How does it feel to come from a family with a legend? If you’re today’s guest, novelist and playwright Esther Freud (daughter of painter Lucian Freud and great granddaughter of Sigmund Freud) you work with that legacy to produce some of the finest novels of the last thirty years. Her first Hideous Kinky, based on her unusual childhood, was made into a film starring Kate Winslet and after the follow-up, Peerless Flats, she was named one of Granta’s Best Young Novelists. Scroll forward a couple of...
Jun 08, 2021•41 min•Season 4Ep. 37
This is a replay of an episode published at the start of the year in which Kate Mosse talked about her experience of caring for both her own elderly parents, and her husband's mother. I'm replaying it now to coincide with the publication of her memoir, An Extra Pair of Hands, in which she writes movingly about that experience and its profound effect on her family. Kate is also founder of the Women's Prize for Fiction, now in its 26th year, and a bestselling author of seven novels and two short s...
Jun 03, 2021•43 min•Season 4Ep. 36
This week’s guest is the behavioural and data scientist, Dr Pragya Agarwal. A passionate campaigner for gender and race equality, Pragya is the author of the much-praised Sway, about unravelling unconscious bias, and the host of of the podcast, Wish We Knew What to Say: talking with children about race. Pragya is also - and I tell you this only because it’s relevant to today’s conversation - the mother of three daughters, the first is now in her early twenties, her twins, now aged five. It’s tha...
Jun 01, 2021•45 min•Season 4Ep. 35
My guest this week is a business woman, broadcaster, curator, tastemaker and DJ. She headlines festivals, hosts one of BBC Radio 1’s flagship shows, was Europe’s biggest female DJ and has her own hit podcast Changes with Annie Macmanus. And now, as if that wasn’t e-bloody-nough (bc let’s not forget the two kids), Annie has written her first novel, Mother Mother. Oh and she’s cool. And nice. (In the best possible way. Not in the I’m too lazy to think of a proper adjective kind of way.) Over the n...
May 25, 2021•42 min•Season 4Ep. 34
The phrase force-of-nature was created to describe this week’s guest. Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy has been fighting back and refusing to shut up for the best part of 50 years. She has been assaulted and detained in Tahir Square, banned from an Australian TV network, and has made it her business to be the scourge of the pale male, and stale everywhere. She is also a huge source of inspiration for women and girls the world over through her Feminist Giant newsletter. In her new book ...
May 18, 2021•47 min•Season 4Ep. 33
My guest this week is the cartoonist Alison Bechdel. Probably best known for the Bechdel test - a tongue in cheek method she came up with in the 80s for assessing gender bias in movies. She became a household name when Fun Home, her graphic novel/memoir about coming out and her father’s death, became a bestseller and was turned into an award-winning musical. Her new autobiographical graphic novel, The Secret To Superhuman Strength is a funny-not funny exploration of her own search for inner and ...
May 11, 2021•39 min•Season 4Ep. 32
Entrepreneur and fashion designer Anya Hindmarch is the queen of practicality. The bags for which her eponymous label is famous have long been adored for their pockets, compartments, zips and the fact they’re not weighed down with hardware - I mean seriously who wants a bag that’s too heavy to carry when it’s EMPTY?! It’s that super-sensible but fun, creative approach that saw her lauded as Accessories Designer of the year at the British Fashion Awards. So it’s no surprise that her never-fail pi...
May 04, 2021•44 min•Season 4Ep. 31
This week’s guest is a writer, photographer, sheep rearer (pretty sure that’s not the right word for it), crofter and expert at the dark art of being alone. Tamsin Calidas lived a relatively anonymous life on a small Scottish island, until she wrote her memoir, I am an island, about her experience of moving from London to the comparatively remote Hebrides. In doing so, she was living the dream of every midlife woman I know. Or was she? From her stone croft (no heating - and on the day we talk, b...
Apr 27, 2021•39 min•Season 4Ep. 30
Like many 80s kids, I grew up with today’s guest. Tracey Thorn started early, forming The Marine Girls (once described as looking like they would “break your arm before they’d let you break their hearts”), while still at school, and Everything But The Girl, with her musical and life partner Ben Watt, whilst at university. Since then she’s released three solo albums, three critically acclaimed memoirs - and had three children. Her fourth book - My Rock’n’Roll Friend - about her 37 year on-off fri...
Apr 20, 2021•43 min•Season 4Ep. 29
I am thrilled to kick off season four - season bloody four! - of The Shift with today’s guest, Mel Giedroyc (and yes I did practice saying that 935 times). Mel is (she reckons) the more punctual half of beloved comedy duo, Mel and Sue, an actress, writer and, drum roll, NATIONAL TREASURE thanks to the best part of seven years spent eating cake. (Nice gig if you can get it) And now - bloody over-achiever - she’s written her debut novel, The Best Things, which is as warm, hilarious and full of pin...
Apr 13, 2021•48 min•Season 4Ep. 28
You know when people say you’re “brave” because you’ve got a few grey hairs?! Well, my guest this week is the living proof - as if it were needed - that that is a right old load of BS. Channel 4 International Editor Lindsey Hilsum is an acclaimed foreign correspondent who has reported from all over the world including Iraq, Syria, Gaza, Kosovo and Rwanda. She also won the James Tait Black Award for In Extremis, her devastating biography of her friend, the foreign reporter, Marie Colvin who was k...
Mar 23, 2021•40 min•Season 3Ep. 27
My guests this week have both lived fascinating lives. Both have experienced ups and downs. Both are now 55 and have found themselves in this place in life that has brought them a surprising new power. Actress, producer, businesswoman and compulsive learner Sadie Frost and award winning actress and singer/songwriter Frances Ruffelle first met at school in 1976 (when they were the scruffy, noisy, naughty ones at the back!) and have been firm friends ever since. They are also both yoga addicts, so...
Mar 16, 2021•42 min•Season 3Ep. 26
My guest today is the Ghanaian American writer Nana-Ama Danquah. Nana-Ama found herself in the public eye when, in the late 90s, she published her memoir Willow Weep For Me about suffering from clinical depression - one of the first books to openly discuss black women’s mental health experience. Critically acclaimed by the likes of the late, great Maya Angelou, its description of the shame, dismissal, denial and out and out despair experienced by many black women started a much-needed conversati...
Mar 09, 2021•47 min•Season 3Ep. 25
The main word I can think of to describe this week’s guest is wise. (Well there are other words - fabulous and no-bull for starters - but wise is the biggie.) Bestselling author Isabel Allende has written 25 books including her debut, the global smash hit The House of the Spirits, published when she was 39, and two memoirs, one about the death of her daughter Paula, at the age of 29. In her latest, The Soul of A Woman, the 79 year old Chilean who has been in self-imposed exile since 1975, takes ...
Mar 02, 2021•37 min•Season 3Ep. 24
This week is a bit of a “how to cope when your life spirals out of control and goes tits up!” Special! And my guest, journalist Rosie Green, is an unwilling expert on midlife chaos. She was 44 (there’s that age again…) when her contented, settled, literally roses-round-the-door family life was pulled out from under her when her husband and partner of 26 years told her he didn’t love her any more - well, he did, but “like a friend”. Yep, I know. Three years on, Rosie has flipped the pain of that ...
Feb 23, 2021•47 min•Season 3Ep. 23
Like many women, my guest this week has lived a lot of lives in one. Married and divorced in her 20s, Sarah Pinborough left a career in teaching, became a horror writer and taught herself to script write, but it was when she turned her hand to psychological thrillers, when she was 44 (remember that age, it’s definitely significant!), that things went ‘a little nuts’. That book, Behind Her Eyes, went onto sell a million copies and is now coming to Netflix as a highly bingeable series (18 February...
Feb 16, 2021•37 min•Season 3Ep. 22
Where to start with the last decade of this week's guest's life? After struggling to get pregnant, Alexandra Heminsley finally conceived at 40 after unsuccessful rounds of IVF. You might hope that was the end of the stress. But no. First came the DNA test that questioned whether the embryo was really hers and then, as she tried to adapt to life as the mother of a much longed-for newborn, her husband D reached a point where they felt they had no choice but to transition. Oh, and She was also assa...
Feb 09, 2021•44 min•Season 3Ep. 21
You’d be hard pushed to think of anyone who has done more for women writers than this week’s guest. Twenty five years ago, Kate Mosse was working in publishing when she looked around and realised that everyone on all the awards shortlists looked familiar - pale, male and stale. The result - the Women’s Prize for Fiction - has just celebrated its 25th anniversary, and given a much-needed voice to women’s writing. Kate is also a bestselling author of 7 novels and 2 short story collections includin...
Feb 02, 2021•43 min•Season 3Ep. 20
This week's guest is acclaimed poet, author and activist, Salena Godden. Now in her late 40s, Salena has been writing and performing since 1994 when she moved to London seeking the bright lights and never looked back. In her evocative debut novel, Mrs Death Misses Death, the self-confessed “dreamer” brings death to life as a middle-aged black woman and combines prose, poetry and non-fiction to tell the stories of the invisible women society prefers to ignore. Over the next half hour, the woman o...
Jan 26, 2021•34 min•Season 3Ep. 19
How's 2021 for you so far?! I know, right? Well, who better to grab us by the scruff of the neck at just the point our meagre enthusiasm is starting to wear off than Philippa Perry? Philippa has been a psychotherapist for 20 years. She’s also an agony aunt, presenter and author of the bestseller, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and your children will be glad you did) - a clever, funny - and SANE - guide that acknowledges ‘they f*ck you up, your mum and dad’, and then helps you try not t...
Jan 19, 2021•39 min•Season 3Ep. 18
How can it possibly be season three already?! Time flies when you're locked indoors binge-watching repeats! After full and frank conversations about life after 40 (and I DO mean full and frank!) in the first two seasons with the likes of Marian Keyes, Emma Freud, Jojo Moyes, Jo Whiley, Sara Collins, Bryony Gordon, Jodi Picoult, Gabby Logan and many more, we're back with lots more chat about everything from hormones to cash flow, body image to the portrayal of midlife women on screen to the tripl...
Jan 18, 2021•2 min•Season 3Ep. 17
My guest this week has hosted everything from Final Score to the Six Nations to the Olympics. Formerly an international gymnast, Gabby Logan moved into broadcasting in her early 20s and neither she – nor the male-dominated world of sports broadcasting – have looked back. Now 47, she’s launched The Mid-Point, a podcast about midlife career change and becoming more comfortable in your own skin. Join us as Gabby talks resilience, reclaiming “middle age”, competitive coping, cooking for Mary Berry a...
Dec 08, 2020•48 min•Season 2Ep. 16
Feel like your wardrobe has turned against you? Your body’s gone awol and you've mislaid your style mojo? This week’s guest is the answer to your sartorial prayers. Fashion journalist and lifestyle blogger Erica Davies’s career spans two decades: at 24 she was the youngest ever national newspaper fashion editor, on The Sun. At 44 she is a legit Instagram influencer – one of very few representing the legion women between 30 and 80! - has over 150,000 followers and has just captured her styling wi...
Dec 01, 2020•42 min•Season 2Ep. 15
This week’s guest is the award-winning novelist, Maggie O’Farrell. The author of eight novels, most recently the stunning Women’s Prize winner, Hamnet, and one of my favourite memoirs of all time, I Am, I Am, I am. And now she’s written a children’s book, the absolutely gorgeous Where Snow Angels Go, which is a banker for a Christmas Day teatime animation a la The Snowman if ever I saw one. While Maggie noses through my bookcase and plays with Sausage the (tail-less) cat, we talk being a social ...
Nov 24, 2020•42 min•Season 2Ep. 14
This week’s episode comes to you from the Glasgow kitchen of straight talking crime writer Denise Mina. (Lockdown let up long enough for me to leave the house - yay!) She’s written 15 novels, including the award-winning The Long Drop, and her last, Conviction, was scooped up by Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine Bookclub. But her latest, The Less Dead, based on a real life Glasgow serial killer, focusses on what makes a “good” victim versus a “bad” one, and takes her right back to her political ...
Nov 17, 2020•50 min•Season 2Ep. 13
This week’s guest has been in the tabloids since her early teens. In fact, like me, you’re probably guilty of thinking you know all about Meg Mathews just because you read about her marriage to Noel Gallagher, her partying with the “primrose hill set” and her journey off the rails and back on again. But she’s set out to prove us all wrong with her campaign to put an end to the menopause taboo and a new book, The New Hot. In her immaculate North London living room, Meg talked to me with brutal ho...
Nov 10, 2020•47 min•Season 2Ep. 12
This week I’m chatting to a woman who is the very definition of a Bestseller. Jodi Picoult has written 24 global smash hits (including A Spark of Light and Small Great Things) all with her inimitable mix of hard hitting issues and intimate personal stories, and her last eight novels have debuted at No 1 in the New York Times bestseller list. Her new novel, The Book of Two Ways, is a page turning exploration of life, death, grief and the biggest question of all - what would our lives look like if...
Nov 03, 2020•47 min•Season 2Ep. 11
This week’s guest will be no stranger to you but she’s a little bit of a different one for The Shift because, at 40, Bryony Gordon is a mere whipper snapper, but she’s crammed a whole lot of living into those years. Journalism, Mental health campaigning, marathon running, body positivity activism, bestselling books and, as we’ll be hearing, alcoholism. In her latest bestseller, Glorious Rock Bottom, Bryony gives a painfully candid account of alcoholism, what it does to the alcoholic and the peop...
Oct 27, 2020•36 min•Season 2Ep. 10
My brilliant guest for the first episode of this season is a very special one. You may not have heard of Karen Arthur, but you sure as hell will have done by the time she’s finished with you. Because Karen - the founder of Menopause Whilst Black - is a woman on a mission. In the few months since she launched Menopause Whilst Black on Instagram she has become a force to be reckoned with in the fast-growing “menopause community” (not sure what that is, but it will come as no surprise to you that i...
Oct 20, 2020•40 min•Season 2Ep. 9
Where to start with this week’s guest? Now 58, Emma Freud is a broadcaster, presenter, columnist and fund-raiser, for want of a better way of putting the incredible work she and her partner Richard Curtis do with Comic Relief. And she’s got four kids. And a bazillion pets (listen on for kittens!). And she lives in my Pinterest board. And she’s not afraid to call a spade a spade. Lots of spades, in fact. In a no-holds barred conversation, Emma talks frankly about reshaping Comic Relief for a new ...
Oct 13, 2020•49 min•Season 1Ep. 8
