Life Uncut - What Happens When We Reach the Mid Life Clusterf*ck? Uncut with Eleanor Mills

Episode Date: September 3, 2024

Eleanor Mills is an award winning journalist, editor and broadcaster who has taken a bit of a pivot in her mid life by creating a community called ‘noon’. At 49, Eleanor was abruptly made redundant from her role as the editor of the Sunday Times Magazine and chair of women in journalism.  She lost her sense of purpose, and her identity - and her family lost its main source of income. She felt washed up and burnt out; like everything which had defined her life for the last 25 years was gone. But then she noticed something: she wasn’t alone. Today we are going to unpack what Eleanor calls the midlife cluster fuck, our perceived value as we age and a lot of the motivators and values that we hold as career driven women.  We spoke about: Identity in ‘success’ and our jobs What happens when that identity is shattered Real life ‘Succession’ after working for Rupert Murdoch for 23 years Gendered ageism in our culture vs what we truly have to look forward to ‘Queenagers’ - the freedom of becoming the woman you always wanted to be  Power is fleeting when it’s based off of fecundity and fuckability  The double edged sword of speaking about menopause; exposure vs it being weaponised against up How Eleanor has helped so many women realise that there’s much more to come past 50 Eleanor’s new book titled ‘Much More to Come’ can be found hereEleanor’s InstagramEleanor's organisation Noon can be found here! You can watch us on Youtube Find us on Instagram Join us on tiktok Or join the Facebook Discussion Group Tell your mum, tell your dad, tell your dog, tell your friend and share the love because WE LOVE LOVE! xxSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Life Uncut acknowledges the traditional custodians of country whose lands were never ceded. We pay our respects to their elders past and present. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. This episode was recorded on Cammeraygal land. Hi guys and welcome back to another episode of Life Uncut. I'm Laura. I'm Brittany. And I am so excited for today's interview because whilst we were interviewing this fabulous, amazing woman, I honestly did not want the conversation to stop. Her name is Eleanor Mills. And for those of you who do not know who she is,

Eleanor is an award-winning journalist. She's an editor and a broadcaster. And now she has created the community called Noon. But prior to that, Eleanor was the editorial director of the Sunday Times and editor of its magazine for 23 years. Now, the big thing that we're talking about in this episode is this almost like midlife crisis that Eleanor went through. Well, it's not really a crisis, is it? She was made redundant at the age of 49. Out of the blue. It was not expected. And had to go through the very real realization of what does life look like when you reach quote unquote middle age. Eleanor calls it the midlife clusterfuck. We talk about our perceived

value as we age and a lot of the motivators and values that we hold as career driven women. This is a conversation around how the media especially puts an expiration date on women. This idea that we have the currency of what a woman is worth and what she can contribute. Eleanor is completely rewriting this conversation and she describes the years of her life now in her 50s after much self-work as the most incredible years of her life, as her now finally living her prime. Eleanor, welcome to Life Uncut. Hello, very nice to be here. Very nice to have you here. Also, it's 7.30 in the morning where you are, is that correct?

It's quite early in the mornings of not really my forte. You're doing very well. We start every episode the same, and that is with an accidentally unfiltered story. Your most embarrassing story, it's a good place to start, and you just said you thought you had one that was quite embarrassing. Well, it's also about getting up in the morning. So this particular morning, I was in Cannes at the advertising festival and I was staying in the most kind of glorious modern villa

high above the harbour you can see the whole of kind of ad world media land is spread out in front of you the cicadas are beeping I've got the most terrible hangover ever I've probably drunk my body weight in rosé and I stagger up the stairs and I kind of look out

and I'm so groggy that I stagger towards what I think is the door and whack my head so hard on the glass because it's one of those kind of swanky glass villas that I see stars I literally think I'm going to pass out and I'm feeling pretty dreadful and my entire senior leadership team most of the most senior people at News UK are sitting outside on the terrace having breakfast hear me thump my head on the front and they all stagger into the kitchen where I'm like literally holding my head like this kind of trying to pretend that I'm all right when

actually I think I've got concussion so that was pretty bad that was like you know me definitely making a pram myself I mean you had me at a holiday full of rosé I think that makes up for the whole thing does it not there'd been an extremely large amount of rosé drunk the night before and I just couldn't see that it was glass it was one of those places that you probably have loads of them in Australia that's my vision of Australia anyway all those kind of modern glass kind of houses overlooking the beach so I was kind of thinking hey I'm queen of all ice today i have such strong memories of being a little kid and sitting on our lounge in the back house and my my stepmom i was playing with some fabric she was a dressmaker at the time and she

saw from outside and she ran inside to get it off us because it was important fabric to her she ran in at pace and went face first into the back door and broke her nose so it happens and she wasn't even drunk so don't worry you're amongst good company here we've all been there Eleanor you were working for Rupert Murdoch for the best part of 25 years you've been in the industry a very long time can you talk to us back at the start of your career how did you find yourself in this world? It's a really great question so I was fortunate enough to go to Oxford University and I graduated with a degree my shiny degree in English and my dad wanted me to be a management consultant and I was really not very keen on that for obvious reasons like

it sounded really dull and i really wanted to write boring as fuck it sounded boring as fuck and i kind of grew up in quite a kind of political family my stepmother was a politician she was in tony blair's cabinet so there were quite a few people around us who kind of you know ran things so that makes me sound very plutocratic i'm not really but one of my dad's friends tried to try and save me from being a management consultant was like oh well you can come and do some work experience on the guardian if you want that was what it was like back in the day so I did and I was 21 and I I never looked back it's one of those things with those kind of openings that somebody can get you a foot in the door but I think I was

just a born I was a born journalist I'm very nosy I'm quite chatty I had good contacts I've always liked to write and what journalism gives you is that kind of amazing front row seat on history that you know you really are there you get to write the first draft and I just love that I love the knowing and the being in the lead. With this, I mean, you were one of the youngest editors at the time. So then when you've worked in such a high profile position and built yourself up into this career, how important to you at that time was your career to your identity, to your sense of self-worth, to kind of how you positioned yourself, I guess? Well, I think also, particularly when you start off very young. So I was such a kind of,

I was a real wunderkinder kind of within the industry because I was the features editor at another newspaper called The Telegraph by the time I was 26 and I was running the main bit of the comment and features part of the Sunday Times by the time I was before I was 30 which is incredible like you're brushing over that very quickly like then I had this really huge achievement when I was born that's an incredible feat to do in your early 20s it was and it was quite intense and it was a very male world I was often the only woman in meetings always the youngest always running people who were much older than me but I had a lot of ideas I think and a lot of enthusiasm and at that point they were trying to reach a more kind of female audience as well so they

needed some women around the table and I think it was just incredibly heady to be at the top table when people were deciding right who we're going to back for the election you know the run the Iraq war the kind of I did American elections I ran a lot of the big coverage after 9-11 all that kind of thing it was a very exciting kind of heady time and I've got you know I'm married and I've got two kids, but I think that basically the main focus of my life for a quarter of a century was journalism, the paper, having the best stories, getting the best people to write for me. I ran the magazine. I was the Saturday editor. I was the editorial director. I, you know, I really kind of ticked the boxes on those big journalism jobs. So I would say that was pretty

much at the core of my identity. Why do you think you were the person that was chosen when you do say for the one female role and also so young you know you would think if that's the case there would be other women who may be older more qualified like what do you think it was about you yourself that kind of got you into those roles to start with I think okay oh gosh that's a hard one to say I'm quite sharp and I'm quite good at kind of seeing to the center of things I get on with people I don't scare easily I think I really wanted it yeah and I was prepared to put up with quite a lot of the kind of misogyny that went with being allowed in the huddle you know there was an assumption that you weren't going to be what they called missish you know that you weren't

going to kind of someone made a kind of sexist joke you weren't going to kind of you know blush and run out of the room you know you had to kind of give as good as you got and I grew up with six brothers and I went to a big what we call a public school here big male private school called Westminster from when I was 16 so I think I'd grown up in the belly of the beast of those kind of men and they didn't frighten me. Did you find you were taken seriously with your ideas? Did you challenge the men with their ideas? Did you feel like at any point you were a token female substitute

at that table? No, I don't think I was ever a token. I think anyone who spent five minutes in my company would know that I was never a token. And I don't mean offence by that. I just know that back when we were starting, that's the world we lived in, right? Okay, oh, we've got 25 men at the boardroom,

we'd better throw a woman in. And it's nothing against you personally, but it was the world we were in yeah i think that's true but i i think that might you know they might think oh gosh we should have some female representation but that won't keep you in the room very long because the way that newspaper hierarchy's work is that there are quite a few people who have quite big titles but aren't necessarily in the huddle and what happens is that you'd have a kind of big conference where everyone would be invited and then afterwards you know two or three people would be called into the editor's office to really make

the decisions and I was in that huddle always for you know 25 years and I think you know that that has to be because you bring a kind of acuity to it I think I was quite good fun which I think is an under-repped kind of quality at work that's quite nice to have people in the room who make life a bit more jolly and I think I brought a different perspective and I think I was also quite good at speaking truth to power but I also think that there's something about being a young kind of blonde rather curvaceous woman which also makes you rather kind of palatable to a whole group of top chaps yes unfortunately i mean i have a whole theory that as women become less pleasing both kind of physically and in terms of becoming more bolshie which i think you certainly

do as you get more senior because i think you become less grateful just to be there and a bit more like well hang on you've got to listen to what i say because i've won these prizes and actually my section is the most successful bit you know you become a bit less emollient about or enthusiastic maybe about you know things that they want to do so I think I became more I was also chair of something called women in journalism uh for seven or eight years and that involved me often challenging the status quo you'd look down a news list and everybody on the news list would be a bloke who was doing something interesting and then there'd be a few women who were probably victims you know who'd been murdered or something or were arm candy and then I'd be

like well where are the stories about women with agency where are the women doing something in their own right. And it was also increasingly hard to get pictures or stories about older women into the paper. And I think as I began to get older, I began to see that and go, hang on, there's something really fundamentally unjust about this coverage. And that was one of the things that we did a lot of research on at Women in Journalism. So I think I probably became more motivated to challenge the status quo as I got more senior. Eleanor, I saw this quote that you wrote, and this ties into that perfectly. You wrote, older women are very much the demographic the mainstream media forgot one of the last bastions for diversity when was it that you recognized this

and what was the response when you started to push against it and wanted to kind of get more coverage or more visibility well i can remember a really sorry it's earlier here in the morning i can remember a really key time when i was editing the i was editing the magazine and uh we had a photo shoot with an amazing we'd had charlotte rampling who's the incredible actress and we'd had her shot in Paris in her 70s in black and white for the cover of the magazine and I went up to the editor because I made most of the decisions but he had to approve the cover and I remember showing him the pictures of Charlotte Rampling and him going oh god can't we have a picture of her when she was younger you know like when she was in the night portal

when she was attractive and I was like well no the whole point is that she's now 70 and she's iconic and we've had these incredible photographs shot and it was that was really typical of it I And I really had a battle. We did get the pictures on the cover, but it became increasingly difficult. I remember putting on the cover a picture of some of the girls who'd been kidnapped in Nigeria, the Chibok girls. And again, having a real kind of fight about that, about people don't want to read about poor girls in Nigeria. So there was just a kind of there was a real battle often to get any kind of stories on the cover involving women who weren't glammed up in that traditional kind of media way. there's a lens a male what i call a male lens in the media about what they think is appropriate what they think we should see and i think that that's really obvious when it comes to

the depiction of older women that often the older women that we see on our screens don't look old at all there are about two who are allowed to see who actually are old like judy dench or miriam margolis judy dench because you know she's been m in bond and miriam margolis because she's funny and they're the kind of two who are allowed but most of them are kind of you know identikit kind of very cosmetically enhanced clones who don't really look like 50 year old women at all i find this so interesting when you talk about like this male lens of viewership i guess it's not just when we talk about like mainstream media in terms of i'm talking pop culture or when we talk about movies we see in sport in terms of like men thinking that well no one wants to watch women

in sport. No one wants to watch older women in movies. And it's like almost this perceived expiration date that I think a lot of women put on themselves. And then it's very hard to, it's even as like your own self-talk, it's very hard to rework that and go, oh, well, being 40 is not scary. Being 50 is not scary because your whole life you've been told that, you know, you have an expiration date as a woman. Yeah. I really hate that. I mean, that's one of the things that my book, which is called Much More To Come, is really trying to challenge so men seem to age like silver foxes you know or fine wine getting better with age whereas women in our culture are given a an expiration date what we call in england a sell

by date and i think that women as they age have seen more like peaches one wrinkle and we're done you know and that is the story that i am really trying to challenge because that comes from that very narrow male lens view of what women are for you know patriarchy values women for being fecund able to have children and you know fuckable you know hot fanciful someone they might want to kind of go to bed with so if you only see women through that male lens then i think it's a bit like seeing women in black and white rather than in the kind of rainbow of colors that we really are and once you take away that male lens and you say actually we're going to live and breathe in brilliant technicolor you begin to see that women are not just about being

kind of fecund and fuckable they're about being creative or brave or funny or experienced or loving or you know all those other kind of rainbow colors of what women can be so that's really what my book argues for because if you start seeing women through a rainbow lens then they don't have an expiration date of you know any time at all let alone 30 or 40 or 50 the funny thing is it's the media that's defining what fuckable is like it just comes full circle when you say women are seen as fuckable it's the media and not you but like in general in a very broad spectrum the media is saying what is fuckable like they're putting the definition on the covers they're putting the leads in the movies and the tv shows and they're who's saying hey if you don't look like this then

you're not fuckable yes but that's because of the male lens that the media has so it's about changing that first of all it's about pointing it out and understanding it because i think that that's a you know huge thing most people aren't even aware that that's going on so pointing out a bit i think we're a bit like lobsters being boiled in a pot you know we're kind of put in when it's quite quite kind of lukewarm we don't realize and it gets kind of hotter and we don't see it so i think part of what my book's trying to do is to point out the kind of gendered ageism in our culture and i think the purpose of doing that is not just so that women like me i'm 53 feel better but so that younger women don't feel like they've got this kind of terrible sell-by

date coming at them I think that by changing the story that we tell about older women in our culture we also extend the runway for all women and when I go and talk about my book and I do a lot of public speaking I see that it's not just the other what I call queen ages in the room who are excited about what I'm saying but the young women are too because I think because of the tyranny of screens and Instagram and filters and all that kind of thing that fear of aging is actually starting even earlier oh my god it's crazy yeah and that's really scary and then what's really crazy about that is the great benefit that we have from science the kind of longevity dividend our lifespans have doubled since 1900 so we're all living longer so actually

what women today have is this incredible period between 50 and 75 when we're still young we're still you know healthy if we're lucky where we've got some agency and maybe made some money because we're the first generation to have worked all the way through since we were 20 and we're now 50 and so we can actually have this golden period our queenagerhood where we can come into our power pivot into purpose do the things that we always wanted to do I talk about becoming at 50 the woman you always wanted to be and yet that's not that story's not in our culture at all and yet I see so many incredible women around me really fulfilling that paradigm so that's what I really wanted to change. Eleanor, I find this fascinating because I think also the problem

is, is that we sometimes as women, when we're young, we self-fulfill that prophecy without realizing because you get the validation. It feels nice. You know, you, people tell you you're beautiful and you, and you dress in a way that like acquires that validation. And then you hit an age where you're like, well, it's not coming as frequently. And then you start to pick out the things that are wrong with your face or the things that the world tells you you should change or you should fix. And it's quite a rewiring that's required. And I'm curious as to whether it's a process that you experienced, like, was there a time in your life where you recognize that you valued the youthful aesthetic and that sort of like male validation for what

it was, and then realize as you got older, that there wasn't the representation that you looked at yourself in the media or in the articles that you were writing and say, like, I don't see myself reflected back in this anymore. And it's so one dimensional. Yeah, I think that that's totally and I think that it's quite easy when you're young particularly before you have any children to think oh what this is all rubbish all this feminism stuff the world's fine you know I'm getting this job all these men are chatting me out I seem to have all this power but I think that what you realize and I've got daughters I've got a 21 year old and a 19 year old is how fleeting and evanescent a power based on fecundity and fuckability is you know that if we

go on valuing women only for those qualities we're condemning them to a very brief kind of you know flowering shelf life we're totally tapping into that patriarchal valuation or validation of what women are so i also think it's important for younger women to realize the trap that they're walking into and they do that by that being explained to them by women who have kind of you know walked the walk before and also for all of us to women to stop kind of doing that kind of divide and rule pitting different kinds of women against each other younger women against older women and saying that we're all in this together actually we're not going to be picked off and fight against each other we need to support each other through this whole journey to be seen as

rainbows not in black and white and that then helps all of us you know because it's like patriarchy only works for a very small amount of men who happen to be at the top of their kind of you know the pinnacle so actually the power that women get from playing up to patriarchy only works for a very short amount of time so i'm arguing for a much more kind of equal view of of what we do and for women to understand the landscape which they're going into and to unpick it for themselves so they also stop valuing themselves by the male lens because there's so much internalized misogyny which is also stoked up by the media if you think about the daily mail going on about women's kind of bingo wings or cankles or kind of you know defects that we never thought we even had

we didn't even know that we had you know all of that is often stoked by the media too so as someone who's been in the belly of the beast of the media for 25 years as a woman I'm trying to kind of point out how this thing works and how we can unpick deprogram ourselves if you like from its tremendous power and I think it's particularly important for our kids growing up in an internet age where it's even more pernicious and with freely available online pornography which completely i mean if you want to see the male lens in action it's porn yeah i'd love to take like a little deviation to something that you just said eleanor and you did say you've been in the belly of the beast for 25 years women being pitted against women is something that we can't

escape in the media even as women that are trying to support each other within it we can't find a way out from media reporting on it because it's clickbait it's what they love and there's always some female that's got a beef with another female we thrive in the drama don't we well that's what I want to ask over in the UK we've seen it for so long now with the royal family we've seen it a lot with Megan Markle and Kate Middleton yeah and as somebody that is there assuming you're extremely patriotic you are in the media you were seeing it happen what are your thoughts on the actual relationship between Megan and Kate but how do we escape that when the biggest and most famous family in the world and the two women that are at the helm we're seeing them constantly quote

unquote fighting and bickering like how are the rest of us supposed to escape that and i guess grow in any form when that's what we're looking up to well i would say that the first thing to do is to kind of analyze the medium you know the medium is the message if you got if i go back to my old kind of uh you know critical theory that i studied at university so you're seeing that catfight through the lens of the male media all the time and that's the element of that relationship that the press has chosen to report because it fits into a narrative of women fighting against women you know exactly what I was saying about that kind of divide and conquer I think you see it I think with Meghan Markle and Kate it was exacerbated by the racism in the British press

I'm on the record challenging that I mean one of the most egregious examples of it was Jeremy Clarkson's column about Meghan where she compared her to that scene in Game of Thrones and said that she should be pelted with excrement and walk through the streets while people shouted shame I mean I just thought that was outrageous and I was Jeremy Clarkson's editor for 15 years if Jeremy had filed me that column I would have taken it out I would have deleted the whole lot and gone back to him and gone Jeremy you've gone completely mad I'm not running that and I did that on numerous occasions because part of my job as Jeremy Clarkson's editor was to save him from himself that's what editors do you know he's a kind of powerful expensive franchise you don't

want him to shoot himself in the foot so as his editor you had the power to say no Jeremy you've gone over the line and I used to do it a lot and actually to be fair to Jeremy he was always very nice about it he kind of knew that often we were you know we were saving him from himself so I was really shocked by that column because somebody could have stopped that it's not like he was so powerful nobody could have taken it out so that made me think that within the kind of belly of that particular beast either whoever was in charge was you know slacking on the job and didn't see it or they intentionally let it through and i would assume it was probably the latter and i think that that then stokes a very misogynist racist debate which is becoming more polarized i think it's even

worse than in some ways when i was there now because of the effect of kind of twitter and online platforms and it's almost like they're playing into a particular side of the culture war so i just think it's really important that we point out where the kind of the goldfish bowl is you know in all of this so that women can see it and understand how they're being manipulated and when kate is pitted against megan that's a very intentional piece of media crafting women don't have to compete for the same space we can all there's lots of space in the world we can all take it up and support each other so i think it's a really unfortunate it's a really unfortunate lens do you think scarcity mindset we talk about it a little bit on this podcast but this idea of

scarcity mindset there's not many royal positions no laura no but yeah okay to be fair we're not all going to be princesses in some cases there are some scarcities but we're all princesses deep inside do you think it is a real thing in terms of job scarcity or you said like like the pie is big enough but do you think the pie is always big enough or is it a case that we catastrophize it a little bit because we have been brought up and we and we're in this world where there is such internalized misogyny there isn't enough seats at the table as women and we seem to almost compete with each other sometimes in environments where it is our own undoing i think that women have been encouraged to compete against each other for say the one seat at the table in

the past there would be what like one seat at the table for a woman so all women would be fighting for that I think as we open up we get more equal and there are more places at the table for you know half the table the places at the table should be for women then hopefully women support each other into getting those roles rather than having to fight to be the only one there and I do think that that's changing as you get more women kind of you know coming into professions I mean not always we've all come across you know senior women who don't behave in a collegiate way there's still very much a kind of queen bee syndrome I think a kind of hangover from you know the effects of people like Margaret Thatcher who define themselves in such a macho world as being

exceptional as being not like other women there's a really interesting study done of the Dutch police which showed that when there were very few women in the service the women got on better by defining themselves as not like other women but as the women became 30 40 percent of the service the behavior which was actually more helpful to them was to be more collaborative so it's also you're right it's a kind of scarcity mindset and hopefully if you get more women in they behave in a more supportive way but often i think the women who get to the highest echelons don't behave in that way i was actually i was finally whacked at the sunday times by a woman who then got rid of five other senior female journalists

when she came in to be the editor. You are 49 working for the Sunday Times as an editor when you get a knock on the door and it's goodbye. You get the boot. Can you talk us through what that... Made redundant, one might say. Well, like, it's pretty cooked. I say get the boot because it sounds, as far as I know, pretty horrific

and I don't think we give them the respect of saying that, like, you deserve the respect, they don't. But can you talk to us about what that time was like? Yeah, it was really hideous. So we started off talking about this about identity. And I think in some ways, we're the kind of first generation of women who have had the kind of careers which allowed us to build an identity around work in a way that I think men have done for a long time.

So to find myself, I've always been quite competitive. So I was still doing really well. My section was doing really well. The day that I was actually made redundant from the paper, I could talk about being whacked. i had a global scoop an interview with cheryl sandberg on the cover of the magazine that i edited and it was international women's day so that was all really oh my god take your cupcake and go i told you it was the boot there's no more of a boot than getting sacked by a woman on international women's day on international women's day with a kind of global scoop of an

amazing woman on the cover of your magazine which i've i've done myself i've been to silicon valley to interview cheryl it was my scoop anyway so i got this call i've been out for lunch i got a call going oh the new boss wants to see you I'm like okay fine so I go up there with like a whole like file of all the stuff that I'm going to put in the magazine that I'm intending to run over the next six months walk in and then I suddenly think oh crikey it's that meeting you know the meeting where there's tissues in the middle of the table and the head of HR is sitting next to the boss who's looking a bit shifty and I suddenly thought fuck it's that it's that meeting have you seen the movie or the series one day where there's a kind of there's one day in the womb you know we all

have a day when we're going to die right but you have a kind of death day when you're at work and you're suddenly like oh okay i'm at my death day this is when i die kind of thing and i remember sitting r.i.p me it's such a good way of describing it but it's true yes absolutely so so i go in there's the tissues there are the two women looking shifty and i just suddenly thought okay I'm for it I'm going to get the bullet because you also know in those kind of media companies that there's no way back you know once someone's decided that you're on your way out you know it's a negotiation about you know what's your payoff basically but my brain just completely separated a bit like when you're in a car crash or something and so I was kind of aware that there

was a conversation going on people were like shuffling papers around but my brain was just following this pigeon as it flew around the kind of spires of Southwark Cathedral I could see a tugboat chucking up the Thames I'd completely checked out and I felt like I died it was a really weird kind of out-of-body experience because I knew that the life that I'd had was over and that there was going to be a new chapter a bit like when somebody dies and you know that there's no going back so I just knew that this was the end of a period of my life and that I was going to move into something else and it was very funny even on that day I was like I'm not going to get another job in the media i'm not going back i didn't want to do what i had been doing somewhere

else and i was offered some other jobs but i just i was like no i'm not going to do that i'm going to set up my own thing so that was when i set up my media company noon as in the middle of the day because in the hundred year life 50 is halfway through so i set up noon.org.uk which is all about helping women start a new chapter at 50 of course it wasn't quite as quick as doing it you were like watching the pigeon on the tugboat and you were like ready to do now i've been thinking about this for a while but I wonder especially this idea of and 49 is not old it's not like we're sitting here going like oh god 49 but there must have been a sense of what am I going to do for my next job like what is the next thing at some point and I guess when you and you

know we've said identity a couple of times but when so much of it is tied up in the work that you do and who you are and how you've shown up to this one place for work for so long what did that do to your sense of identity to your sense of knowing who you are or what you wanted It was pretty dark. I mean, it was like, I think when I was at the Sunday Times, I wore what I kind of describe in the book as a Game of Thrones style cloak. I had this kind of big, kind of, you know, swanky, heavy cloak with fur and gold and, you know, and it gave me a lot of status. I wandered around the world with this huge cloak on going, you know, I am a kind of media, you know, I'm a kind of Murdoch media kind of baron. I mean, that sounds grim, but... confidence cloak on. I had my cloak. But it was kind of more than that. And what I realised when I had to give the cloak back, as it were, was that actually wearing that cloak comes with severe limitations. It's really heavy. It's very cumbersome. It's very obvious. So if you're wearing it, you have to behave in a certain way. So it kind of a whole load of things kind of stem

from wearing that big, heavy cloak. You know, good things in some ways, but also real limitations. and I think when I took it off for the really for the first time in my adult life I actually felt to begin with I just felt really sad and I didn't know who I was and I sat at home and binge watched the crown and you know my children would come downstairs and go what's the mum weather like today you know she is she is it full-on deluge is it like drizzle you know whatever how much was I crying so that you know that was definitely bad but I soon began to realized that actually not wearing that thing gave me a real kind of lightness a freedom to say whatever I liked and that I'd also learned a lot of stuff while doing that job you know that actually

all the stuff that I had been I still was but I didn't have to do it with this great big kind of cloak on and actually after I'd got over the sadness of it and I did a lot of work on myself i kind of i went and did lots of like silent yoga retreats and i took a whole load of magic mushrooms in uh jamaica and uh i did not think that that was where that sentence was going to be honest i love it you are a mixed bag and it's so good so i could do suddenly do all sorts of stuff you know i could go and take loads of magic mushrooms and then write about it i had a real kind of awakening i became much more kind of in touch with my spiritual side i did all sorts of wacky stuff that i would never have done in my old job with my cloak on and that felt really fun

and kind of uh really life enhancing and i became i felt a much more kind of revivified more real version of myself i started meditating every day i swam in the pond every day i had a real life changing kind of three years and have come out the other side a rather different person i haven't image of you just off your head on magic mushrooms in a pond in jamaica in jamaica i found myself here i am but eleanor if i can ask did they give you a reason why you were made redundant because by all accounts it sounds like your section was doing really well like there it was no not performance based oh no it wasn't it wasn't performance based it was entirely personal you know it was like my face didn't fit with a new lady you know i was out that was there was

no explanation given at all did you feel resentful like how did you overcome that uh yeah i did feel resentful and i think that when that kind of thing happens you get a kind of a slight ptsd response so i found myself in subsequent months i mean like if you split up with somebody and your brain just kind of keeps going back to the moment where they go i don't want to be with you anymore you know what you should say replaying it over and over what if I'd had this response or that response exactly you know if I'd done this or you know what what was the point at which this thing became inevitable a great friend of mine's husband died really tragically and she said that she just kept going over and over and over the last movements if she hadn't made that decision

then he wouldn't have been at the place where he died you know all those kind of things so I think that there's that awful kind of working backwards and one of the reasons that I started meditating and stuff was to get out of that very kind of ruminant loop about the kind of what ifs or the anxiety about what was to come so I became very interested in how you know in this moment actually everything is fine I may be feeling worried about this or you know regretful about that but actually in this moment everything is okay so it was like how do I keep that sense of being here in this moment rather than being in the past or being anxious about the future and that for me was the essence of coming into a sense of being in the now and that's you know I meditate every

morning and I love that feeling when you get into the cold water as well you can't think about anything else but exactly where you are so I became very interested in in that kind of practice of being very present. Eleanor it's so joyful hearing you talk about this almost like second chapter of your life but it's so interesting to me we did an interview with Trini Woodall a couple of months back and it's a fantastic episode. We'll link it in the show notes. But we were talking about this idea of the currency of the aging woman. And now without any context around that, she was quite offended by it. And I understand why. Laura asked the question. It's because we do seem to have this currency on ourselves as women of our value, of the value that

we have. And I know we've touched on it, the value that you have when you're in your twenties, your thirties, your forties, and how that kind of seems to dwindle throughout our years. what are the steps that as women we can take to rewrite that and whether that's rewriting our internalized misogyny but what can we do to start to safeguard ourselves when we are in our 20s and in our 30s and still technically in our prime to get to a point where we're okay with the fact that there are as many phases of life as a woman and turning 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 or whatever it is is just another chapter in that it doesn't devalue what you have to offer the world no i mean i would i would argue quite the contrary so i would say that we come into our prime

at 50 it's when we become the women we always wanted to be it's when we've got the experience and the wisdom and the kind of self-knowledge what i call being stout and i feel very proud to be stout to take up space in the world to exhibit what i know to speak out about the things that I care about and I think that that quality of being very rooted in who and what you are and what you care about only comes with wisdom and so I think that we need to really change the story that we tell about women and becoming and start thinking that 50 is actually you know the beginning of that queen age period between 50 and 75 that's when we really reap the benefits of this long life that we've had and everything that's come before when we can start maybe some kind of

spiritual adventures when we move into our personal power and can pass on that wisdom i think that telling much more positive stories about what that feels like what that can be like is the antidote to the kind of sell by date itis that you're talking about and i've seen that and what my book does is to tell the story of becoming of so many incredible women who have shifted into their power at 50 and if you think about the way that we've changed the story in our culture around race and around sexuality in the last kind of 20 30 years we can do that about how we value women as they age what it's really goes down to a very fundamental sense of what are women for you know we are not here to be pleasing to men to be eye candy to men to be handmaidens to the patriarchy

which is basically how our society tries to groom us so i'm calling for a kind of stoutness a sense of really embodying who and all of what we can be as women at this point and making other younger women look forward to that and that means bringing back examples of incredible strong women doing their thing at 50 and beyond not just these kind of highly surgerized and kind of you know distorted visions of what women can be about when they're hanging on to a kind of use which is always going to be the law of diminishing returns so i think we have to move into our power and part of that is reclaiming the myths of the older wise women which have been absolutely annihilated from our culture by christianity and patriarchy over the last 2000 years one of the most interesting books

i've read recently is something called wise women by a woman called sharon blackie who's gone back and discovered all the myths of shape-shifting older women the women who control the landscape the women who weave fates, the hen wife who kind of helps the younger women in the village. There are all these incredible stories of what older women can be and their power. They've just been eradicated from our culture by patriarchy. And this is about bringing back that narrative. That is so fascinating. I've never heard any of that.

All I've kind of noticed is that there is this gaping hole, but I've never been aware that these stories existed, but they didn't serve the purpose of what the patriarchy was wanting. I mean, for people who might be interested in where they can find more of those sorts of stories or information around what used to exist, where might they be able to find that? Well, this new volume of stories coming out, which is called Wise Women by Dr. Sharon Blackie, which is coming out later this year. She wrote a book called Haggitude as well, which also looks at some of the kind of visions of the crone. I'm not so crazy about this kind of, you know, reclaiming cronehood or haggitude and stuff. I think that sounds a bit depressing.

That's why I came up with the other moniker of Queenager. Yeah, I think that feels a bit more positive for women, kind of 50 plus. Has a bit more of a ring to it. Yeah, a bit more zing. Yeah, I'm a journalist. I've written headlines for a long time. I thought we needed a kind of positive groundwork. I don't want to be a hag or a crone.

I'm happy to be a Queen, Asia. But I think that that's really, that's super important. And there are so many myths. I mean, in Scotland, there's the myth of the Kaliak who inhabits the mountains. she's the kind of highest mountains and she created the earth we all live within her body or if you go to the ancient greeks that's the women who are the three fates who weave everybody's life i was reading a wonderful siberian folk tale the other day about this kind of transformation that comes to women at around 50 where a woman turns into a fox and suddenly kind of goes off

into the forest and has a whole new life and that's really what queenagerhood is about it's like the research that we've done on my platform we've done you know I'm an old journalist so I like some facts we did a huge study and what we find is that really whatever we've been doing between 25 and 50 at about 50 it all changes and yet in our culture there's nothing saying expect this pivot point you know as we live longer lives we're all going to have to shift into a new phase so if you've been at home with the kids the kids leave home if you've been doing a job likelihood is you know after 25 years you're probably going to have to shift and do something else our parents die people get divorced we find that by 50 over half of women have been through

at least five huge life events which often come together in what we call a midlife collision or clusterfuck and therefore what that does is it's a kind of shedding a bit like what happened to me and you have to shed all the stuff that no longer serves you and a bit like a pruning when you cut a plant right back to its essence you come out with this kind of wonderful green kind of shoot a kind of new energy a new purpose that's why i have my bright green nails to kind of remind me of that which is like the kind of sap rising again and i think we really need to tell this story in the culture i think it's so important and kind of restorative and healing for so many women who are coming up behind us that we don't have to believe the disney tropes that the only

older women are evil stepmothers and witches you're so right yeah they're actually there are so many amazing kind powerful helpful older women out there who are just kind of you know wanting to be given a chance that we just need to tell a different story about them which suits us as women not the patriarchy eleanor what do you think's been your favorite decade oh i think i'm happier now than i've ever been truly i really am i'm 53 i've just you know so four years ago i kind of was drummed out of the times you know in tears walking out along the thames last weekend i was on the bestseller list my book went in at number four on the times bestsellers much more to come so that was an amazing bit of circularity and in fact before it came out on the bestseller list

i'd gone back in to the times building they have this huge tower by the river and my old friend who's a the top interviewer there interviewed me on stage in front of a kind of big audience there and they kind of really rolled out the red carpet i went down to see the ceo and all that kind of stuff and I kind of I felt that there's something very healing in things coming full circle you said to me am I bitter no it was very sad and it was a real you know massive thing to get my head around and to move out of but actually I think whatever form that midlife clusterfuck comes to you in for me it was redundancy but I now run these circles of women as part of Neen we run a kind of monthly queen ager circle we call it a noon circle we do them all over the uk now and

what i see when i sit in that circle and speak to the women is that everybody has this kind of reckoning in some ways for me it came through the redundancy for others it comes through divorce or a bereavement or for some people though nothing actually massive external happens but how they feel just totally changes and they need to slough off a whole bit of their life and go off and do something else so what I'm arguing for is a sense of the possibility of reinvention and coming into your new most glorious chapter at 50 and that's what my book is all about so much more to come it's all about telling the stories of women who have done exactly that and all the women who have inspired me on my own journey and who are the absolute tapestry of this book and all these

incredible women I sit in the circles with every month. Did you drop a signed copy back into your old boss's desk when you went back into the Sunday Times that's what I would have done I did the one who fired me or whacked me is now no longer there she's she left after two years but I did go back in to see the CEO there who I've always been extremely fond of and she said to me she said to me Ellen are you really happier now as if she found it really hard to think that she said I know you write in the book that you're happy now and I was like yeah I really am because I am entirely my own boss nobody can control what I say or how I say it or what I do within my company and actually for me now the freedom as a kind of older more powerful woman the freedom to

really call it as I see it is now worth far more to me than that Game of Thrones cloak because nobody can control my voice or tell me to shut up or to kind of stop me or edit me in any way and that it feels very very like an amazing place to be and I think that for women the freeing of that voice only comes with pain and fear when I first started to write as me rather than in the way that I'd been schooled to write by the paper for all those years it came with a lot of kind of pain and anxiety I'd literally be like trembling as I hit send on some of my posts but coming through that there's an amazing sense of kind of one's own power and the capacity to change the way people think and to shift the you know to really shift the dial on this whole conversation in the

world and that's my real purpose now there are so many women who will listen to this who are our older demographic of women and who will find the things that you're saying very affirming but what I feel most excited about it's because people who are in your place in life probably already understand and feel the way that you feel and are seeking out a community of similar like-minded women but I get really excited about the people who are my age who feel fearful about aging or being older and about their value within their workplace their value within themselves because they're still on that discovery they're still on that self-journey towards it and I have a question for you around something that has been recently in Australian media it's been talked about a lot

more there's a lot of women who are at the forefront of this conversation and it centers around menopause it's probably the first time ever that I've started to actually see women publicly talking about menopause and this almost like reframing of it. Do you think that it kind of has something to answer for in terms of how we've spoken about menopause for so long? Because I guess for me, everything up until recently, it's always been like, well, that's when you can no longer have children. And that's the most important thing as a woman is being able to have children. So once you can't do it anymore, well, once again, the expiration date conversation. but i've been seeing a lot more conversations around perimenopause around for some people

that feeling liberating what has been your experience of this menopause conversation and your experience of it i guess well i try to talk about queen ages not walking hot flushes because for me the entire point of feminism was for us to be freed from our biology so while i think it's incredibly important that the menopause conversation comes out of the shadows and isn't kind of no and is no longer part of a taboo and that doctors know how to help us if we're having bad symptoms and about 25 of women really suffer i also think it's really important that we don't put all older women into this kind of hot flush kind of menopausal slightly kind of hormonal box i actually think that's really dangerous i think that that's a bit like taking us back to victorian

times when women were seen as kind of hysterical because they were ruled by their wombs and their hormones so they weren't fit to take any decisions we women were seen like children or dogs you know is not really mentally proficient so I think that there's a reason why a patriarchal culture has been so enthusiastic to embrace putting all older women in a hot pink sweaty menopause box so I think it's quite also while I welcome the fact that there's some older women kind of speaking out about this and I think the men you know the menopause is obviously a big thing the danger of this conversation is it makes everybody think that they're going to have a terrible menopause because the women who tend to speak about it are the ones who've had a really bad time you know

understandably but the reality is that for about three quarters of women you know it's a bit uncomfortable you get a bit hot which has been my experience but it's fine I don't take HRT I find if I swim in the pond every day I feel okay if I don't drink alcohol I'd feel okay so I don't think it's a kind of I think for some women you know they really really feel awful and they get very depressed and they have you know bad symptoms but I think to put a message out there into society for younger women that you know okay you've just battled through you know your periods having children maybe if you have them kind of you've got to this point and then you're going to get whacked over the head with menopause I don't think that that is a massively positive way of framing

women's lives and what we're for so I while I welcome it in some ways and particularly the medical stuff I mean I'm a great believer in the Caroline Corrado Perez stuff about invisible women and it's really important that doctors actually understand and are trained in menopause in the UK it wasn't mandatory to have training for GPs in menopause till about 18 months ago so you know that's really important the health equity piece but I think it's also really important that we don't play into that trap you know and often that's the problem with misogyny you know it doesn't go away it mutates into a different form and I while I think the menopause conversation is important i don't want to be seen through a menopausal lens in the same way that i don't want

to be seen through a male lens and actually we did a big we did a big study with our ladies at noon on this and 80 of the women don't want to be defined as menopausal they want doctors to know what they're doing but they don't want to be seen through that lens that's why i talk about queen ages not and we you know menopause of course is a part of the experience at this time but if you think of it like a pie chart the menopause is like one kind of slither of that pie chart whereas this midlife collision is much more about it i think and also the gendered ageism in the culture and also i think a sense that of women themselves just getting to a point of what we call the midlife revolt which is just going i just can't be asked to be pleasing anymore i don't need to

fit into these stereotypes i'm gonna you know wear purple and kind of go my own way or you know whatever that is so i just think that they're the menopause conversation can be quite reductive and so i resist the menopausal lens someone said to me the other day hey elena are you in the menopause i was like uh no shoot me in the head menopausal as a as a label is so deeply intertwined with hormonal and it's so reductive in that sense and like it's so pejorative yeah it is it's not a compliment is it i mean and in the same way i wouldn't say to my daughters oh darlings you're menstrual you know no one defines young women as being menstrual and i said this at adweek the other day but you don't you wouldn't go to a whole room of middle-aged men and go oh you know welcome

to your viagra years how's the limp dick club i mean it's the same thing it's really let's not put women in that kind of menopausal kind of hormonal box let's see them as the amazing kind creatures that they are queen ages not walking hot flushes almost i'm gonna want to disagree with something you said there just the part where i think i think the opposite i think we do label hormonal and i think it's okay for women in terms of when they're menstruating because science says we are more hormonal we are more emotional and like i think it's okay to say that like hey i'm sorry i actually do have my period right now not apologizing but like i know things are heightened for me right now I think there is something to be said for having

some self-awareness around that so it's not it's not an excuse and it's not a label but our bodies do change at that time I guess the thing though is with that Brit is that that doesn't need to be said because it's over corrected so far it's already used as a I say it all the time but it's already used by people as a weapon so people don't need to be reminded that yes I have hormones that do sometimes affect the way i feel about things i'm cognizant of that don't diminish what i say when i feel a certain way because of it and i think it's weaponized and that's what happens with menopause as well it's just another thing that's used to weaponize the way in which and reduce the way in which women feel i completely agree so i'm not i totally agree with you that

we should be allowed to say that you know we're impaired i had i had terrible periods and it used to make me really really emotional and i'd have a few days where i really just needed to go to bed and i think it's really important that women are now able to say that in the workplace one of my great friends is a woman called gabby who set up bloody good period so i totally and i'm a huge believer that women who are discriminated against that work for menopause or have really bad symptoms and all those kind of things should get the support that they need i really you know 100 believe that but it's again it's about the lens through which we're seen through you know you may have a few days a month where you feel you know emotional hormonal and of course in an ideal world

we'd be able to kind of express that and that would be understood. But I think the world that we live in still weaponizes any female weakness against us so massively. That's the kind of mutation of misogyny. So we kind of think that we're getting something which is positive for us and then it's weaponized against us. So I just think that we always have to be aware of that and aware of the historical precedent, which is that women are seen as hysterical, hormonal, and therefore you know less than and less fit to kind of to lead and I think that you know we're talking about female CEOs I think there's also a real danger within the corporate world I do a lot of work now as a consultant and trying to get companies to think about how many senior women

they've got and to hang on to them but I think that there's also a danger there that the menopause conversation puts us in a kind of sweaty menopause or hot box hot flush box just when we should be being kind of stepping into leadership positions so i'm just very wary of anything that diminishes female power through a biological lens it's nuanced isn't it it's both it definitely just comes back full circle to education the reason people put into that box is because they're not educated enough to know that it doesn't have to impact someone's life like it doesn't have to define us but that's that comes with conversations like we're having right now yeah for sure and you know these things are never it's never completely kind of black and white you know there's some

right on both sides but i think that what tends to happen when we're talking about women is that any kind of weakness that we admit to is then weaponized and used against us so i'm just wary of that because i've seen that happen with the menopause space so much you know whether it's about big brands cashing in on kind of menopause lines kind of like cotton shirts it's like actually i'm an intelligent woman i know that probably cotton is a good idea it doesn't need to have a menopause label on it you know so that kind of thing so there becomes a kind of also a kind of corporate jumping on the bandwagon and it always slightly makes me cringe when i go to a conference and i see some very powerful woman standing up and like feeling like she has to talk about her

menopause that that's kind of now expected in a way that a man never would so i think that it's always kind of worth looking at the equivalents and i think that the viagra one is quite a good one we don't say to the senior chaps you know on the little blue pills you know in the way that talk about hrt and i think the other thing that's important for us to mention in the context of this conversation is that if we think about the witch trials i think that they are actually the real we're talking about kind of women being pitted against women it's just important to remember the church and society went through a phase where they killed women they drowned them or they burnt them for being friendly with other women or for being interested in kind of you know natural cures

or for being midwives or for being slightly weird or women who were living on their own on the edge of the village they actually were killed within you know the last kind of 100 150 years so within our kind of genetic memory it's been very dangerous to be an outlying woman who supports other women so when i talk about the kind of when you speak up you have that kind of sense of fear that's very real and recent if you think about women in iran or malala who was you know shot at for saying that she had the right to be educated all of this stuff is very new what i'm talking about in much more to come is the latest phase i think the last bit of feminism kind of one of the last bits of the argument that needs to be made and it's only 100 years since women got the vote

so this is an ongoing revolution it's probably going to take hundreds of years for us to really get to equality so i'm just begin trying to spell out the places where which we're only just beginning to think about and so all of these things hopefully will come out in the wash we'll have a truly equal society where the fact that we feel emotional or we're menopausal or whatever won't be held against us but I think currently we're still very much at the beginning of that trajectory and to say to women that we've got equality is entirely to gaslight them we haven't we're at the beginning it's like we've been given the lanyard we're allowed into the building but it's not set up for us yet. Eleanor you would be in all sorts of trouble on psychedelics in the

pond back in the day. If you were a hundred years ago, you would be fucked. Oh, I would definitely have been thrown into the, I would definitely have been burnt at the stake. I'm very happy to be a witch. I have found this conversation so incredibly fascinating. I found myself, I have felt a shift. I'm 38 now. I think when I was in my twenties, I was quite fixated on the things that I thought were important, which were the way that I looked, the way in which men validated my existence the things that I could provide in a work sense but not from my own fulfillment from like a sense of like seeking external validation perspective and and I have seen a shift and it's and it's a growing shift in me I'm certainly not where I want to be but I'm

heading towards that in a sense of comfort and ease in the person that I am and with that has come like a real sense of confidence that I didn't have five years ago or six years ago but I love speaking to you and love hearing that it doesn't just stop one day. You don't just reach a destination and then have to rework yourself from the ground up. Because, you know, even when I said earlier, prime years of your life and for you to overcorrect me and say, actually, I think the prime years of my life now, I take a real comfort in that because I think for a long time I was scared about aging and I don't feel fearful anymore, not just from this conversation, but from where I'm heading towards. I think a lot of people, there's a comfort to getting there,

that's for sure I'm still scared we're not there yet you haven't read my book yet Eleanor I'd love to finish with just your favorite piece of advice that you can impart on us or maybe someone's imparted on you over the years I think the most helpful thing that anyone said to me when I was going through my own kind of dark midlife kind of transition well um the American midlife guru Chip Conley says midlife is not a crisis but a chrysalis and I think that that's really important that sense of you're going into something and you're going to come out you know as a butterfly I think that's really helpful but actually the most helpful thing anyone said to me was change is difficult I was in a chigun class and I was at the end and I felt really emotional and I

was crying and this lovely teacher just said to me you know and he said what's wrong and I said I'm going through a big big transition he said you know it's okay change is difficult and I think allowing ourselves giving ourselves permission to be finding it hard for me that was the most liberating thing that it was like for the first time I allowed a bit of self-compassion to come in like you know this is hard I'm doing my best and kind of saying to people when they're in a bad way oh you know buck up it'll all be fine there'll be the making of you which is what people tend to do or you'll bounce back you know that's meant kindly but actually when you're in that place just to be met to be heard and to be told that you're you're allowed to be finding it

unbearably tough is kind of what I really needed to hear and that allowed in the beginning of the healing process that it was going to be a process changes is difficult it takes a while you have to be kind to yourself you have to do things in a different way and so I think that's the key message but that change is difficult but we have to keep on doing it and we need to expect it particularly if we're going to live the hundred year life we're going to have to keep changing nothing's going to stay the same it's the only constant. Eleanor you're wonderful thank you so much for joining us much more to come your book is out now we're going to link that in our show notes along with your website and all your other info but you have been truly wonderful like I love

this yeah you have made a pretty tough topic very very palatable like very funny very easy to listen to and quite inspirational oh well thank you so much for having me I'm a real I'm really fatted and honored to be on your podcast and I just really hope my real like purpose now is to spread this message so that women don't feel like they have a sell-by day you know we really don't and we come into our power and our prime at this point and that's the message