Off Air... with Jane and Fi - A little playful smile resting around my face - with Jake Humphrey

Episode Date: December 7, 2022

Will Jane's dreams of becoming a lounge crooner ever come true? Does Fi have an incredibly serious face? Can the pair still unlock their full potential?Jane and Fi are joined by sports broadcaster and host of "The High Performance" podcast, Jake Humphrey, for this week's edition of Wellness Wednesday.Also, author AM Homes discusses her new book "The Unfolding".If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: [e-mail] Producer: Kate LeeTimes Radio Producer: Rosie CutlerPodcast Executive Producer: Ben Mitchell Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

VoiceOver describes what's happening on your iPhone screen. VoiceOver on. Settings. So you can navigate it just by listening. Books. Contacts. Calendar. Double tap to open. Breakfast with Anna from 10 to 11. And get on with your day. Accessibility. There's more to iPhone. I'd love to have been a sort of lounge crooner.

I think I'm the radio equivalent of a lounge crooner. When I've got rid of this cold, I really hope that I will be. I think that might be your third age. Do you think? Yep. Yeah, I've only got to develop a proper vocal performance ability. No, I don't think in some lounge singers' cases you really need to do that. Just bellow. Just bellow.

Just bellow. There's that molly. And it's my way. Will you sing my way at my funeral? That would be lovely. No, I will not. In a handsome falsetto. She somehow pulled herself together in front of the audience of 16 and gave it her everything.

Oh, that would be great. I'll spring out of my coffin and surprise you. Oh, please don't do that. I don't want to think about your demise. That's not very nice. It's just inevitable. Right, so we had a lovely day today. It was a bit strange though, wasn't it, Jane, because we had to go into hair and make-up before the show.

We did. And you were joined, I wasn't, but you were joined by the great Vanessa Phelps. Yeah. How was Vanessa? Well, she was very lovely and it took a while for us to recognise each other because we were surrounded by hair and beauty. By attendees. Yes, practitioners. And we had a very nice chat, actually.

She sent her regards to you. I said we'd pop in and see her sometime down on the set. Yeah, well, why not? Yep, and we talked about being liberated from the previous place. Yes. And about all the good times ahead of us. It was lovely. Very nice.

I'm glad you heard that. That's a rather positive account. Yeah, no, it was nice, actually. It was very nice to see her. We were actually, Kate did make up because we were being filmed for some sort of, I mean, it's all quite new to us, this world, but some sort of advertisement, which is coming out in what we call the new year.

So that's something you can certainly adjust your sets for. I did find myself during the show today because I think both of us have got, we've got kind of slouchy resting faces. Yeah, I know. Well, it's just, I just look really grumpy unless I make a profound effort to look otherwise. But I look incredibly serious with my resting face.

Quite a serious person. But I did find myself today, A, sitting up straighter, and B, with a little playful smile, just resting. Just resting around my face. Just cogitating around your countenance. And actually, I felt a bit better for it, Jane. Well, maybe that's taught you a savage lesson, and not before time. Actually, you know, yesterday I talked very fondly

about seeing a baby in a Santa hat on the tube and how cheerful it was. Yes. Well, today I saw the opposite. I saw an adult in a Santa hat looking really down and actually sort of gazing, you know, just sort of slumped. And he wasn't, I don't think he was inebriated in any way.

He just looked really down in the mouth, hard on his luck, but wearing, I don't mean in terms of he was poverty stricken because I wouldn't pick on somebody in those circumstances. I don't think anybody on your tube line is poverty stricken. This was very close to work, actually. But he just, you can't, basically my point is, if you're going to wear a Santa hat in public... Your face has got to match.

Yes, you don't have the option to look miserable. It's not a thing. So please don't. Right. Or just don't wear the hat. That's very good advice. Now, we've worked out a strategy for Meghan and Harry, or Harry and Meghan, the Netflix dump, which is happening tomorrow morning, 8 o'clock. So,

we've already decided, you watch episode one, which is about their romance. Yes. And I'm getting on to episode two, when things fall apart and things start going wrong. Yep, or as you put it, you do the romance fee, I'll do the meaty. That's the way it pans out for us, isn't it? I'll picture you in your little bed jacket, perhaps with a tea cake, just indulging in their romance. I think you'll find I'll be doing my weights, stretches and lunges in front of our Netflix. Yes, I have absolutely no truck.

Well, it'll warm you up because it was properly cold when I tiptoed down to the loo first thing this morning. Crikey. Well, I've tried taking a dog around the block for their doings

once over at five o'clock in the morning. We do love hearing from you all. Please do continue to get in touch. One of Jane's favourite phrases on email, janeandfee at times.radio and you can tweet us at times.radio using the hashtag

janeandfee and you can also leave a review of the podcast wherever it is that you're listening to us right now. Now that helps us, doesn't it, Jane? It does help. Yes. I mean, obviously don't write, this is crap. Well, no, I mean, you can if you want to. Does even that help? Just do five stars

of crap. Okay. Anything you like. Five stars. Shimmering stars of shite. You won't want to miss a word of this. Write whatever you like. But I think it helps to get us up the charts, doesn't it? And we're nothing if not chart toppers.

I think we were once, weren't we? Just for one week. But listen, you can never stop referring to it afterwards, so it's brilliant. They can't hold it against you. And also because our book is an Amazon bestseller because once we were number one in Silver Surfers and I think Computing Radio

Plays. Yeah, that's right. Well, just Radio Plays. So only a slightly broader category, in fairness. Not the broadest on Amazon. We'll take anything. A little bit niche. Yeah. Here's one from Tamryn,

and she has a surname in common with the Princess of Wales. Did you know there's a colour pink named after her in a popular war chart? Paint chart. Well, that completes my life. Well, you know I'm looking at paint colours at the moment because I'm having my hallway painted. So I've been mildly obsessing about what to do.

Oh, listeners, I live this every day. She does glaze over a bit. You dip in and out. I live it every day. Anyway, thanks for asking. I've gone for... No, I'm not going to mention it. I think it's quite tasteful.

Others may disagree. Who cares? Tamrin says, I just want you to write and tell you that you accompany me for hours while I'm driving. I am from Zimbabwe. I'm now living in Zambia and my husband and I are farmers.

Now, we live in a remote community. So our kids who are 7, 11 and 13 are at boarding school. I drive a lot between schools, including Bulawayo in Zimbabwe. I save up episodes so I can listen for five hours on the go. Gosh, this sounds amazing, Tamrin. Thank you for this. I wish you could see the view outside my window right now as I drive past Hawangi National Park. It's a bright green bush. There are huge trees, sunlight on the tar road with butterflies

drifting past all in the foreground of massive black thunderclouds. I'm really grateful for that because as we sit here and we are huddled in a tiny studio here at Times Towers in London, right by London Bridge, and it's freezing in London at the moment, isn't it? It's suddenly got very cold in the UK and it's quite suddenly and it feels proper wintry. So it's lovely to get that splash of colour. Thank you for that, Tamarind. You make me laugh and sometimes you make me think, says Tamarind, I don't agree with all your views.

That'll be for you, Fi. No, I think that's for you. Probably is actually, isn't it? But I'm grateful for the chance to hear all sides. My life is very different. And so it's also a chance to have a window into a more complex world which i hope i can reap the benefits of to inform my children as they will no doubt come overseas one day and have to navigate the waters of a confusing environment compared to their very independent but also sheltered upbringing thanks for being with me on my phone, says Tamrin.

Well, it's our pleasure, Tamrin. Thank you very much. And I'm not sure whether... It's difficult, that, isn't it? She says her children are having an independent but sheltered upbringing. I mean, everyone has a sort of a shelter in what they think they know about their own circumstances.

And I wonder whether your life there is any... Certainly not any smaller than mine, Tamrin. Don't beat yourself up about that. No, but I suppose if you're dropping your kids off at a boarding school in rural Zimbabwe, then that probably does feel to be a far more distant childhood than if you're bumbling along in an enormous city. Yeah, no, I guess so. It sounds incredibly exciting and thrilling to me,

which I suppose is why I don't want Tamarind to feel down about it. Yeah, no, don't feel down. No, no, I don't think she does actually feel down. That was the wrong way of explaining it. But also I'm slightly alarmed that you might think that we're in any sense a guidebook to any form of a life because, I don't know, have we succeeded, Jane? In some parts of our lives in others not so much

tamra not so much that would be right right it is wednesday so you all know what that means this past month jane has been trying out the high performance journal written by sports broadcaster jake Humphrey, to see if she could change her mindset and achieve, it just says success here, which is a bit rude actually, achieve more success. Thank you, Fiona. We spoke to Jake and asked him if he's going to tell us it's not too late and we can still unlock our full potential.

Of course I am. The Stoics, who I follow religiously, said the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is right now. So I will not hear of it that either of you are in anything other than your prime and ready to attack and commit and drive change, unless you're totally happy where you are and everything's great, which indeed it may well be, in which case, relax. The Stoics died out, didn't they? Yeah, they did. But their thinking and beliefs and understandings of the world live on.

And they were very wise, considering that they didn't have what we have now, air travel, social media, newspapers, the internet. You know, they knew their stuff. Can I take you up on something? This is from your high performance the daily journal 365 ways to become your best book which i've got in front of me here um there is something that really interested me um it's on page 86 and it's about not thinking

about a problem that appears to be stressful when we find a problem stressful it is tempting to simply not think about it this was the method used by the olympic cyclist chris hoy at least right now my issue uh jake in all seriousness is that i don't just think about things that are stressing me i overthink about them and it makes me feel worried nervous and incredibly anxious how do i I kick that habit? Is it possible to change that way of eking out what passes for my existence? Yeah, it's absolutely possible. I mean, the first thing to discuss, right, is whether this overthinking, and by the way, I am exactly the same.

I'm a total overthinker. Are you a catastrophizer as well? Do you go like 10 stages on and see the end result? Right. Well, welcome to the club. like 10 stages on and see the end result. Right. Well, welcome to the club.

I think the thing is, we are now pessimists, right? Because we've evolved from the human beings who were the warriors, who saw the tiger or whatever early and went, we need to run away from that. So I'm going to start running now. The optimists who were there going, look at that beautiful animal, were the ones that got eaten. So actually, naturally, we've evolved from the most pessimistic people, because those are the ones that were pessimistic, so they survived. The problem is, the truth is that for both of you, the things that we

were pessimistic about a couple of thousand years ago, we no longer need to be pessimistic about, because those dangers are not so prevalent. And it's hard, because the news makers understand that our brains are hardwired to listen to negativity, which is why they fill our lives with negativity, which then makes us feel like everything's a disaster all the time. So how do you get rid of that? Well, the first thing is you have to really think about whether this negative thinking and this catastrophizing and this cycle that you can easily spin into and everyone does like just stop and say, is it actually helpful? this cycle that you can easily spin into and everyone does like just stop and say is it actually helpful almost certainly you know that it isn't and then i think it's about perspective like you both and your podcast and me and my podcast and my wife and my children and your kids and your friends and probably almost every business that you interact with every single day right in a 100 years the whole lot is gone what and 100 years well exactly it

isn't that far away right in the blink of eye it's all gone so do we need to be worrying quite so much about everything like look at it like a bit of an egg timer okay all of the sand underneath is gone so it's not yours anyway all the stuff above it hasn't happened so it's not yours anyway and who knows how much of that you're going to get. The only bit that you actually have for you is the single sort of grain of sand in the middle. And I think we are spending too much of our lives concerned about things that we didn't do right previously, worrying about things that might be down the road,

and not living in this moment that we're in right now. It's being present, isn't it? Totally. Can I put something to you, Jake? Yeah, of course. I've known Jane for quite a long time now. And I think she is one of the very few people I know, who can actually sit in a place of kind of contentment, which is neither low performance nor high performance,

and actually exists quite happily within that. And I think there's a lot to be said for that i mean you cannot you cannot want everybody in the world to be operating at a high performance level we need lots of different people going at different speeds don't we i would counter that she's found high performance oh i think one of the mistakes right there's a pleasure one of them it's not necessarily a mistake but one of the things i wrestle with sometimes is the title of our podcast, High Performance, the High Performance Podcast. I think it alienates some people. And I think they think, well, there's no point in me listening to that because I'm not high performance.

I never will be, partly because I don't believe it, but also some people because they just are happy with where things are at. But the truth is when we talk about high performance, it's your own version of high performance. Now, if being content represents high performance, then you're there. And I actually think that when I started that podcast, for me, it was all about like the scrap and the struggle and the fight to try and achieve some great thing. The truth is, from all the conversations that we've had, it's not about any of that stuff it's all about being happy that's all high performance is being happy you know johnny wilkinson joined us and he

said he actually how long do you think he was happy for when he kicked the drop goal that won us the rugby world cup oh surely he's still happy because of that isn't he so it was like a 20 year journey right to get to that moment and he said the joy lasted for 30 seconds. Oh my gosh. So that is the actual truth about the people that join us on High Performance. These billionaires, these elite performers, these leaders, these CEOs, these music artists, these sports stars, they are no happier than you or I. And the truth is that what they're often doing is they're delaying their own happiness like lots of us are to reach a goal or get to a moment. But that never comes.

And we all have to realise, I think, if I was to leave you with one message, it's that we need to stop thinking, I'm going to be happy when I get that big house, I get that promotion, I get married, I have children, I buy a new car, whatever it is. Because what we're actually doing is we're kind of saying, well, I'm not going to be happy until I achieve that goal. And then when I achieve that goal, then I'm going to find my happiness yeah so it's lowering your expectations part of this the point of this feature jake is that we we are going to try out these uh self-help books and the kind of motivational products on offer as part of our

kind of task so jane has been filling in the High Performance Daily Journal. So I think we should ask her which bits have really... Well, I took great heart from the fact that Tracy Neville, when she began to manage the England Roses netball team, one of her first instructions to the team was tidy your locker. Now, this is the kind of message I've been trying to give at home for about 15 years without a great deal of success but there's something that seems on the face of it an entirely anodyne slightly inane instruction but it's a it's a it's a cue to your brain to

behave in a certain way isn't it and maybe even simple things like that those little tips and hacks are are part of improving the way we conduct our daily life do you get what i mean so did you change your daily habits because you were using the daily high performance journal i have certainly learned to put order and precision into the way i conduct myself in the domestic setting, Fiona. OK. For example, I spent a tidy afternoon sorting out the spice rack. Has there ever been a more middle-class way to spend a Sunday afternoon? Well, Jane Susan, what did you start with and what did you end with?

Did you do it on heat or did you do it alphabetically? No, alphabetically. So is the smoked paprika next to the paprika? Oh, that's a difficult one. Or is it further down? I moved it to S. Yeah, OK. That's going to drive you mad. Well, it already, it may have actually been,

I made a vegan chilli earlier in the week and it had to move up. But anyway, no one is interested in this. I am. OK, thank you, darling. The idea that you can affect your professional performance by living your life at home in a certain way, do you believe that? Yeah, darling. The idea that you can affect your professional performance by living your life at home in a certain way, do you believe that? Yeah, absolutely.

You do? Yeah. There's a really interesting book that I would recommend to both of you, actually. It's by a guy called William McRaven. He was 37 years, right, as a Navy SEAL. And he wrote a book, number one bestseller. It sold two million copies. What do you think it's called?

Tidy Your Spice Rack. Yeah. How to be the best. Make your bed. Yes. It's called Make Your Bed. And then underneath it, it says small things that change your life and maybe the world. It's about making world class decisions on the simplest things. So the time that you get out of bed half an hour early. So you have a bit of time before everyone else wakes up and your phone starts going and everything kicks off. The food that you eat, spending a couple of minutes an hour just looking out the window or walking around outside, doing some exercise, making sure you find the time for that, talking kindly to yourself, being optimistic, believing great things are around the corner. These are all things that anyone can do. They don't cost any money.

They're all available to you. And once you work them into your daily routine, hopefully, as you found from using the journal and other sort of books that you'll be reading, it honestly makes a difference. And you say that your podcast is called High Performance. If it had been called Mediocre Performance, it just wouldn't have done that well, would it? I would be more likely

to listen to a podcast called mediocre performance than high performance though and i'm not trying to be silly really because jake's earlier point that high performance i feel that excludes me because i'm not really seeking that jake if i can be honest no that's and that's fine but actually i think you are seeking high performance but you're seeking your own version of high performance and your own version of it may well be sleeping well at night, getting a bit of exercise so you feel good, living in the moment, having enough money just to take away the sort of daily stresses of can I afford to pay mortgages and buy food and things like that and going on a couple of holidays and spending time with people you really like. That's true. Yeah, that is your own version of high performance. Please don't mistake high-achieving people

for high-happiness people. They're not any happier than you or I. And what I learned from Jake, honestly, has been that thing about tidying up the things in your domestic life that you could do better that might actually instill... I mean, it does sound farcical for me to talk about my working life

in terms of performance, but I honestly do think I was marginally... It's all a performance, love. I was marginally better today than yesterday. Oh, God. I am clutching. I'm clutching at radio straws. So you've achieved. It's for incremental gain, isn't it? It is. It's interesting, isn't it? You were talking about earlier on the programme, actually on the radio programme,

about the mess in your kids' bedrooms. And I realised in later life I do need a certain amount of order. I used to be quite low-key about that sort of thing. And as I've got older, I definitely want to know where things are and I want to be reassured by a certain structure in the domestic setting. And I don't think that's unusual, actually. No, but also I don't want to embarrass my kids by saying that their rooms are messy,

because actually I really, really remember that feeling of wanting my room at home to just be mine, how I want it. Oh, yeah, no, it's your sanctuary. Totally. And their rooms aren't hideous and festering, but they're just, if you walked into our house, you'd know which room was mine and which room was the kids'. Yeah, actually...

Because mine is a little bit tidy now. Yes, I'm glad to hear it. I mean, all this talk of rooms does remind me of our privilege, and we are both. We do know that we are very fortunate. And we were talking on the program today about renting in your 50s with a guest called bb lynch and you can of course listen back to the radio program on the times radio app can't you yes you can yes i'm

just filling in for people who may not know indeed i'm not sure you all together remembered that and um bb lynch was a guest she's in she's 56 and she's renting and she was just she written an article for the times today about what she believes there is She's 56 and she's renting. And she was just, she'd written an article for the Times today about what she believes, there is a stigma, I think she's right, there is a sort of stigma about so-called still renting in your 50s. And it got quite a, it got a good reaction, her interview, and I think the article had also got a good reaction from readers. I think it's a fair point to make as well,

that nearly everything that we talk about with regards to the cost of living crisis, the energy crisis, the housing crisis, the people who are on the radio talking about that are in a completely different position. We are removed from it by the certainty of our own employment. So, you know, we are happy for people to point that out. And we just want to acknowledge that we do know that. Yeah, and it's safe in the knowledge it could at any moment go tits up. Books, contacts, calendar, double tap to open. Breakfast with Anna from 10 to 11. And get on with your day.

Accessibility. There's more to iPhone. Our next big guest interviewed today. Yes, on the face of it, A.M. Holmes is a very serious writer. She writes very serious American novels and some incredible nonfiction as well. But she's one of your, you like her, don't you? You were a fully paid up fan of A.M. Holmes. Well, I love her book, May We Be Forgiven. It's one of those books that's really stayed with me. I mean, it was, I think it won the Women's Prize in 2012.

So it stayed with me for over a decade. I can remember the characters in it and the point that she was trying to make. She is dark and she goes to places that other writers would be more fearful to go. And I was nervous of interviewing her because I'd asked if we could have her on the programme and then last night I just thought, oh no, maybe it'll just be too terrifying,

we won't ask the right questions, we won't do this and we won't do that. And she was just lovely, wasn't she? Yes, she was great. She was really interesting. So why don't you read the intro, because you wrote it and you know her work. Just showing our workings. This is how you do

a podcast. Learn from me. In the margin. A.M. Holmes writes books that can shock and delight and nothing is off the table. The life and times of a child molester, killing your Your Wife, White Men Seeking Salvation in an African Country. And she's also written about her own experience of meeting her birth mother as an adult woman. She often writes from a male perspective and nearly always about how the chain can so easily come off the bike of life. Now, The Unfolding is her first novel in 10 years, and it works its way

around the themes of right-wing politics, patriotism and revolution. Is that all right? And this is my chance to say that we began the interview with A.M. Holmes with a lovely email from a listener called Elaine. I really enjoyed the interview with Adele Parks yesterday. Looking forward to A.M. Holmes today. One of my favourite writers. This book will save your life and may we be forgiven i can see on my bookshelf as i type but what do you do about books which you've acquired

or been given and which have sat unread in particular about 30 years ago a then boyfriend gave me the three volumes of marcel proust's remembrance of things past with the intention he said of improving me reader i did not marry him says elaine a wise move elaine if i might say so obviously now uh with the confidence gained in my 50s uh do i think i need intellectual improvement uh but i don't do anything about them and i haven't actually read them should i read them on the basis of great literature and indeed should that ever be a consideration? Have either of you read Proust? Can you ask A.M. Holmes if she has?

Well, we certainly will. Well, we will. I haven't read Proust, no. And I'm with you on that. I think anyone who hands you anything in life and says, this will make you better, it's time to go. Bye. See you. Shall we start with that fantastic question from Elaine?

What do you think? Do you think that if you've got weighty tomes on your bookshelf that you've been a little bit fearful or reticent to read that you should make yourself even if you don't really want to? I think the most important thing about Elaine's question and her comment is that it was given to her by someone who's no longer in her life. So I think you should give those books away

and go to the library or the bookstore and pick out something that she's interested in reading. Don't be, you know, tied to what somebody thought you should read to improve yourself. Be tied to what compels you. Yeah, good advice. Let's talk about The Unfolding and then we'll talk about some of the other books that you've written. You started writing this book about 10 years ago, I think, but it does have uncanny parallels to recent events in American politics, doesn't it? So I wonder if you could outline that kind of shadow that you saw looming. Sure. So and it's interesting because I was reading today's paper that there was an arrest in Germany of a group of people who were plotting to overthrow the government there. I think what I saw was it felt to me that the American political system, not one side or the other, but the entirety of it had lost touch with the average American person.

person and that politics was becoming more about a politician's desire for attention in their own right and and much more driven by money and special interests and not so much about actually representing the people who vote for somebody and that was quite a long time ago that I noticed that and started you know making notes and can you tell us a bit more about your main protagonist? And I think both Jane and I are really fascinated as well by how well you write from a male perspective and what really draws you to have these male leads. Yeah, well, so first I'll tell you about the big guy. So the big guy, and the reason he's called the big guy and doesn't have a name is because he is that big guy that we all know. He is a man who takes up too much space and feels entitled to things without even realizing that he feels entitled. He's a little bit oblivious because of the entitlement of being an older white man and someone who has quite a bit of money and so on.

And I think he thinks of himself as a good person and he thinks of himself as having been a good spouse and a good father and so on. And then he begins to realize that that might not really be true. And then that's a hard moment for him to realize, you know, what happens if you begin to think, oh, I might really be a jerk or worse. So to me, it's interesting, because in terms of his political and social beliefs, they're very different from my own. But with all my characters, and this goes a little bit to writing, you know, men, I think about their people's humanity and compassion. And I and I am always writing about human behavior and what compels a person to do what they do. And I do really like writing these male characters. I think, you know, I know what it is to be female. I know what it is to have the experiences I've had. And I'm so much more interested in the experiences of the other. And I think that you really nail those male characters, actually. I think that combination of frailty and toxicity is what makes them really intriguing. I wonder what you think about where America heads in terms of its men. Massive question, I know.

Right. But actually, I think I'm right in saying that nearly all of the mass shootings in America have been undertaken by men, mostly by young men. The incel movement has been declared a terrorist organization because it is so feared in America. You know, there is heavily entrenched toxic masculinity there, isn't there? Yeah, I think it's interesting because I was talking to a friend too, when we read about, you know, these crimes that are also happening a lot in New York where people are getting punched by random strangers and, you know, people are raped or sexually attacked and so on.

Women don't do that. Women don't walk up to strangers and punch them. We very rarely, you know, attack people. And the mass shootings are almost all by men. I mean, on the one hand, I think, wow, it must be really hard to be a man these days. Um, and I say that, you know, meaning it very realistically, I think, you know, I want to say that part of it is a generational moment. We are at a moment in terms of power structures and so on where there is a real divide. And yet the other

thing that's hard to explain is that, you know, the people doing mass shootings are not old men. They are young men. So I think so many different things, including that we absolutely need gun laws that other countries have, because it just can't be that easy to have a gun. And they talk about our constitution and the right to bear arms. And there's no way that that's what the founders meant when they wrote that. I think they meant you could wear short sleeves, you could bear your arms, but you can't. You just cannot have military grade weapons that you walk around with on the streets. Can I ask you, what is it like to be a pretty visible and very successful writer who is female and critical of her own country.

Does that make you vulnerable, frankly? It certainly makes me feel vulnerable. Yeah, it's interesting. You know, I think in this, in the United States, in some ways, critically, people are never quite sure how to look at my work. They think, is she making fun of us? Is she celebrating us? How is she? How is she talking about us? And I've even had booksellers ask me with the new book, who is this book for? And I can never tell if they're asking, who is the book rooting for? Or who should be reading it? Because it's as though they want the recommendations that they give to be like, oh, this is a book for men to read. Oh, this is a book for women to read.

Our publishing industry and readers tend to be very divided by gender and I would suspect now also by politics in some ways. When I go out of the U.S., I feel like there's a lot of really good, serious, rigorous conversation about the ideas in the book. And that's what's important to me. On a completely different topic, I wonder whether we can talk about some of your writing to do with meeting your birth mother. You've made no secret of the fact that you said at the age of 60, you're still both amazed and ashamed of the myriad ways that this experience continues to affect your sense of legitimacy. Why ashamed? I guess that's a good question. I would say ashamed in the sense that I would hope that one would at a certain point, you know, because I get over it, make peace with it, move on from it. But it is interesting to me, and I think about this entitled and outside of things. And on the one hand,

as a writer, I would say, well, that's an asset and it gives me a certain perspective in the world, but it also can leave me feeling a little bit, I would say, isolated from some pretty primitive kind of basic experiences of attachment, of family, and so on. And it does surprise me that I still feel that way when I talk to other adopted people they also will say it it doesn't go away it's not a one-time event that you're adopted and then you know everything is all good yeah perhaps it's naivety on the part of us the part of those of us who were not adopted that it could ever be like that I guess um how does it impact on your own parenting?

It's really, yeah, it does, I think, in the sense that, well, first off, my child is the first person I've ever grown up with who was related to me, right? So it's both amazing, and as all parents know, slightly sometimes, you know, horrifying to see the ways in which your children are just like you. But I've never seen that reflection until now. So that's a very cool thing about it. But I will say that in terms of my making attachments, in terms of my kind of ability to navigate certain things, there is a kind of a fragility or sometimes like a blank space. The good news is I talk about it. I talk about it within my family and with my child, but I definitely feel it.

A.M. Holmes, American novelist, and her new book is a really important book if you're at all interested in contemporary American politics and who knows what's going to happen there next. It turns out, did you know that there were suggestions that Donald Trump may have been a wrongman? My fee looks devastating. She had no idea. Anyway, The Unfolding is the name

of A.M. Holmes' book. And actually, if you enjoyed that, tell us. If there are writers you'd love us to interview or people you'd love us to interview, let us know. janeandfeeattimes.radio And just to say to Tamrin in Zambia, I love that email about

your life. And that's the kind of email we really want. So we want to know about your lives. We're glad that you're listening. But I mean, that's just a life that I couldn't imagine driving. I mean, she just very casually says that she drives quite a bit between Zambia and Zimbabwe. Tell us about the roads. It's not the M42. It's not the M42. It's not the m42 it's not the m42 it's not the toll road the one i usually take if i'm going up north i want to know more tamarin about what you have on your farm about what i'm about what your friends are talking about what do they care about what gets their goat when you meet them for a coffee or a drink or whatever it is so please do let us know we love emails like that because that's the spirit of off-air and other podcasts we may have done in

the past. I'll be quite keen to hear again from Ruthie. She was the one who emailed us about upping sticks and going to live in New York. She downplayed her experiences, but I'd like to know a bit more about that too. It's janemfee at times.radio. And thank you very much for listening to this one. Are you going to go home wearing your showbiz makeup with your showbiz hair on the tube? They're much there. Me too.

I'm hoping it will alter my fortunes. I'll definitely put a little jig in my step. You should bloody fall over. Roy Keane doesn't like jigs. You be careful. You wore heels on today. A whopping. I'll be coming in in a surgical boot tomorrow. Well, I wouldn't put it past you.

You have been listening to Off Air with Jane Garvey and Fee Glover. Our Times Radio producer is Rosie Cutler and the podcast executive producer is Ben Mitchell. Now, you can listen to us on the free Times Radio app or you can download every episode from wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget that if you like what you heard and thought, hey, I want to listen to this, but live, then you can Monday to Thursday, three to five on Times Radio. Embrace the live radio jeopardy. Thank you for listening and hope you can join us off air very soon. Goodbye. join us off air very soon goodbye voiceover describes what's happening on your iphone screen voiceover on settings so you can navigate it just by listening books contacts calendar

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