00:03:04.640Awesome. I know that we're not supposed to ask women their age, or we weren't supposed to ask0.97
00:03:09.700women their age before. I think that's dumb. I like talking about my age. I'm pretty sure you0.99
00:03:14.620do too. Yeah, I think that that is one of the many, many conventions of midlife that we should
00:03:21.180absolutely be tossing out. Like, what is wrong with being 44? Should I be like apologizing that
00:03:26.760I'm not 25? I was a nightmare at 25. You're much better getting me at 44. Oh my God. I was such a
00:03:34.480disaster at 25. I was the absolute worst, to be honest. I mean, I could do a whole podcast series
00:03:41.560about how bad I was at 25. I think, especially, you know, now that I'm in my 40s, our youth
00:03:48.220worshiping culture is so bizarre because you are the most unhinged, making the worst decisions
00:03:56.280ever in that era of your life and why we are still kind of insisting on holding it up as some kind of
00:04:03.480peak or you know everything's downhill from there is just i don't know no i want i want i want to
00:04:11.040replace that mantra with telling 21 year olds 25 year olds 29 year olds y'all it is all uphill from0.97
00:04:18.580here it is it is nothing nothing but up i would not go back to my 20s for a goddamn thing i love0.98
00:04:23.820myself in my 40s so much i don't even i don't even really dislike my boobs my 20 year something0.95
00:04:29.340boobs were great but my boobs now are totally fine my my boobs and i are at peace at in every0.69
00:04:36.060era we are at peace and that is that is the number one thing i strive for boob i i boob peace boob
00:04:41.680peace i think that we should uh get mugs that say in every era i strive for boob peace that is going
00:04:48.020to be my first piece of merch thank you oh you're welcome this is what i do this is what i do i help
00:04:52.160design design merch for people uh yeah i just i really i completely agree i think that it's
00:04:58.540ridiculous that our culture worships youth. I was just telling a book club the other night,
00:05:02.920I was doing a book club for Parisian heist. And, you know, this is a gentle reminder that
00:05:07.780if y'all read the Parisian heist, I will zoom into your book clubs because
00:05:10.900that is what I do as a 46 year old woman. But I was saying I have women who are in their early
00:05:17.92020s who are pull off an all women art heist in the book. And then I have this badass woman in1.00
00:05:24.100her 80s and she's my favorite character maybe one of my favorites I've ever written also juicy in
00:05:29.880Sicilian inheritance who's in her 50s but I just think it's so much more interesting to me to write
00:05:36.320a woman who's lived a life rather than a woman who's trying to figure out a life I find the young0.74
00:05:41.320women in their 20s hard to write hard to grasp on to hard to like get get into their heads because0.74
00:05:48.340Because, I mean, I think if you were in my head in my 20s, it was just it was probably a terrible, terrible maze of doom to be in.0.97
00:05:58.260I think if you got in my head in my 20s, it would just be a giant billboard that said, someone please like me, which is probably why our culture is so fixated on women in their 20s that, you know, you're more malleable and you're willing to do a lot more to get people to think you're all right than you are older and wiser.0.76
00:06:18.620Yeah, exactly. Exactly. No. And you are you've been working on a project trying to change this narrative around midlife, how to talk about midlife, how not to blow up your freaking life in midlife. Tell me a little bit about that.0.83
00:06:36.180uh yeah so my co-author lindsey goldwart and i wrote a book called the midlife plot twist
00:06:43.520and basically our stance is that if you are you know in midlife in your 40s and you start
00:06:51.020asking a lot of questions like is this is this life i built actually for me do i actually you
00:06:57.960know maybe hate a lot of it um you know i think especially because of cultural pressure to kind
00:07:04.480have things figured out by now, a lot of us will feel like shame or be like, oh, my God, no, I
00:07:10.740should just be grateful for what I have. And, you know, we think instead, if you are feeling those
00:07:17.420feelings in midlife, number one, they're totally natural. We surveyed 150 women and those feelings
00:07:23.740are so common. And two, if you feel those feelings, it's not like because you're an ingrate,
00:07:30.780It's because your brain is sending you an SOS signal going, you know, please change.
00:07:36.420Please, you know, let's have a different life.
00:07:39.260And, you know, luckily, when you're in bed life, you have so you have so much data, you
00:07:44.660have so much information from the life you've lived that you can understand your values
00:07:50.500and understand maybe the kind of life you'd want to build that might actually satisfy
00:07:55.360you in a way that I think is really difficult when you're younger.
00:08:00.780And you're you're a pop culture expert who, like me, has just been living in the trenches of pop culture for for a long time, for half our lives, honestly.
00:08:10.420And how have you seen these ideas that we were just talking about, about youth just being so dominant, show up in our pop culture?
00:08:19.660Oh, I mean, you know, look, and it has been getting better a little bit in recent years as, you know, younger Gen X and millennials, say, you know, female actors have been, you know, permitted to keep having careers.
00:08:39.660But I think especially when we were younger, you know, young actresses were sort of held up on TV and in films as just this is this is the cultural goal.
00:08:54.420And then when you hit a point, usually at a very young age, you know, suddenly you are the mother and we're not interested in your story anymore.
00:09:03.300Or I'm thinking of, I don't know if this might resonate with other listeners around my age.
00:09:10.260In the early 2000s, there was a movie where Angelina Jolie played Colin Farrell's mother.
00:09:18.400Oh, I sure do. I sure do. It was Alexander. Am I correct?
00:09:21.700Yeah, yeah, it was Alexander. And I believe she was like five or seven years older than him.
00:09:26.340But she had, you know, crossed the line. Maybe she was over 35. Oh, my God.
00:09:30.980and so they were like yeah you're you're a mom now you're a mom to someone who's basically the
00:09:36.260same exact age as you oh yes yes yes yes i i think about that so so much i'm hoping it's changing
00:09:46.940one of the things that's been tricky for me is as i've been talking about parisian heist a lot
00:09:50.920people are like oh my gosh who do you want what actresses do you want to play everyone and i'm
00:09:54.560like i don't know anyone's anyone in hollywood's age okay first off i don't know actresses in their
00:10:00.26020s I'm like oh could it be Scarlett Johansson no she's like 50 like me but then all of the women
00:10:06.160in their who are in their 40s like me um look the same as the women in their 60s the women in their
00:10:11.98080s look like they're 50 and it's very confusing oh yeah no I have no idea what age anyone is I
00:10:18.980mean I think also as I've gotten older I think um like 23 year olds are 17 so uh also not a good
00:10:25.420judge there. Also not a good judge there, not a good judge there. But do you think that it's
00:10:30.020changing? Do you think that we're starting to see more stories and narratives in popular culture
00:10:35.680about women who are our age and not just women who are our age, but women who are our age who1.00
00:10:41.720enjoy their fucking lives? I think we're definitely we're definitely getting there. And I mean,0.99
00:10:48.660the examples so far are kind of imperfect because a lot of them are still, you know,
00:10:54.480They're about a, you know, traditionally, quote unquote, beautiful, you know, thin, wealthy white woman.
00:11:02.500I'm thinking of, you know, a movie like The Idea of You, if you saw that, with Anne Hathaway.
00:11:18.480She has a, you know, divorced single mom in midlife.
00:11:21.780She runs an art gallery and she has a sort of very compelling affair with a guy who is, I mean, he's supposed to be, he's supposed to be Harry Styles. I'll just, I'll just say that out there. I know it's not, not legally allowed, but everyone knows he's supposed to be Harry Styles.
00:11:40.260And they have this very invigorating relationship. And, you know, it's a compelling, I thought it was a compelling story. And kind of, you know, despite the fact that, you know, Anne Hathaway is a very specific idea of the kind of woman in midlife that we're allowed to look at, I still thought kind of the way it foregrounded her love and her pleasure was so interesting.
00:12:08.260And, you know, we've had, I think, a lot of, not a lot of, a lot of compared to the past movies about women in midlife recently.
00:12:14.960But some of them, you know, like, say The Substance, which was a huge hit, that was not necessarily a movie about enjoying midlife.
00:12:24.380So kind of in that landscape, I thought The Idea of You was really great.
00:12:28.680Yeah, I also, the one thing that annoyed me about Idea of You was that Anne Hathaway had a body in it that looked like a 23-year-old's body.0.92
00:12:37.160like and she's wearing like this string bikini in it and again fine cool for you it's just like i do1.00
00:12:41.640not know that many women in midlife especially ones who have had kids as she did in this movie1.00
00:12:46.620who do not have a little belly belly pooch and i mean that's like what you run into i think with0.98
00:12:52.700any of these big pop culture things so far like that the things that you know a movie studio or
00:12:58.740what have you is willing to sink a ton of money into like you know that woman has to be an actress
00:13:04.720who goes to Pilates five times a day.0.99
00:14:16.060There was a great podcast a few years back talking about Kathy and how revolutionary Kathy's life as a middle-aged woman actually was to see in comics.
00:14:26.800I think there are a lot of things interestingly I think there has been we're having a moment where
00:14:33.640I think there are more big budget movies maybe exploring you know middle-aged women's lives and
00:14:39.100sexuality but if you go into the past there's a lot of forgotten media that explores the lives
00:14:46.040of women in middle age who are you know less less glamorous than an Anne Hathaway who are a little
00:14:50.580more realistic and a little more down-to-earth and I think yeah Kathy is an interesting example of
00:14:55.280this. Totally, totally. Well, also, I'll tell you, I think that the 80s were really great for this.
00:15:01.300And these sitcoms were exploring ambitious and interesting women in middle life. And then they
00:15:07.080just freaking went away. I mean, I'm talking about the Kate and Allie's and the Who's the Boss. I
00:15:12.040mean, these women were ambitious and successful and they were building mom communes. And then1.00
00:15:17.120all of a sudden we kind of saw yet another sea change in the other direction.
00:15:21.220Yeah. Also, my favorite from that era, Murphy Brown, which I think had an unspeakable, I can never say the impact Murphy Brown had on me. She also becomes a single mother by choice towards the end of the series. It was really, really great stuff.
00:15:37.780And, you know, I think we had in the late 90s through the early 2000s had a tremendous feminist backlash, much like the one we're experiencing right now, where all these kind of complex stories about women later in life just, you know, suddenly they're they're unbankable and suddenly everything has to be a Judd Apatow movie about like farts.
00:16:01.320exactly exactly or you're allowed to be a funny woman in your 50s much like
00:16:07.700judd apatow's beloved wife who i adore but you have to look like you're 31
00:16:12.240he also i think she is so much he i i have a bone to pick with jed apatow actually please
00:16:20.800please tell me please tell me sometimes i feel like he she is so funny leslie man
00:16:26.560Leslie Mann is funnier than Judd Apatow.
00:16:29.980And I feel like some of the roles he was writing for her in that early 2000s period were just like these inane, sexist, like she's your wife and she's yelling at you roles.
00:19:08.740Talk to me a little bit about your midlife.
00:19:11.320And then I want to talk about your midlife plot twist.
00:19:13.720so my own midlife and you said before when does midlife start and I think I think you you know
00:19:21.080when you're in midlife you can personally I feel like everyone has their own moment where they're
00:19:26.080like okay I'm in the middle of it um and I think I had that probably around my very late 30s and
00:19:33.520I guess I knew I was in midlife because I started having a midlife crisis where I started kind of
00:19:40.960questioning everything about the life I had been living you know I had been working as a blogger
00:19:49.720which is a job that doesn't really exist anymore and kind of as that fell apart I just started
00:19:57.000asking myself like who actually am I what do I actually want what do I want like the next 40
00:20:06.040years to look like because I don't think I can do them the same way I did the first 40 where you
00:20:13.260know I'm obsessively trying to people please and just trying to you know do everything correctly
00:20:21.500win at my job you know whatever and um I kind of really got in it and got down in it and ended up
00:20:31.160just sort of looking at every aspect of my life and going is is this still working and if the
00:20:37.920answer was no being like I have to figure out something else um and so yeah I'm 44 now so
00:20:47.260that stuff has uh calmed down a bit now I guess I find myself on the other side of it and you know
00:20:54.700I've kind of got a new career permutation. I had some some shakeups in my marriage that have
00:21:02.820have settled down now. And I find myself probably confident on the other side of it in a way I
00:21:14.020could not have imagined before it happened. Which I think is a really great argument for
00:21:19.900this plot twist for a reboot for just doing an inventory of what do I like now what don't I like
00:21:27.880what I don't want to what I don't want to have in my life anymore yeah I think so many of us
00:21:34.960you find yourself still living out patterns or living out a life based on decisions you made
00:21:41.360when you were like 22 you know a lot of us pick careers like the day after we get out of college
00:21:47.160or make up ideas about the kind of person we want to be in a relationship
00:21:52.480based on, like, a Jennifer Aniston movie we saw in 1998.
00:21:56.720Like, and before you even realize that you've spent years living out these things,
00:22:02.920and I think it's pretty natural to get to a point where you go,
00:22:08.240were these actually great decisions?0.98
00:22:11.620And I don't think I know my reaction when I first had that feeling was to be really, really embarrassed and be like, I am the only idiot to have ever made a bad call.0.87
00:22:30.280I think we're all idiots idioting right now and and trying to figure out what we want life to look like for the second half of our life.1.00
00:22:39.100Like I said earlier, I'm happier than I've ever been.1.00
00:22:41.440I'm a big fan of my 40s. I think I'll be a big fan of my 50s as long as my kids don't morph into
00:22:47.580teenage assholes, which could very well happen. But at the same time, I know that it takes a lot0.98
00:22:53.360of work to figure out how you're going to be happy in midlife. And for a really long time,
00:23:01.280we have been talking about the midlife crisis is a joke, right? It's been a punchline forever,
00:23:06.480but only for men, right? Never for women. I mean, I think the midlife crisis is so interesting1.00
00:23:13.860because it went from being kind of a thing that was taken seriously in the 70s to this joke by
00:23:19.060the time we grew up and, you know, something that we would roll our eyes at, you know, like in
00:23:25.480American beauty or something. But I do think we also had this idea of a female midlife crisis0.60
00:23:31.780That is, you know, you have to burn it all down like she is a little bit younger than midlife.0.56
00:23:36.960But I think a lot of people think of eat, pray, love like, you know, that's what I have to do.
00:23:41.520If I feel dissatisfied with my life, I have to quit everything and leave everything and, you know, move to Europe for a year.
00:23:49.580And then you think to yourself, well, obviously, I can't do that because I'm a regular person without a book advance.
00:23:55.080And so, you know, you feel like the option is doing that or doing nothing.
00:31:06.020I also don't give any of the Fs anymore.
00:31:08.600I mean, I think also it's tougher than ever to give us, especially career-wise, considering how most of these career ladders that we were told to be so obsessed with are absolutely falling apart.
00:31:22.080They're just gone. They're just gone. OK, they're not around anymore. But I want to talk a little bit more about careers after we get back from our last break.
00:31:33.840Wish you could skip this ad? We get it.
00:31:38.640Wish you could just skip to retirement?
00:33:19.560thank you so much for validating my nine job lifestyle, which I have to admit up until this
00:33:24.700moment, I did also think was maybe just me. And I was I was another idiot who made a mistake. So0.97
00:33:30.440we are learning in real time that this is this is just another another part of life now.
00:33:36.660But yeah, my life involves nine jobs. You know, I had a career in the media and then the media
00:33:42.260kind of imploded. And I have nine jobs right now. Writing writing this book was one of the nine
00:33:48.820jobs. And I think and I should say that Lindsay wrote that chapter. So she is going to be able to
00:33:55.640to give you maybe some more granular information about careers right now. But I do think that
00:34:02.860ironically, there is something a little bit freeing about realizing this career ladder that
00:34:11.380we were told to be obsessed with is just gone. You know, if you cannot climb this corporate ladder
00:34:18.240anymore because it doesn't exist because, you know, your company got bought out by DCs and
00:34:24.240they replaced everybody with AI. So if there are no jobs on this corporate ladder anymore,
00:34:30.960you do get an opportunity to go, well, what is there anything that makes money that I would
00:34:38.640actually enjoy doing? And, you know, some of my nine jobs are the answer to that question.
00:34:43.360I'm certainly, I don't think having nine jobs is the ideal, but I think there's sort of, there can be an interesting kind of midpoint between saying, yes, that's not ideal, but also I can embrace some of this as an opportunity to maybe have freedom in a way that I couldn't when I was trying to girl boss my way up the ladder.
00:35:11.280exactly exactly and i do think that it's freeing but you i think you guys also you're really
00:35:19.700writing for a group that i call the zillennials it's younger gen x it's older millennials i was
00:35:28.260born in 80 my husband was born in 74 he's much more xy than i am but i still think i'm much more
00:35:33.560exy than millennial? Because we did not have the same job security. We have a lot more student debt
00:35:42.800than the generations before us. And also, you know, we're a lot of us hadn't been able to buy
00:35:52.340houses or do the things that were promised of us. But I like the fact that this book talks to people
00:36:25.640I mean, and that is the interesting thing
00:36:27.180about uh millennials that sort of there is as much as you know the media might say oh you know
00:36:33.540it's happening this one particular way for everybody it is happening so many different
00:36:37.520ways to so many different people like yeah some people did get that you know the 401k that our
00:36:43.800parents were always telling us we needed to get some of us uh are living totally flexible lives
00:36:51.440that don't have that kind of security, but have other positives. And I do think, you know, not to
00:36:56.580I definitely am not trying to be toxically positive because there are downsides to all
00:37:02.320of these things. But there are also, you know, upsides to every situation. And, you know, I hope
00:37:09.140we we get at that in the book, kind of that in in almost any situation, even if your situation is
00:37:16.420not something that we were told you should aspire to. There are minuses and there are pluses. You
00:37:24.460probably don't have a situation that is entirely bad. And there's probably also no situation that's
00:37:29.900entirely good. And you shouldn't feel embarrassed about that. And you should be able to work with
00:37:37.100the pluses a little bit. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, there's one subheader in your book,
00:37:42.840and I'm going to talk about this with Lindsay too, but it caught me so much. I want to talk
00:37:45.780about it with both of you. We want to retire, but we're afraid to get old. And it's confusing.
00:37:51.660I don't even know what retirement is going to mean anymore. I mean, I don't none of us are
00:37:56.320going to go play golf starting at age 65. Most of us certainly can't afford that. But also,
00:38:02.300there's no social safety net and most of us don't have retirement accounts. So but then there's also
00:38:07.040no jobs. So what does retirement even look like to you? I mean, an amazing question. I will be
00:38:15.240totally, totally vulnerable here and say my 401k does not match the random numbers that you'll
00:38:25.060find when you're up late at night Googling, do I have enough money saved for retirement? So I do
00:38:29.860not. I do wonder what retirement will look like for our generation, because I think it's going to
00:38:38.340It's going to be completely different than the retirement we have now.
00:38:44.300You know, I don't, I think this system where we're just supposed to take care of ourselves
00:38:51.780and if, you know, you don't have enough saved, you know, see you in hell, I do feel like
00:38:57.460at some point that is going to crash and become untenable.
00:39:03.200So I have no idea what retirement is going to look like for us, but I do feel like it's
00:39:07.460going to look very different just because I don't think there's any way it can exist the way it's
00:39:13.380been going. Exactly. I mean, there's not, right? And again, you know, in so many episodes of the
00:39:19.980show recently, I've just been like, life's weird now. Like, the world's weird, right? It's all
00:39:24.260weird. I think it's going to be weird for a while. Do you think it's going to be weird for a while?
00:39:31.080Yeah, I think especially if you were, like, coming of age, you know, in the 90s,
00:39:35.480It is real different. You know, if your parents were boomers, your life is going to turn out real different from them, regardless of what you do or how many of the quote unquote right decisions you make.
00:39:48.240Like these are just different times. Different things are going on. I think things are so different and so weird that even some of our boomer parents are like finally being able to get the message that like, oh, things are different and harder than they were when I was in my 40s.
00:40:05.480all right we're going back to pop culture for a hot ass minute what would who is your ideal
00:40:14.240mid-life plot twist heroine if you could write a sitcom right now and i'm just putting you on the1.00
00:40:20.720spot do you have her in your head like a real person or like what would she be like what would
00:40:25.380she be doing what's what is the what is the plot twist in this sitcom that you're writing right now0.67
00:40:29.720on the spot. I think if we had a midlife plot twist sitcom, honestly, it would be a lot like
00:40:36.660to take it all the way back around a lot like those sitcoms from the 80s and 90s about women.
00:40:42.100I think it would be about a woman who is in her 40s, who has kids. Maybe she is divorced. She is0.99
00:40:51.660certainly experiencing the career ladder not functioning the way she was told it would. And
00:40:58.980it would just be you know a a early Roseanne style look at what what that kind of life is and0.92
00:41:06.760how you can experience some moments of joy in that even though a lot of parts of it suck
00:41:12.860I love that so much one more question you like me are also a massive fan of Judy Blume yes do you
00:41:23.240also desperately want to see are you there goddess me Margaret but for a woman in perimenopause
00:41:28.360Oh, my God. This is... Can you write this script? This is the best idea I have heard in so long. This is such a good idea.0.94
00:41:36.960I would love Judy to write it. We're going to Key West in December. I'll see if I can stalk her gently at the bookstore.
00:41:42.700I think so many of us grew up with that great young adult fiction. And I think this would be a great moment to kind of reexamine some of those tropes and some of those heroines who would all be in midlife now.
00:41:56.460Like, I would love a midlife babysitter's club.
00:41:59.040How did things turn out for Christy, you know?