00:02:45.780Awesome. I know that we're not supposed to ask women their age or we weren't supposed to ask women their age before.
00:02:52.040I think that's dumb. I like talking about my age. I'm pretty sure you do, too.0.95
00:02:56.600Yeah, I think that that is one of the many, many conventions of midlife that we should absolutely be tossing out.
00:03:03.440Like, what is what is wrong with being 44? Should I be like apologizing that I'm not 25?
00:03:09.100I was a I was a nightmare at 25. You're much better getting me at 24.
00:03:13.460Oh, my God. I was such a disaster at 25. I was I was the absolute worst, to be honest. I mean, I could do a whole podcast series about how bad I was at 25.
00:03:23.860I think especially, you know, now that I'm in my 40s, our youth worshiping culture is so bizarre because you are the most unhinged making the worst decisions ever in that era of your life and why we are still kind of insisting on holding it up as some kind of peak or, you know, everything's downhill from there is just, I don't even know.
00:03:48.880No, no. I want to replace that mantra with telling 21-year-olds, 25-year-olds, 29-year-olds, y'all, it is all uphill from here. It is nothing but up. I would not go back to my 20s for a goddamn thing. I love myself in my 40s so much. I don't even really dislike my boobs. My 20-something boobs were great, but my boobs now are totally fine.
00:04:33.500Yeah, I just, I really, I completely agree.
00:04:36.440I think that it's ridiculous that our culture worships the youth.
00:04:39.860I was just telling a book club the other night.
00:04:41.780I was doing a book club for Parisian Heist.
00:04:44.100And, you know, this is a gentle reminder that if y'all read the Parisian Heist, I will zoom into your book clubs because that is what I do as a 46-year-old woman.
00:04:52.700But I was saying I have women who are in their early 20s who pull off an all-woman art heist in the book.
00:04:58.780And then I have this badass woman in her 80s, and she's my favorite character, maybe one of my favorites I've ever written.1.00
00:05:05.900Also juicy in Sicilian Inheritance, who's in her 50s.
00:05:09.860But I just think it's so much more interesting to me to write a woman who's lived a life rather than a woman who's trying to figure out a life.
00:05:17.860I find the young women in their 20s hard to write, hard to grasp onto, hard to get into their heads because, 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.0.57
00:05:34.640I 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.1.00
00:05:54.600Yeah, 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
00:06:11.340Yeah. So my co-author Lindsay Goldwart and I wrote a book called The Midlife Plot Twist. And basically our stance is that if you are, you know, in midlife, in your 40s, and you start asking a lot of questions like, is this life I built actually for me? Do I actually, you know, maybe hate a lot of it?
00:06:33.320And, you know, I think especially because of cultural pressure to kind of have things figured out by now, a lot of us will feel like shame or be like, oh, my God, no, I should just be grateful for what I have.
00:06:45.480And, you know, we think instead, if you are feeling those feelings in midlife, number one, they're totally natural.
00:06:52.180We surveyed 150 women and those feelings are so common.
00:06:56.820And two, if you feel those feelings, it's not like because you're an ingrate.
00:07:02.040It's because your brain is sending you an SOS signal going, you know, please change.
00:07:07.660Please, you know, let's have a different life.
00:07:09.940And, you know, luckily, when you're in mid-lice, you have so you have so much data, you have
00:07:15.340so much information from the life you've lived that you can understand your values and understand
00:07:20.920maybe the kind of life you'd want to build that might actually satisfy you in a way that
00:07:26.200I think is really difficult when you're younger.
00:07:28.960And 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.
00:07:38.340And how have you seen these ideas that we were just talking about, about youth just being so dominant, show up in our pop culture?
00:07:47.280I mean, you know, look, and it's I it is 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 permitted to to keep having careers.
00:08:05.040But 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.
00:08:17.360And 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.
00:08:26.220I'm thinking of I don't know if this might resonate with other listeners around my age.
00:08:32.060In the early 2000s, there was a movie where Angelina Jolie played Colin Farrell's mother.
00:08:39.540Oh, I sure do. I sure do. It was Alexander, am I correct?
00:08:42.980Yeah, yeah, it was Alexander. And I believe she was like five or seven years older than him,
00:08:47.460but she had to, you know, cross the line. Maybe she was over 35. Oh, my God. And so they were
00:08:53.220like, yeah, you're a mom now. You're a mom to someone who's basically the same exact age as
00:08:58.720you yes yes yes yes i i think about that so so much i'm hoping it's changing one of the things
00:09:06.260that's been tricky for me is as i've been talking about parisian heist a lot people are like oh my
00:09:10.400gosh who do you want what actresses do you want to play everyone and i'm like i don't know anyone
00:09:14.320anyone in hollywood's age okay first off i don't know actresses in their 20s i'm like oh could it
00:09:20.480be scarlett johansson no she's like 50 like me but then all of the women in there who are in their
00:09:26.02040s like me look the same as the women in their 60s. The women in their 80s look like they're 50,0.58
00:09:30.900and it's very confusing. Oh, yeah. No, I have no idea what age anyone is. I mean, I think also0.79
00:09:37.380as I've gotten older, I think like 23-year-olds are 17, so also not a good judge there. Also not
00:09:44.180a good judge there, not a good judge there. But do you think that it's changing? Do you think
00:09:48.240that we're starting to see more stories and narratives in popular culture about women who1.00
00:09:54.460are our age and not just women who are our age but women who are our age who enjoy their fucking0.96
00:09:59.500lives i think we're definitely we're definitely getting there and i mean the examples so far0.96
00:10:08.020are kind of imperfect because a lot of them are still you know they're about a
00:10:12.640you know traditionally quote-unquote beautiful you know thin wealthy white woman um but i'm
00:10:19.280thinking of, you know, a movie like The Idea of You, if you saw that, with Anne Hathaway.
00:10:24.460I really liked The Idea of You. I was very surprised by The Idea of You. Can you tell
00:10:29.180people what it's about if they haven't watched it yet? Sure. So Anne Hathaway plays, she has a,
00:10:35.520you know, divorced single mom in midlife. She runs an art gallery and she has a sort of very
00:10:41.980compelling affair with a guy who is, I mean, he's supposed to be, he's supposed to be Harry Styles.
00:10:47.880I'll just say that out there. I know it's not legally allowed, but everyone knows he's supposed to be Harry Styles. And they have this very invigorating relationship. And, you know, it's a compelling, I thought it was a compelling story.
00:11:01.740And 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.
00:11:20.440And, 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.
00:11:27.140But some of them, you know, like, say The Substance, which was a huge hit, that was not necessarily a movie about enjoying midlife.
00:11:35.080So kind of in that landscape, I thought The Idea of You was really great.
00:11:39.700Yeah, I also, the one thing that annoyed me about The Idea of You was that Anne Hathaway had a body in it that looked like a 23-year-old's body.1.00
00:11:48.380And she's wearing, like, this string bikini in it.0.99
00:11:51.660It's just like I do not know that many women in midlife, especially ones who have had kids, as she did in this movie, who do not have a little belly pooch.
00:12:01.160And I mean, that's like what you run into, I think, with any of these big pop culture things so far, like that the things like, you know, a movie studio or what have you is willing to sink a ton of money into like, you know, that woman has to be an actress who goes to Pilates five times a day.
00:12:17.120We're not we're not necessarily get or, you know, a woman who has had tons of hair and makeup and whatever else.
00:12:25.820And we've not quite gotten to the point where we are so comfortable celebrating women in midlife that we're willing to showcase women who actually look like they are in midlife.
00:12:37.180Exactly. Exactly. I mean, that would be a step too far.
00:12:39.520We can talk about women being 44 and 46, but they shall not look like the average 44 and 46 year old woman.0.53
00:12:45.720I mean, I think Anne Hathaway pretty much looks the same as she did in the original Devil Wears Prada. So as much as I want her to be an icon of middle-aged women, you know, being allowed to thrive on film, it's not necessarily relatable to most of us, I think.
00:13:02.160Truth, truth. I love that one of the quotes you include in the beginning of the book, one of them is from Willa Cather from O Pioneers. Love that one. But the other one is just, ah, from Kathy.
00:13:12.600You know, I think obviously a lot of us reading this grew up in the Kathy era, and I think
00:14:42.240And, 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.
00:14:59.540and suddenly everything has to be a Judd Apatow movie about, like, farts.
00:15:23.320I feel like she is so funny, Leslie Mann.
00:15:27.680Leslie Mann is funnier than Judd Apatow.
00:15:29.540She is funnier than Chad Apatow, and 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, and she is capable of so much more.
00:15:45.240So much more. I'm actually dying to see Spa Weekend. I rewatched This Is 40 recently, and that movie doesn't age well.
00:15:50.840It doesn't make 40 seem like 40. If you're living 40 right now, you're like, what the F are they even talking about?
00:15:57.940I thought that was a very, like, retro view of 40.
00:16:02.160I thought that, yeah, did not line up with the lives of most of the people I knew who were in their 40s.
00:16:19.520I mean, yeah, the interesting thing, I guess, sort of about midlife is what a midlife looks like, I think, has changed a lot.
00:16:26.860Because, you know, some of it because a lot of people are having children later. Some of it is because a lot of us can't afford to buy homes or, you know, our careers are a lot more unstable than they used to be. So in certain ways, I think even the even some of the recent media we've had about midlife, it feels like it's working from from an older version. It's working from, you know, maybe our parents ideas about midlife.
00:16:52.140Yeah, yeah, I agree. Well, I want to dig in a little bit about what your midlife has been like. What do you consider the start of midlife? When we get back from a very quick break.
00:17:22.140Assurance and advice from someone who gets you.
00:17:34.860Talk to me a little bit about your midlife.
00:17:37.080And then I want to talk about your midlife plot twist.
00:17:40.420So my own midlife, and you said before, when does midlife start?
00:17:44.680And I think you know when you're in midlife.
00:17:47.880You can personally, I feel like everyone has their own moment where they're like,
00:17:52.020okay I'm in the middle of it and I think I had that probably around my very late 30s and I guess
00:17:59.280I knew I was in midlife because I started having a midlife crisis where I started kind of questioning
00:18:06.200everything about the life I had been living you know I had been working as a blogger which is a
00:18:14.640job that doesn't really exist anymore and kind of as that fell apart I just started asking myself
00:18:21.740Like, who actually am I? What do I actually want? What do I want like the next 40 years to look like? Because I don't think I can do them the same way I did the first 40 where, you know, I'm obsessively trying to people please and just trying to, you know, do everything correctly, win at my job, you know, whatever.
00:18:47.320And I kind of really got in it and got down in it and ended up just sort of looking at every aspect of my life and going, is this still working? And if the answer was no being like, I have to figure out something else.
00:19:02.120and so yeah I'm 44 now so that stuff has calmed down a bit now I guess I find myself on the other
00:19:11.020side of it and you know I've kind of got a new career permutation and I had some some shake-ups
00:19:18.500in my marriage that have have settled down now and I find myself probably
00:19:26.220confident on the other side of it in a way I could not have imagined before it happened
00:19:32.040Which I think is a really great argument for this plot twist, for a reboot, for just doing an inventory of what do I like now, what don't I like, what I don't want to, what I don't want to have in my life anymore.
00:19:46.060yeah I think so many of us you find yourself still living out patterns or living out a life
00:19:53.980based on decisions you made when you were like 22 you know a lot of us pick careers like the
00:19:59.600day after we get out of college or make up ideas about the kind of person we want to be
00:20:05.400in a relationship based on like a Jennifer Aniston movie we saw in 1998 like and you
00:20:11.480But before you even realize that you've spent years living out these things, and I think it's pretty natural to get to a point where you go, are these actually, were these actually great decisions?0.89
00:20:25.460And 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.0.86
00:20:38.240I'm the only idiot to ever, ever idiot.1.00
00:20:40.140No, no. I think we're all idiots idioting right now and trying to figure out what we want life to look like for the second half of our life. Like I said earlier, I'm happier than I've ever been. I'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 teenage assholes, which could very well happen.1.00
00:21:01.700But at the same time, I know that it takes a lot of work to figure out how you're going to be happy in midlife.0.80
00:21:09.140And for a really long time, we have been talking about the midlife crisis is a joke, right?0.55
00:21:16.040It's been a punchline forever, but only for men, right?0.96
00:21:21.660I mean, I think the midlife crisis is so interesting because it went from being kind of a thing that was taken seriously in the 70s to this joke by the time we grew up.1.00
00:21:31.240And, you know, something that we would roll our eyes at, you know, like in American beauty or something. But I do think we also had this idea of a female midlife crisis that is, you know, you have to burn it all down. Like she is a little bit younger than midlife. But I think a lot of people think as eat, pray, love. Like, you know, that's what I have to do. If I feel dissatisfied with my life, I have to quit everything and leave everything and, you know, move to Europe for a year.0.94
00:21:59.420And then you think to yourself, well, obviously, I can't do that because I'm a regular person without a book advance. And so, you know, you feel like the option is doing that or doing nothing. And that's not true at all.
00:22:11.600Well, exactly. I think so much of this, they're smaller steps, right? Like it's like, yes, there's a pivot, but I'm not going to blow up my life. I'm not going to go eat, pray and love and do all those things because that's not rational. Also, let's talk about the fact that Liz Gilbert eat, prayed and loved and she was still not, she still ended up with not the things that she wanted in her life is the nicest, easiest way of saying that.
00:22:36.120I think that her her last book, which was about that, is like a great example of why a lot of the time blowing up your life doesn't help. Like, it's dramatic. I'm sure it feels amazing in the moment, but it doesn't, you know, it doesn't necessarily do the hard work of deeply thinking about, you know, the patterns you have or deeply thinking about the messaging that you grew up with about how to live a life.
00:23:02.560You know, if you burn down your life and move to Italy, well, now you're in Italy, but you still have to think about all of your ideas about, you know, success and relationships and family.
00:23:14.620There's kind of there's no getting out of the thinking part.
00:23:18.680Exactly. Exactly. One of the things you guys ask a lot of questions that I think seem really obvious in this book, but they're not really obvious because we don't ask them a lot.
00:23:26.440In fact, I want to send these out to my group text texts, things like, what do I actually like?
00:23:32.020I mean, and that is from like our own lives. And I was, again, like totally embarrassed when I realized I don't even know. I don't even know what I actually like. So much of my life has been, you know, optimized to make people think I am, you know, a good girl or a person they want to hire or a person they want to be around, like in terms of what would actually make me happy. I have no goddamn idea.
00:23:58.920I do not know. I am not certain. Well, exactly. I, you know, I read that question and I'm like,0.97
00:24:03.560what, what do I like? What, what do I'm trying to think about it? Like, let's name them the
00:24:07.680things I like. I like my kids. Okay. Like I do. I actually like being a mom a lot more than I
00:24:13.820thought I would. I do not like being with my kids all of the time. Okay. Like I don't,
00:24:18.060I do not want to be a full-time all hands on deck mom all the time. I really like traveling. I would
00:24:24.620say my friend was my friend is doing this experiment where she tries to be like she tries
00:24:30.020a bunch of different hobbies all the time and I'm like I I might not be a hobby person I tried I
00:24:37.100tried crocheting and I was like I hate crocheting I'd like can travel be a hobby because I love
00:24:42.120traveling or someone I want to travel travel and then write about travel all the time which is good
00:24:47.420because I write books about travel but just generally I think it is hard to like sit down
00:24:52.780and be like, I like this. What do you like? I was. So, yeah, this was a huge thing for me to
00:24:57.940figure out. I realized I like I tried a bunch of hobbies. I'm also not a hobby person. I hated
00:25:02.820all of them. I mostly just like I like popular culture. You know, I love movies. I love reading.
00:25:08.740It turned out that I like my marriage after we did a few tweaks to it. I like my home in New
00:25:15.680York City. I like living here and I like writing. And, you know, that was sort of enough information
00:25:22.980for me to try to figure out how to move forward. But it was it was hard to like that stuff sounds
00:25:29.540so basic, but it took so much time and so much effort to even get there. It's basic, but it's
00:25:37.400not basic. It's so important, right? Like these are the things that matter. What actually makes
00:25:41.720you happy? What do you like doing? Who do you like being around? One of the best things that's
00:25:46.220happened in my 40s is if I don't like being around a person, I'm not going to be around them.
00:25:51.000If I don't like working with a person, I'm not going to work with them. And I know that's a
00:25:54.100privilege to have that choice in a lot of situations, but I'm just not dealing with0.68
00:25:58.400toxic douchebags anymore. And I mean, I think especially to like take it back around to when
00:26:04.380we were young, like who was asking us what we actually liked when we were young? I think
00:26:09.140especially for, you know, older millennial and younger Gen X women, like we came of age in like
00:26:15.000the era of totally toxic dating books that were just about, you know, changing yourself to try to
00:26:22.740try to get married or find a relationship or books like he's just not that into you. Well,
00:26:28.180I don't know. Who cares what he's into? What am I into? What am I into? Oh, my God. That's
00:26:32.820who cares what he's into? I don't care. I do not care at all. Exactly.
00:26:37.680And yeah, I think just we are so infrequently asked, like, what is actually meaningful and interesting to us? And, you know, that's certainly something that I hope is changing. I think, you know, Gen X and millennial women who are raising children, I think they're raising them with, you know, a totally different framework.
00:26:57.520and they are raising their daughters to kind of experience life really differently than we did
00:27:03.480and to experience life extending from what actually makes them feel good
00:27:09.120instead of what would make other people feel good about them.
00:27:12.060But I think for women of our generation, it can be a tough nut to crack
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00:38:01.540What's what is the what is the plot twist in this sitcom that you're writing right now on the spot?
00:38:06.740I think if we had a midlife plot twist sitcom, honestly, it would be a lot like to take it all the way back around a lot like those sitcoms from the 80s and 90s about women.
00:38:17.420I think it would be about a woman who is in her 40s, who has kids.
00:39:09.460I mean, that's that I would actually like I would love Judy to write it.
00:39:12.840I don't know if we're going to Key West in December.
00:39:14.800I'll see if I can stalk her gently at the bookstore and talk her through it, because this is the book I want.
00:39:20.140This is the only book I want right now.
00:39:21.540I think that that I would there is nothing. I think so many of us grew up with that great young adult fiction. And I think this is 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. Like, I would love a midlife babysitters club. How did things turn out for Christy? You know, how did things turn out for Christy? I think Christy's doing great.
00:39:45.920I think I you know I related a lot to Mallory and I wonder how things are going for her I assume
00:39:52.320they're going as weird for her as they did for me but I would I would like I would love more than
00:39:56.780anything to have just midlife babysitters club babysitters reunion where where are they now
00:40:01.740who's doing what who had a midlife crisis so I think everyone's had a little bit of a midlife
00:40:06.440crisis I want to know I want to know who's in a thruple now I think Dawn Dawn's in a thruple