big Challenge, you can find out more here.

* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Mad Woman by Bryony Gordon and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.

* And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including exclusive transcripts of the podcast, why not join The Shift community, come and have a look around at www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com

• The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Juliette Nicholls @ Pineapple Audio Production. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker.

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Today’s guest is the anti-guru behind the massive No F*cks Given franchise, Sarah Knight. What started life with the Marie Kondo pastiche, The Life Changing Magic of Not Giving A F*ck, now comprises 7 guides and three journals which have sold three million copies and a TED talk that’s notched up ten million views. 

But Sarah wasn’t always the queen of giving zero f*cks. Scroll back to her mid-30s and you’d have found her having a panic attack in the Manhattan office where she worked. So started ten years of anxiety and depression, a massive leap into the freelance unknown (which let’s face it, worked out pretty well!) and a 1500 mile geographical from Brooklyn to the Caribbean, where she now lives.

Sarah joined me from her home in the Dominican Republic (grrrr) to talk about her new book, Grow The F*ck Up, how sometimes it takes getting what you want to realise you don’t want it, Why we often need permission to make a change and having the courage to recognise you really don’t have enough left in the tank. Sarah also told me how she learnt to give fewer but better fucks, what to do if you’re married to a “big f*cking baby”, why selfish shouldn’t be a four letter word and she gives us a masterclass in learning to say no.

* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Grow The F*ck Up by Sarah Knight and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.

* If you enjoyed this episode and you fancy buying me a coffee, pop over to my page on buymeacoffee.com.

• And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including exclusive transcripts of the podcast, why not join The Shift community, come and have a look around at www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com

• The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by 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

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Dr Gladys McGarey died, aged 103, in September of this year, so I wanted to honour her by making her episode the last to go out on the last day of the year. Rest In Power Gladys.

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A few months ago I read an article that took my breath away. The author was 102 years old and in it she wrote candidly about losing her partner in life and work after 46 years. Not because he passed away, but because he handed her divorce papers!

That would have floored most of us, but despite being sideswiped, Dr Gladys McGarey, picked herself up, started a new medical practice with her daughter before becoming a speaker, author and all-round inspiration. All this at the age of 70.

Since then Dr Gladys, who is known as the mother of holistic medicine, has received countless awards including the Humanities Award for Outstanding Service to Mankind. 

At 85 she travelled to Afghanistan to teach rural women safer birthing practices. At her 90th birthday party she jumped out of her birthday cake. At 102 she became the proud owner of an adult tricycle.

Who is this woman? And how does she do it? I HAD to know.

Now on the cusp of 103, Dr Gladys joined me from her home in Arizona to tell me her secrets to health and happiness. We discussed ageing into health, femifesting (as opposed to manifesting), how divorce was the remaking of her, finding her voice at 93 and why we should all spend our energy wildly!

I know this isn’t the first time I’ve said I found my old bird role model, but seriously. Dr Gladys is IT.

If you loved this episode you might also like my conversations with Hilma Wolitzer and Isabel Allende

* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including The Well-Lived Life by Dr Gladys McGarey and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.

* And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including exclusive transcripts of the podcast, why not join The Shift community, come and have a look around at www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com

• The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Juliette Nicholls @ Pineapple Audio Production. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker.

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For this bonus episode of The Shift, I’m delighted to welcome a very special guest: the award-winning author of ten bestselling novels, Barbara Kingsolver. 

Every so often, a book comes along that you want to press into the hands of everyone you meet. For me, Demon Copperhead, is one of those books. A reimagining of the Dickens classic, David Copperfield, translated to the Appalachian mountains in the midst of the opioid crisis that has gripped the area. It’s funny, it’s furious and its hero Demon is a character you will never ever forget. 

I’m not the only one who thinks so. Earlier this year Barbara was awarded a Pulitzer Prize and now she’s become the first person ever to win the Women's Prize for Fiction twice (she won over a decade ago for her novel, The Lacuna).

A couple of weeks ago, Barbara foolishly let me and my little mic into her Edinburgh hotel room to tell me how growing up weird, bookish and poor shaped her and how she discovered she was a so-called hillbilly. We also discussed being an introvert in an extrovert world, finding love second time around, not winning the jackpot in the mothering department and why life gets better with every decade – and at 68 and the top of her game, she's living proof.

She also shares her killer packing tips and, I have to say, if you ever wanted to do a three week holiday with just a carry-on, Barbara is your woman!

* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.

* And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including transcripts of the podcast, please consider joining The Shift community. Find out more at www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com

• The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve all had those moments in our lives when everything feels… darker, colder, a little (or a lot) less hopeful. Those emotional winters were perfectly encapsulated by today’s guest, Katherine May in her transatlantic bestseller, Wintering, the power of rest and retreat in difficult times. Her new book is another soothing antidote for the way we live now, Enchantment, Reawakening wonder in an exhausted age.

I don’t know if it’s the aftermath of the pandemic, our always on culture, or just… life, but this spoke to me in exactly the way Wintering did. So, that’s a thumbs up from me.

Katherine joined me from her home by her beloved seaside (hence the seagulls!) to talk about her midlife autism diagnosis, why she believes we’re living through the burnout decade and how to wrest back control of our lives from our work. She told me about entering perimenopause at 29 but still being absolutely livid in her mid-40s, how she’s fully over “white male gurus” and why she wants to open up the conversation about meaning.

* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Enchantment by Katherine May and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.

• The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker.

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If you were a teenager in the late 80s you only have to hear the name Neneh Cherry to conjure the image of Neneh, seven months pregnant, on the Top of the Pops stage performing her hit Buffalo Stance. She was the epitome of cool. She made teenage girls everywhere believe that anything was possible.

Now, almost 40 years later, the award-winning singer, songwriter, rapper, producer, mother of three, stepmother of one, grandmother of four, has lived - and continues to live - the most incredible life. She has released six critically acclaimed albums, won two Brits and been nominated for a Grammy. 

And now she has written a memoir that takes us from her peripatetic childhood moving between Sweden and New York with her mother Swedish artist Moki Karlsson and her step-dad jazz trumpeter Don Cherry to the present day. It quite honestly blew me away.

A Thousand Threads takes those strands and weaves them into a story of creativity and collaboration, love and loss, motherhood and daughterhood, and above all what it means to be a woman. I inhaled it. (And if you're in the market I highly recommend having Neneh read it to you on audible.)

Neneh and I got on zoom to talk about home, family, losing her mother Moki at just 66 and losing herself to grief and menopause, finding pleasure in the little things, being a gran, staying creative forever and so so much more. TBH teenage Sam is beside herself right now. I hope you love this as much as I loved making it.

* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including A THOUSAND THREADS BY NENEH CHERRY and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.

* If you enjoyed this episode and you fancy buying me a coffee, pop over to my page on buymeacoffee.com.

• And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including exclusive transcripts of the podcast, why not join The Shift community, come and have a look around at www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com

• The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Juliette Nicholls @ Pineapple Audio Production. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My guest today is the fashion designer Bella Freud. Bella launched her eponymous label in 1990. Over thirty years later it remains resolutely independent, one of the very few that hasn’t been subsumed by a fashion conglomerate. 

Bella’s clothes are for wearing and have become a byword for women who want to be glamorous but not girly with a bit of added wit. Her iconic word jumpers are one of the most covetable individual fashion items bar none. (As her instant-sell out collaboration with M&S proved.)

Bella has always played with her heritage (her father, the artist Lucian Freud designed her famous dog logo and great-grandfather was Sigmund Freud, widely credited as the inventor of psycho analysis) and now she’s launched a podcast - Fashion Neurosis with Bella Freud - where she literally puts celebrities on the couch to analyse their relationship with style. Eric Cantona, Zadie Smith and even Kate Moss have succumbed and, I have to say, it’s an eye-opener.

I met Bella at home in North West London to talk about growing up outside convention and how she finally shook off her childhood coping mechanisms. We discussed the “wonderful feeling of progress” that’s come with ageing, what we can gain from unravelling life’s knots and the impact of losing both of her parents in one week. Bella also told me how her body image shaped her designs and how she’s learnt to appreciate her body as she’s aged. Fashion is a magic carpet, she says, and she’s the living proof.

* You can buy all the 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 @ Pineapple Audio Production. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My guest today is a woman who is credited with putting poetry back on the map, Donna Ashworth…. Donna came to prominence in 2020, when a poem she wrote about lockdown was read in a viral video to raise money for the NHS. She subsequently self-published her first volume of poetry, To The Women, which sold over 100,000 copies. Unsurprisingly the publishing industry came a-calling.

Now The UK’s best selling poet, Donna has written eight books, including the bestsellers Wild Hope and I Wish I Knew and you’ll find them on the bedside tables of millions of women.

Her latest, Growing Brave, a collection of words to soothe fear and let more life in, feels once again, perfectly pitched for the times we’re living through. 

Donna joined me for what is probably the most emotionally intelligent conversation I’ve ever had here on The Shift. We talked about being dubbed “the difficult one” and how we grow into the labels we’re given, how to win the self-worth battle, the secret to being well-boundaried, why she doesn’t care for a “man-made” timeline and finding her calling in midlife. Also, I should warn you that Donna is incredibly generous and candid when it comes to talking about her experience of anorexia and how it feels to age with an eating disorder.

* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Growing Brave by Donna Ashworth and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.

* If you enjoyed this episode and you fancy buying me a coffee, pop over to my page on buymeacoffee.com.

• And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including exclusive transcripts of the podcast, why not join The Shift community, come and have a look around at www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com

• The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Juliette Nicholls @ Pineapple Audio Production. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My guest today is one incredible woman.

Baroness Lola Young of Hornsey is an actress, academic, campaigner for social justice and a cross bench peer in the House of Lords.

By anyone’s standards she has achieved. 

She studied at the New College of Speech and Drama and started her career as an actress in the 1970s and 80s, before becoming professor of Cultural Studies at Middlesex University. In 2001 she received an OBE and became an independent peer in the house of lords in 2004, where she has actively campaigned against modern slavery and unethical fashion, amongst other things. 

But before all that, from the age of just 8 weeks old, Lola moved between foster care placements and children’s homes. Then, at the age of 18, she was pushed off what she calls “the care cliff”.

Now that childhood is the subject of Eight Weeks, her stunning memoir of a childhood in care and her journey to discovering her own story. 

As she says herself, when people say “this is my friend Lola, she grew up in care, now she’s in the house of lords” it misses out rather a lot of steps on the way.

Lola joined me to tell me how it felt to start trying to weave together the scattered parts of herself in her 50s and how growing up in care turned her into an activist. We also discussed everyday racism, what it’s really like being a Black woman in the House of Lords, her conflicted relationship with visibility and why somebody has to go first so it might as well be you. 

* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Eight Weeks by Baroness Lola Young and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.

* If you enjoyed this episode and you fancy buying me a coffee, pop over to my page on buymeacoffee.com.

• And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including exclusive transcripts of the podcast, why not join The Shift community, come and have a look around at www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com

• The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Juliette Nicholls @ Pineapple Audio Production. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My guest today is the forensic psychotherapist Dr Jennifer Cox. She trained at the Tavistock and now has an extensive practice specialising in treating women with undiagnosed anger. As part of this work she developed the Women are Mad approach to help women who can’t afford therapy to “think below the surface” about where their rage might be coming from.

Sounds like it might be useful? I thought so, too.

Jen is also the co host of the Women Are Mad podcast and has written a book called Women Are Angry which is very much what it says on the tin. 

Her mission? To help us identify our rage and let it the hell out. Productively. Of course.

Jen joined me for a fascinating conversation about the nature of female rage and why she thinks we’re seeing such a groundswell of fury now. We also discussed the impact of being a young carer, when and why we learn to “bitch”, why it’s easier to be a worried person than an angry one and the moment the anger penny dropped for her.

CW: I should warn you that there’s passing discussion of suicidal ideation, eating disorders and depression

Note: This was recorded before the November 5 election in the US.

* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Women are Angry by Jennifer Cox and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.

* If you enjoyed this episode and you fancy buying me a coffee, pop over to my page on buymeacoffee.com.

• And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including exclusive transcripts of the podcast, why not join The Shift community, come and have a look around at www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com

• The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Juliette Nicholls @ Pineapple Audio Production. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My guest today is Louise Doughty, the woman behind some of the knottiest thrillers to grace our bookshelves and TV screens in recent years. Her bestseller, Apple Tree Yard about a sensible middle aged woman who makes a very unsensible decision (involving sex in the house of commons!) sold over half a million copies and was turned into a smash hit BBC series starring Emily Watson. She was also the brains behind the breathtaking BBC drama Crossfire that starred Keeley Hawes. 

Of course What you don’t hear, is that Apple Tree Yard was Louise’s 7th novel, catapulting her to “the big time” at the age of 50.

Her latest book, A Bird In Winter, looks set to continue that trajectory. Think The 39 steps if the lead was an extremely resourceful 50something woman on the run.

Louise joined me to talk about how her “overnight” success at 50” transformed her life (mainly she finally started a pension!) And why it’s still considered controversial when middle aged women have sex! We also discussed surviving the menopause-puberty collision, the unrealised fury - and potential - of the middle aged woman and the power and importance of realising you’re not for everyone. And that’s fine.

Note: apologies for the occasionally disrupted sound quality at the start of this episode.

* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including A Bird in Winter by Louise Doughty and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.

* If you enjoyed this episode and you fancy buying me a coffee, pop over to my page on buymeacoffee.com.

• And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including exclusive transcripts of the podcast, why not join The Shift community, come and have a look around at www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com

• The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Juliette Nicholls @ Pineapple Audio Production. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices