The Shift with Sam Baker

My guest today is the award-winning broadcaster Aasmah Mir. Born and brought up in Glasgow, of Pakistani Heritage, Aasmah started in newspapers before moving to the BBC, where she worked for twenty years - most famously as co-host of Saturday Live. She joined Times Radio three years ago, as cohost of the Breakfast Show and is a two-time winner of a Sony Gold Award, kind of like a radio Oscar. She’s also been named audio presenter of the year at the broadcasting press guild awards AND, she won celebrity mastermind. we’re talking brainiac!But before all this, Aasmah was a teenage loner, the third of four children, growing up between two cultures in the 1970s and 80s. A childhood that could not have been more different than her mother, Almas, growing up in the 1950s in Pakistan. It is those two childhoods that are the subject of Aasmah’s moving memoir, A Pebble In The Throat, which interweaves Aasmah’s childhood and teenage years with those of her mother.On a trip to Scotland, Aasmah came and hung out in my kitchen to discuss writing a book with her mother, how the racism of her childhood shaped her, learning to be visible, deciding to end her marriage and rebuilding life after divorce. We also discussed her "unexpected daughter”, menopause, her monster to-do list and how she finally dislodged the pebble in her throat* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including A Pebble In The Throat by Aasmah Mir 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

I’m pretty sure there isn’t a woman who was alive in the 90s who didn’t own one of this designer's dresses (or at least one heavily inspired by her from the high street). From the moment they hit the shops, the bias cut slip dress became ubiquitous and it still is. And for that we have to thank Tanya Sarne, the founder of Ghost. Personally I still have five of her dresses and I’m neither a dress girl nor a sentimental clothes hoarder. Those frocks are keepers. Tanya was a single mum of two in her thirties and on benefits when she founded Ghost. Divorced and grieving the death of her mum, she thought she was unemployable, until she took one look at the lack of well-priced, multifunctional, comfortable, feminine clothes which went in the washing machine and didn’t need ironing, and resolved to put that right. She borrowed two thousand pounds and fuelled by fury and, frankly, necessity, the brand that changed a thousand wardrobes was born.Now, 78 and still beyond fabulous, Tanya joined me to talk about her memoir, Free Spirit, the snobbery of the fashion industry and the sexual harassment you “just had to put up with” in the 60s and 70s. We also discussed her alcoholism, the pain of losing her beloved business, the joy of marrying a younger man, her horrific menopause and why she longs to go back on HRT.* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Free Spirit by Tanya Sarne 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

Today’s guest is the comedian Josie Long. Josie started early – and I mean EARLY. She has been performing standup since she was 14, and by 17 won the BBC New comedy award. She was the first woman to be nominated for the Edinburgh Comedy Award three times and is co-founder of the education charity, Arts Emergency.Josie is also a regular on those terrifying panel shows where you just know you’d think of the smart thing to say when you were on the bus home (if at all!) has written for TV, radio and stage and has now turned her hand to short stories with Because I Don’t Know What You Mean And What You Don’t, a funny, dark, poignant (and occasionally jaded!) look at lifeJosie and I are both Scottish emigres, so we met up in her publishers atmospheric 16th century office in Edinburgh’s old town to talk about everything from house prices to climate change, how hormones and ADHD affect pregnancy and perimenopause (clue, it’s not great), breaking free of diet culture, living in a two comedian household and why she hopes she’ll still be performing stand up at 80. Oh and she shares her secret past as a fake tarot reader!AND IF ANYONE KNOWS ANYTHING ABOUT HOW ADHD AFFECTS PERIMENOPAUSE PLEASE MESSAGE ME ON INSTAGRAM @THEOTHERSAMBAKER!See Josie on tour - find out more at linktr.ee/josielongtour.* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Because I Don't Know What You Mean And What You Don't by Josie Long 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

My guest for Mental Health Awareness Week 2023 is mental health campaigner, psychiatrist and bestselling novelist Joanna Cannon.Jo left school at 15 only returning to complete her A levels when she decided to train as a doctor in her late 30s. She specialised in psychiatry before leaving medicine to write in her mid-40s. (How many life shifts can one woman handle!?) But Jo’s passion for psychiatry, her patients and the way their stories changed her has stayed with her. Which is why she has compiled Will You Read This Please, a unique collection of stories of 12 mental health patients in the hope of shining a light on the stigma and isolation that still impact those living with mental illness.Joanna joined me to from her home in the peak district, where she was born and still lives, to talk about the long family history of mental illness that formed her lifelong fascination with psychiatry, training as a doctor in midlife and the grim reality of working in the NHS. We also discussed why your date of birth is irrelevant, why you don’t have to have loads of friends to live a meaningful life, being a bad feminist and how red lipstick helped her change her attitude to life.* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Will You Read This Please and A Tidy Ending by Joanna Cannon, 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.comAnd if you already subscribe - did you know you can buy a Gift Membership of The Shift for a friend at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/gift_plans• 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

OK, I admit it, I’m a bit in awe, because today’s guest is someone I’ve wanted to get on The Shift for the longest time. You might know Ruby Wax as a successful comedian and presenter, one of the funniest women of her generation. Or you might know her as a mental health campaigner and best-selling author. One thing’s for sure, she has been using humour to make the rest of us feel better for decades.Having suffered depression her whole life, Ruby had a breakdown after losing her job on the BBC in her 50s (hold that thought!). Determined not to “go down with the career ship” she took herself off to Oxford university where she got a masters degree in mindfulness based cognitive therapy, was subsequently awarded an OBE for services to mental health and has written several bestselling books about our brains - and hers. Then, last year, 12 years after her last bout of depression, she discovered she wasn’t actually as well as she thought she was… Cue the inspiration for a new book, and tour.Ruby and I met in an office overlooking the Thames the day after a big birthday (which we will not be talking about!!) to discuss why depression is the wrong word for mental illness and the journeys to find meaning that saw her end up on a journey to a 6 week stay in a mental clinic.We also talked about building a new emotional toolkit for the second half of your life, the secret to her 35 year marriage and why we need to stop talking ageing and start talking evolving. There’s also hair dye, mindfulness, a Carrie Fisher love-in, jewellery and toe nails. It’s all going on in this episode!Falling Upward by Richard Rohr, the book Ruby talks about in this episode, is available here.You can catch Ruby on a UK wide tour, starting in September, tickets are available now via LiveNation.co.uk* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including I'm Not As Well As I Thought I Was by Ruby Wax 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.comAnd if you already subscribe - did you know you can buy a Gift Membership of The Shift for a friend at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/gift_plans• 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

How does it feel to walk into a room and know that everyone already thinks they know all there is to know about you. That’s the position today’s guest, Melanie Sykes has found herself in repeatedly over the last thirty years.After starting out modelling and then moving into TV and radio presenting, Melanie decided she’d well and truly had enough in her 40s, and stepped back from broadcasting to reclaim her own narrative. She launched her magazine Frank in 2016 and has now followed that up with a book, Illuminated: Autism and all the things I’ve left unsaid. In it she discusses the good, the bad and the often ugly of a life lived under the camera’s glare, and of being, as she puts it, "too young and too famous for comfort."I met Melanie in a studio in North London to talk about discovering her creativity in her 40s, the relief of being diagnosed with autism and ADHD at 51 and what she learnt from her subsequent breakdown.Melanie talks candidly about the way the media has portrayed her, being sapiosexual, taking a year out from sex, why it's rare to find a man of her own age with as much energy as her and she won’t be settling any time soon. As you’ll hear, after a lifetime in the male gaze, nobody’s telling Melanie’s story but her.* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Illuminated: Autism and all the things I've left unsaid by Melanie Sykes 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.comAnd if you already subscribe - did you know you can buy a Gift Membership of The Shift for a friend at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/gift_plans• 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

This week's guest is the rural poverty campaigner Natasha Carthew. Natasha was born and brought up in Cornwall, in the 19th century fishing and farming village of Downderry where the Carthews had been resident from the very start.Natasha has spent her life noisily campaigning to give working class writers a voice. Where some might tire of banging their heads against the closed door of the affluent middle classes in general and the London media scene in particular, Natasha has been relentless. And now, finally FINALLY her efforts are being heard. Loud and clear.She founded the acclaimed Working Class Writers Festival in Bristol in 2021 and has written nine books, but the one that’s destined to make her truly impossible to ignore is her furious new memoir, Undercurrent, A Cornish memoir of Poverty Nature and Resilience.Natasha joined me from Cornwall to talk about her lifelong refusal to stay in her lane, growing up gay in the 80s, learning to harness her uncontrollable rage in her 30s and how it felt to return to the hometown she left at 19 to write her memoir. We also discussed her passion for wild writing, the calming power of nature and Why sometimes getting fuckity is the only way.* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Undercurrent by Natasha Carthew 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

I first encountered today’s guest, Marina Benjamin, when I was researching The Shift book and stumbled across her memoir, The Middlepause. An insightful look at what middle age means today, it was prompted by Marina’s own sudden menopause after a hysterectomy. The sense of dislocation she described was the first time I’d ever seen the way I felt put down in black and white.She followed it up with Insomnia (clue’s in the name) and has now completed her loose midlife trilogy with A Little Give a stunning book about the “unsung, unseen, undone work women do” - and what happens when we tire of being a human rehab centre for everyone around us.I inhaled this book, dog-earing page after page and internally yelling YES! and I’m pretty sure you will too.Marina joined me to talk about emotional labour, why “cleaner guilt” doesn’t seem to affect men (strange that!), time poverty and wresting control of the to-do ticker tape. We also discussed why women’s manual work is invisible and men’s is a skill, how to get maximum benefit from your feminist inner critic, the two way pain of caring for elderly parents and why you should always ALWAYS run towards yourself.* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including A Little Give by Marina Benjamin 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.comAnd if you already subscribe - did you know you can buy a Gift Membership of The Shift for a friend at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/gift_plans• 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

My guest today is the bestselling author of American Wife and Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld. I first came across Curtis when both our debut novels were named “ones to watch” by Time Magazine. They turned out to be right about one of us. It wasn’t me!Since that first novel, Prep, hit the big time, Curtis has written six more novels and two short story collections. The most famous of which is the transatlantic bestseller American Wife, a fictionalised look at the life of Laura Bush, wife of George W Bush that ponders the question of whether she would have voted for him!Her latest novel, Romantic Comedy is a total departure and absolutely the tonic we need right now. It asks, pertinently, how come hot accomplished women persistently marry average blokes, but it doesn’t seem to work the other way around. And what if… it did?!Curtis joined me from her home in a very snowy Minneapolis to talk about how men constantly punch above their weight, why rom-coms are having a comeback and how she found her funny. We also discussed writing out your emotions, why old is not a synonym for bad and how weird shit has happened to everyone by the time they reach their 40s.* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Romantic Comedy By Curtis Sittenfeld 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.comAnd if you already subscribe - did you know you can buy a Gift Membership of The Shift for a friend at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/gift_plans• 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