You Don't Have to Burn It Down: The Midlife Plot Twist, Part One

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1:03Even a marching bandwink up call it 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. Hey, all. Joe here and you are listening to Under the Influence. Today is part one of a two part series on how not to blow up your life in midlife. You're going to be talking to the co-authors of the midlife plot twist. How to reboot your life without burning it down. Even if you really, really want to. Our first guest is Gabrielle Moss. She's a 44 year old woman who spent her career writing about pop culture. So she knows very damn well that women in midlife are not very well represented in our pop culture. Really in most places in the world, some media does get midlife right. Most of it does not. And that's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about how midlife has changed.

2:03How the midlife crisis used to be a punchline about men buying convertibles. But it's so much more than that and so different for women. And we're going to talk about the thesis of this book, which is that when you hit your 40s, you just start wondering whether the life that you built is actually yours. And not just something you created because it's what you were told to do. Lindsay and Gabby surveyed 150 women to prove that this feeling is pretty universal and that there's ways to create your own midlife plot twist that do not involve eating and praying and loving. Because let's be honest, that didn't work out for Elizabeth Gilbert in real life. We are also talking about women who have nine jobs and why that's totally normal now, why the career ladder that we were promised no longer exists. And what the hell retirement is even supposed to look like for our generation?

3:04Hey, Gabby, how you doing? Very good. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm good. I'm going to start out with a bold question. How old are you? I'm 44. Awesome. I know that we're not supposed to ask women their age or we were supposed to ask women their age before. I think that's dumb. I like talking about my age. I'm pretty sure you do too. Yeah, I think that that is one of the many, many conventions of midlife that we should absolutely be tossing out. Like what is what is wrong with being 44? Should I be like apologizing that I'm not 25? I was a I was a nightmare at 25. You're much better getting me yet at 44. Oh 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. I think especially, you know, now that I'm in my 40s are youth worshipping culture is so bizarre because you are the most unhinged making the worst decisions ever in that era of your life.

4:07And 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 know. No, no, I want I want 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 it is nothing, 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 I don't even really dislike my boobs by 20 year something boobs were great, but my boobs now are totally fine. My my boobs and I are at peace at in every era we are at peace and that is that is the number one thing I strive for. I I I boob piece. Boob piece. I think that we should get mugs that say in every era I strive for a boob piece. That is going to be my first piece of merch. Thank you. I'm so you're welcome. This is what I do. This is what I do. I help design people design merch for people. Yeah, I mean, I just I really I completely agree. I think that it's ridiculous that our culture worships youth. I was just telling a book club the other night.

5:10I was doing a book club for Parisian Heist and you know, this is a gentle reminder that if y'all read that Parisian Heist, I will zoom into your book clubs because that is what I do as a 46 year old woman. But I was saying I have women who are in their early 20s who are pull off and all women art heist in the book and then I've just bad ass woman in her 80s. And she's my favorite character maybe one of my favorites I've ever written also juicy in Sicilian inheritance who's in her 50s. But 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. I find the young women in their 20s hard to write hard to grasp on to hard to like get into their heads because I mean, I think what if you were in my head in my 20s, it was just it was probably a terrible terrible maze of doom to be in. I 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, then you are older and wiser.

6:24Yeah, exactly, exactly, no, and you are you've been working on a project trying to change this narrative around mid life, how to talk about mid life, how not to blow up your freaking life in mid life, tell me a little bit about that. Yeah, so my co author, Lindsey Goldworth and I wrote a book called the mid life plot twist and basically our stance is that is you are, you know, in mid life in your 40s and you start asking a lot of questions like if this life I built actually for me, do I actually, you know, maybe hate a lot of it, 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 and you know, we think instead if you are feeling those feelings in mid life number one they're totally natural, we surveyed 150 women and those feelings are so common.

7:26And two, if you feel those feelings it's not like because you're in in great it's because your brain is sending you an s o s signal going you know please change please you know let's have a different life and you know luckily when you're in the place. You have so you have so much data you have so much information from the life you've lived that you can understand your values and understand maybe the kind of like you'd want to build that might actually satisfy you in a way that I think is really difficult when you're younger exactly exactly and your your pop culture expert who like me has just been living in the trenches. And we've been living in the trenches of pop culture for for, for a long to for half our lives honestly and how have you seen these ideas that we were just talking about about youth just being so dominant. show up in our pop culture I mean you know look and it's it has been getting better a little bit in recent years as you know younger genics and millennial say you know female actors has been you know permitted.

8:31to keep having careers, but 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 the cultural goal. And 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. I'm thinking of, I don't know if this might resonate with other listeners around my age. In the early 2000s, there was a movie where Angelina Jolie played Colin Ferrell's mother. If I sure do, I sure do. It was Alexander, am I correct? Yeah, yeah, it was Alexander. And I believe she was like five or seven years older than him, but she had, you know, crossed the line. Maybe she was over 35. Oh my God. And so they were like, yeah, you're, you're a mom now. You're a mom to someone who's basically the same exact age as you. Yes, yes, I think about that so so much. I'm hoping it's changing. One of the things that's been tricky for me

9:35is as I've been talking about Parisian high Salat people are like, oh my gosh, who do you want? What actresses do you want to play everyone? And I'm like, I don't know anyone's anyone in Hollywood's age. Okay. First off, I don't know actresses in their 20s. I'm like, oh, could it be Scarlett Johansson? No, she's like 50 like me. But then all of the women in their, who are in their 40s like me look the same as the women in their 60s and the women in their 80s look like they're 50 and it's very confusing. Oh, yeah. No, I have no idea what age anyone of, I mean, I think also as I've gotten older, I think like 23 year olds are 17. So also not a good judge there. Also not a good judge there, not a good judge there. But do you think that it's changing? Do you think that we're starting to see more stories and narratives in popular culture about women who are our age and not just women who are our age, but women who are our age who enjoy their fathom lives? I think we're definitely, we're definitely getting there. And I mean, the examples so far

10:37are kind of imperfect because a lot of them are still, you know, they're about a, you know, traditionally quote unquote beautiful, you know, thin, wealthy white woman. But I'm thinking of, you know, a movie like The Idea of You if you saw that with Anne Hathaway. Really liked The Idea of You. I was very surprised by The Idea of You. Could you tell people what it's about if they haven't, have a watch? Sure. So Anne Hathaway plays, she has a, you know, divorce single mom in midlife. She 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, say that out there. I know it's not, not legally allowed, but everyone that was he's supposed to be Harry Styles and they have this very, in-sigurating relationship and, you know, it's, it's a compel, 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.

11:40I still thought kind of the way it foregrounded her love and her pleasure with so interesting, 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, but some of them, you know, like, say the substance, which was a huge hit that was not necessarily a movie about enjoying midlife. So kind of, in that landscape, I thought The Idea of You was really great. Yeah, I also, the one thing that annoyed me about Idea of You was that Anne Hathaway has a body in it that looked like a 23-year-old's body, like, and she's wearing like this string bikini in it. And again, fine, cool for you. It'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, belly pooch. And 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, 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 actor

12:43who goes to Pilates five times a day. We're not necessarily get, or, you know, a woman who has had tons of hair and makeup and whatever else. And 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. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, that would be a step too far. We can talk about women being 44 and 46, but they shall not look like they average 44 and 46-year-old woman. I mean, I think Anne Hathaway pretty much looks the same as she did in the original Devil Worse Prada. So as much as I want her to be an icon of Nidaleige women, you know, being allowed to thrive on film, it's not necessarily relatable to most of us, I think. Truth, truth, I love that one of the quotes you include in the beginning of the book. One of them is from Willi Cather, from O'Pinears. Love that one. But the other one is just Ack from Kathy. You know, I think, obviously, a lot of us reading this growth in the Kathy era, and I think Ack has

13:47a lot of wisdom to it. It truly, truly does. There 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. Do you remember that? Yes, and I mean, it's true. I think there are a lot of things. Interestingly, I think there has been, we're having a moment where I think there are more big budget movies, maybe exploring, you know, middle-aged women's lives and sexuality. But if you go into the past, there's a lot of forgotten media that explores the lives of women in middle-aged who are, you know, less glamorous than an Anne Hathaway who are a little more realistic and a little more down-to-earth than I think, yeah, Kathy, is an interesting example of one of those. Totally. Totally. Well, also, I'll tell you, I think that the 80s were really great for this, and these sitcoms were exploring ambitious and interesting women in middle-life, and then they just freaking went away. I mean, I'm talking about the Kate and Allie's and the Who's the Boss. I mean, these women were ambitious and successful, and they were building mom commutes. And then all of a

14:51sudden, we kind of saw yet another sea change in the other direction. Yeah, 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, who she also, like, becomes a single mother by choice towards the end of the series. It was really, really great stuff. And, you know, I think we had in the late 90s through the early 2000, had a tremendous, seminist 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 unbankable, and suddenly everything has to be a Judd Aptow movie about like Farts. Exactly, exactly. Or you're allowed to be a funny woman in your 50s, much like Judd Aptow's beloved wife, who I adore, but you have to look like you're 31. He also, I think she is so much, he, I have a bone to pick with Judd Aptow actually. Please tell me, please tell me.

15:51Sometimes I feel like he, she is so funny, Leslie Mann. Leslie Mann is funnier than Judd Aptow. She is funnier than Judd Aptow. 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. So much more. I'm actually dying to see Spauwik and I rewatched this as 40 recently and that movie doesn't age well. It 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? I thought that was a very like retro view of 40. I thought that about, yeah, did not line up with the lives of most of the people I knew who were in their 40s. No, not even, not even a little bit. I mean, the one joke where Paul Red is just constantly playing Scrabble on his phone in the bathroom, yes, that. And then everything else, I'm like, are you talking about people like senior citizens at this point? It doesn't make sense. I mean, yeah, the interesting thing, I guess, sort of about midlife is what, what a midlife looks like, I think has changed a lot because, you know,

16:56some of it, because a lot of people are having children later, some of it, 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. Yeah, yeah, I agree. Well, I wanted to get 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. This is Tamson Fidel from the Tamson show. Fall in New York City is my favorite time of year. Chris Mourning's that excuse to layer up, walking around the city without melting. And once that shift happens, I genuinely don't want anything on my feet except bombas. Their new suede moccasins have been my go-to for the second at Coolsdown. Kushy souls, cheerling lining, water resistance suede. And I have to remember, comfort this good is technically

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19:00Visit joinmitty.com to book your first visit. That's joinmidi.com. Insurance coverage varies. Check with your plan for coverage. Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard? But not the pipeline. That's bullspend. And marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions. My boss asks for results. So I open my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I add. Impression. Cut the bullspend. See revenue? Not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $25 credit go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign turn sick edition supply. Okay, we're back. Talk to me a little bit about your midlife. And then I want to talk about your midlife plot twist. So my own midlife, and you said before when does midlife start? And I think you'd you know when you're in midlife. You can personally I feel like everyone has their own moment where they're like, okay, I'm in the middle of it.

20:01And I think I had that probably around my very late 30s. And I guess I knew I was in midlife because I started having a midlife crisis where I started kind of questioning everything about the life I had been living. You know, I had been working as a blogger, which is a job that doesn't really exist anymore. And kind of as that fell apart, I just started asking myself like, 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. And I kind of really got in it and got down in it and ended up just sort of looking at every aspect

21:02of my life and going, is this still working? And is the answer, Ruzanou being like, I have to figure out something else. And so yeah, and 44 now. So that stuff has calmed down a bit now. I guess I find myself on the other side of it. And you know, I've kind of got a new career permutation. And I had some some shakeups in my marriage that have have settled down now. And I find myself probably confident on the other side of it in a way I could not have imagined before it happened. Which 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? Yeah, I think so many of us, you find yourself still living out patterns or living out a life based on decisions you made when you were like 22, you know, a lot of us

22:05pick careers like the day after we get out of college or makeup ideas about the kind of person we want to be in a relationship based on like a Jennifer Aniston movie we saw in 1998, like. And you know, before you even realize that you 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? And 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, but that's not true at all. I'm the only idiot to ever, ever idiot. No, no, I think we're all idiots, it 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

23:08well happen. But 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 and for a really long time, we have been talking about the midlife crisis as a joke, right? It's been a punchline forever, but only for men, right? Never for women. I 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 and 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 prey love, like, you know, that's what I have to do. If I feel disassiled with my life, I have to quit everything and leave everything and, you know, move to Europe for a year. And then you think to yourself, well, obviously, I can't do that because I'm a regular person without a book advance. And so,

24:13you know, you see like that option is doing that or doing nothing. And that's not true at all. Well, exactly. I think so much of this, they're smaller steps, right? Like it's like, no, like, yes, there's a pivot, but I'm not going to blow up my life. I'm not going to go eat prey and love and do all those things because that's not rational. Also, let's talk about the fact that Liz Gilbert, eat prey and loved and she was still not, she'd still ended up with not the things that she wanted in her life is the nicest, easiest way of saying that. I 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. You know, if you burn down your life and move to Italy, well, now you're

25:15in Italy, but you still have to think about all of your ideas about, you know, success and relationships and family. There's kind of there's no getting out of the thinking bar. Exactly. Exactly. One of the things, are 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. In fact, I want to send these out to my group test texts, things like, what do I actually like? I 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'm, 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. I do not know. I am not certain. Well, exactly. I, you know, I read that question and I'm like, what do I like? What do I do? I'm trying to think about it. Like let's name the things I like.

26:16I like my kids. Okay. Like I do. I actually like being a mom a lot more than I thought I would. I do not like being with my kids all of the time. Okay. Like I don't. I do not want to be a full-time all hands-on deck mom all the time. I really like traveling. I would say my friend was, my friend is doing this experiment where she tries to be like she tries a bunch of different hobbies all the time. And I'm like, I might not be a hobby person. I tried, I tried crocheting and I was like, I hate crocheting. I look can travel be a hobby because I love traveling or someone I want to travel, travel and then write about travel all the time. Which is good because I write books about travel. But just generally I think it is hard to like sit down and be like, I like this. What do you like? I was, so yeah, this was a huge thing for me to figure out. I realized I like. I tried a bunch of hobbies. I'm also not a hobby person. I hated all of them. I mostly just like, I like popular culture. You know, I love movies. I love reading. It turned out that I like my marriage after we did a few

27:19tweaks to it. I like my home in New York City. I like living here. And I like writing. And you know, that was sort of enough information for me to try to figure out how to move forward. But it was kind, it was hard to, like that stuff sounds so basic, but it would took so much time to, and so much effort to even get there. It's basic, but it's not basic. It's so important. Right? Like these are the things that matter. What actually makes you happy? What do you like doing? Who do you like being around? One of the best things that's happened in my 40s is if I don't like being around a person, I'm not going to be around them. If I don't like working with a person, I'm not going to work with them. And I know that's a privilege to have that choice in a lot of situations, but I'm just not dealing with toxic douchebags anymore. And I mean, I think especially to like take it back around to when we were young, like who was asking us what we actually liked? Would we were young? I think especially for, you know, older millennial and younger Gen X women, like we came of age in like

28:22the era of totally toxic dating books that were just about, you know, changing yourself to try to get married or find a relationship or books like he's just not that into you. Well, I don't know, who cares what he's into? What am I into? What am I into? Oh my god, that's a who cares what he's into? I don't care. I do not care at all. Exactly. And yeah, I think just we are so infrequently asked for 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 and they're raising their daughters to kind of experience life really differently than we did and to experience life extending from what actually makes them feel good instead of what would make other people feel good about them. But I think for for women of our generation, it can be a tough

29:24nut to crack just because no one ever asked us. And in fact, a lot of the time when we were young and we said what we like, people would just be like, I'm shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Or we were really told what to do and then told that was the only thing to do. We were told, we were told you should be a girl boss, you should lean in like that was the only thing we should be doing. And that sucked for most of us. Okay, I leaned in, I climbed the job ladder and you know, what was really impossible, all of those corporate jobs, they were freaking miserable, there was good parts of them, but they were not optimized at all for someone who wanted an actual life. Yeah, I think women of our generation have, yeah, between like, he's not that into you and girl boss, we've just have been told who we need to be, to be acceptable and how we need to interact with other people and how we need to present ourselves in order to, you know, have our existence be okayed by society for so long and none of this stuff worked, you know, like I was

30:26someone who really struggled with the girl boss saying, I'm just, I'm not that organized and I'm not that professional. But so it really opened my eyes over the past few years where a lot of people who I thought were thriving within that model were like, actually, it was a nightmare for me, actually, I woke up dreading going to work every single day and it's just, I test him into how much we are told to just kind of fake it for other people's benefit. We were told for a long time to fake it for other people's benefit and I think that that is one of the freeing things about being in your 40's, you're like, I'm not faking it anymore, I'm just not faking it anymore, I also don't give any of the F's anymore. I mean, I think also it's, it's tougher than ever to give a F's especially career-wise considering how most of these career ladders that we were told to be, so obsessed with our absolutely falling apart. They're just gone, they're just gone, okay, they're not around anymore, but I want to talk a little bit more about careers after we get back from our last break. Under the influence is brought to you by Quince. Now guys, I'm going a little bit crazy

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34:43spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign. Turn sick edition supply. Okay, we are back. You guys have a whole chapter in here, and I love your co-author, by the way. She's also, she's on the next episode of this podcast, and we worked together a thousand years ago when we were both trying to climb the media career ladder. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, she told me. I know. I know. Benanna's. So you you have a chapter entitled, yes, of course, you can still change careers. Are you kidding me? But we were not told that. Okay, like we watched we watched adult lives where people stayed in careers forever, and then they retired. But now it's not even as though, you know, it's not the same career forever. It's not going to be the same career for a year, because the kind of job you did is just gone tomorrow. And so what do you think that careers even look like in mid-age now? What are the what is your career look like for you? Are you doing nine jobs? I'm doing nine jobs. I am doing nine jobs. Thank thank you so much for

35:45validating my nine job lifestyle, which I have to admit up until this moment. I did also think was maybe just me, and I was I was another idiot who made a mistake. So we are learning in real time that this is this is just another another part of life now. Yeah, my life involves nine jobs. You know, I had a career in the media and then the media kind of imploded and I have nine jobs right now writing writing this book was one of the nine jobs. And I think and I should say that Lindsay wrote that chapter so she is going to be able to to give you maybe some more granular information about careers right now. I do think that ironically there is something a little bit freeing about realizing this career ladder that we were told to be obsessed with is just gone. You know, if you cannot climb this corporate ladder anymore because it doesn't exist because you know, your company got bought out by DCs and they replaced everybody with AI. So if there are no jobs

36:48on this corporate ladder anymore, you do get an opportunity to go well, what is there anything that makes money that I would actually enjoy doing? And you know, some of my nine jobs are the answer to that question. I'm certainly I don't think having nine jobs is the ideal, but I think they're sort of there can be an interesting kind of mid midpoint between saying yes, that's not ideal, but also I can 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. Exactly. Exactly. And I do think that it's freeing, but you I think you guys also you're really writing for a group that I call the zelenials. It's younger Gen X. It's older millennials. I was born in 80. My husband was born in 74. He's much more exy than I am, but I still think I'm much more exy than millennial because we did not

37:49have the same job security. We have a lot more student debt than the generations before us. And also, you know, we're a lot of us haven't been able to buy houses or do the things that were promised of us, but I like the fact that this book talks to people who are in very different situations. It's like, all right, maybe you did. You do have all this retirement savings, but you hate your job. Okay. So like, yeah, yeah, you need a plot twist too. Or maybe you don't have the retirement savings, but you have the flexibility to go to Europe tomorrow. And that and that is amazing. So I think that you do, you're very inclusive about talking to people who are going through a lot of different life stages, but all at the same age stage. I mean, and that is the interesting thing about the lanyls, sort of, there is as much as, you know, the media might say, you know, it's happening this one particular way for everybody. It is happening so many different ways to so many different people. Like, yeah, some people did get that, you know, the 401k that our

38:53parents were always telling us we needed to get some of us are living totally flexible lives that don't have that kind of security, but have other positives. And I do think, you know, not to, I definitely am not trying to be toxically positive because they're downsides to all of these things. But they're also, you know, upsides to every situation. You know, I hope we get at that in the book, kind of that in, in almost any situation, even if your situation is not something that we were told you should aspire to, like, there are, there are minuses and there are pluses. Like, you probably don't have a situation that is entirely bad. And there's probably also no situation that's entirely good. And, you know, you shouldn't feel embarrassed about that. And you should be able to to work with the, with the pluses a little bit. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, I, there's one subheader in your book. And I'm going to talk about this with Lindsay too, but it caught me so much. I want to talk about it with both of you. We want to retire, but we're afraid to get old. And it's confusing.

39:56I don't even know what retirement is going to mean anymore. I mean, I don't, none of us are going to go like golf starting at age 65. We most of us certainly can't afford that. But also, there's no social safety net and most of us don't have retirement accounts. So, but then there's also no jobs. So what is retirement even look like to you? I mean, an amazing question. I will be totally, totally vulnerable here and say, my 401k not, not does not match the random numbers that you'll find when you're up late at night googling, do I have enough money save for retirement? So I do not. I do wonder what retirement will look like for our generation, because I think it's going to, it's going to be completely different than the retirement we have now. You know, I don't, I think this system where we're just supposed to take care of ourselves and is, you know, you don't have enough save, you know, see you and hell. I do feel like at some point that is going

40:59to crash and become untenable. So I have no idea what retirement is going to look like for us, but I do feel like it's going to look very different just because I don't think there's any way, it can exist the way it's been going. Exactly. I mean, there's not, right? And again, you know, in so many episodes of the show recently, I've just been like, life's weird now. Like, the world's weird, right? It's all, it's all weird. I think it's going to be weird for a while. Do you think it's going to be weird for a while? Yeah, I think especially if you were like coming of age, you know, in the 90s, it is real different, you know, if your parents were boomers, your life's going to turn out real different from them, regardless of what you do or how many of the quote unquote decisions you make, like 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, things are different and harder than they were when I was in my 40s.

42:04All right, we're going back to pop culture for a hot ass minute. Who is your ideal mid-life plot twist heroin? If you could write a sitcom right now and I'm just putting you on the spot, do you have her in your head? Like a real person or like what would she be like? What would she be doing? What is the what is the plot twist in this sitcom that you're writing right now on the spot? I think if we had a mid-life 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, I think it would be about a woman who is in her 40s who has kids, maybe she is divorced, she is certainly experiencing the career ladder not functioning the way she was told it would and it would just be you know, a early Rosanne style look at what what that kind of life is and how you can experience some moments of joy in that even though a lot of parts of it stuck. I love that so much. I have one more

43:08question. You like me are also a massive fan of Judy Bloom. Yes. Do you also desperately want to see are you there goddess me Margaret but for a woman in Perryman opposed? Oh my god, this is can you can you write this script? This is this is the best idea I have heard in so long. This is such a good idea. Yes, I mean that's that I would actually liked I would love Judy to write it. I don't know if we're going to Key West in December. I'll see if I can stalk her gently at the bookstore and talk her through it because I this is the book I want. This is the only book I want right now. I think that that I would there is nothing I think so many of us grew up with that great young adult section and I think this is this would be a great moment to kind of re-examine some of those troops and some of those heroines who would all be in midlife now like I would love a midlife babysitter's club. How did things turn out for Christy you know? How did things turn out for Christy? I think Christy is doing great. I think I you know I related a lot to Mallory and I wonder how things are going

44:10for her. I assume they're going as weird for her if they did for me but I would I would like I would love more than anything to have just midlife babysitters club babysitters reunion where where they now who's doing what? What in the summer? I think everyone's had a little bit of a midlife crisis. I want to know I want to know who's in a threpple now. I think Dawn Dawn's in a threpple. Dawn is absolutely in a threpple. Will you tell everyone where they can find this wonderful book? You should be able to get this anywhere you buy books so whatever book website you tend to favor you should be able to grab a copy there or maybe they'll have it at your local bookstore. That would be nice. It's always nice when a local bookstore has has your books and I will make sure to recommend this and I will order it for our bookstore the bookcase stopbooks. Wonderful. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you so much for having me.

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