Woman's Hour - Late Night Woman's Hour: Ageing

Episode Date: May 25, 2017

"What do you mean I'm going to sag? Sag WHERE?" These days the world seems full of well-intentioned cat-poster sentiment designed to cheer us up over the passage of time -You're only as young as you feel, 70 is the new 40 - but for women in particular, advancing age can mean a sense of panic. Lauren invites writer and broadcaster Miranda Sawyer, cultural historian Helen Small, founder of the Ruby & Millie makeup range Ruby Hammer and writer and Guardian columnist Michele Hanson to provide LNWH listeners with a toolkit - philosophical, cultural, emotional, sartorial - for getting older. Presenter Lauren Laverne.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme. Peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Old age was growing inside me. It kept catching my eye from the depths of the mirror. I was paralysed sometimes. Nothing inside me was ready for it. This is Simone de Beauvoir writing in 1970 in a book called The Coming of Age. What she captures is the stealth of the ageing process, the way it seems to creep up a line or grey hair at a time, and the fear, paralysis she calls it standing in front of the mirror, who am I?

These days the world seems full of well-intentioned cat poster sentiment designed to cheer us up about the passage of time you're only as young as you feel and 70 is definitely the new 40 The powerful baby boomer generation has begun to chip away at the stigma of old age but for older women in particular advancing age can mean a sense of invisibility 40. The powerful baby boomer generation has begun to chip away at the stigma of old age, but for older women in particular, advancing age can mean a sense of invisibility. De Beauvoir's feelings of fear and dread can't be magicked or even Botoxed away. So tonight on Late Night Woman's Hour, we're going to provide you with a toolkit, cultural, philosophical, emotional,

sartorial for the years beyond 40. With me in the Late Night Woman's Hour Lounge are writer and broadcaster Miranda Sawyer, whose midlife crisis was the starting point for a book out of time. The cultural historian Helen Small, whose book The Long Life examines writing about ageing from Plato to the present. Makeup artist and founder of the Ruby and Millie makeup range, Ruby Hammer. And the writer and Guardian columnist, Michelle Hansen. Welcome one and all. Thank you.

Hello. Hi everyone. Miranda, I'm going to start with you. Your generation are, as far as midlife is concerned, the new arrivals. So I'm keen to know how the Acid House and Britpop cohort are coping with middle age. Well, it's quite interesting because some of us, our generation, we generation was kind of generation x I suppose loosely just carry on I mean I think the big divide with people who are my generation is the people who carry on raving and by that I mean kind of getting out of it carrying on taking drugs carrying on kind of partying and the people

who go the other way and what happens then is that they tend to kind of cut down on drink cut down on drugs and go running actually okay i'm one of them but it's a big divide it's quite a weird thing because if people divide in that way you can't tell who's going to divide in that way so you'll have a group of friends that maybe you all went partying with in your 20s and then in your 40s the people who turn to running are not maybe the people that you expected and the people who carried on partying aren't the people who expected so it's quite a divide actually okay and when did you realize that it had kind of crept up on you in in you know the way that we just heard described well I had my kids late which is quite common amongst my generation so I

had my son when I was 38 and my daughter when I was 43 very lucky to have you know kids at that age I was entirely grateful but what happens when you have children at that age and it happens I think at any age but particularly at that age is you start looking at them and you start counting how long they're going to be around so basically what happened to me was I looked at my daughter when I was kind of 43 44 and thought okay if I bring you up and you go to university, how long have I got left? You know, probably in London, you'll come back. You know, so you'll leave that basically eventually once I get you out of the house,

I have to check into an old people's home. And so I felt like it was maths. It was death maths. I was counting the days, the years till my death and thinking, all I'm going to do is bring up kids and then that's it. I have to be honest, Michelle is sitting next to you looking horrified.

How do you respond to this and relate to this obviously you know you write about being older um yes i had my daughter when i was 36 but i've never thought like that because it didn't really make much difference i think i was so miserable before i had her that everything was much perkier afterwards. I went on working. I did more afterwards because before I was a teacher and really depressed. But I first noticed, I remember I started writing at old age when I was 52. And I started by noticing that my thighs, the bottom of my thighs are sort of drooping over my knees. And I thought, what can I, because I used to write about my daughter when she was a teenager and I thought what can I write about now which doesn't annoy everybody so I thought myself my knees yeah I can be as rude as I like and nobody can complain and then

physically you start noticing all these things going wrong with you well not wrong but they're just changing and it does creep up you just one more thing happens like you get the old whisker and you get your molds get bigger and this droops and that droops and you wish you'd appreciated when you were younger what you were able to do and what you look like I mean you obviously kind of deal with this and write with a lot of good humor but I wonder what you think about the way that aging and getting older is portrayed like you're barring the usual cliches about fine wine is it generally negative is it used usually in a pejorative way do you think I think so I just get browned off with the way everybody thinks that when you turn 65 you turn to a bit of a dimwit you know you wear a cardigan you don't have much of an opinion

and I don't know I just think people in general think that you turn thick when you're older that's the big thing I think your mind stays the same your body's going down the drain your mind's going on the same as it was before and so it's very difficult to get the two to fit together. Helen how subjective is this idea about old age because I know for example that middle age is a relatively recent invention, isn't it? Yeah, it's a mixture, isn't it? A lot of it is subjective, but it's about how subjectively we inhabit a culture that tells us certain things. So the big things that have changed in recent years are how far work can be expected to define your prime for you.

So until recently, we expect to work to 65. And then there's this retirement and old age stretch that goes ahead but so many people's the majority of people's lives no longer fit that pattern and legally it's being unpicked for very good reasons anti-ageism and so forth so we start to more ourselves i think by other experiences so childbirth is one of them my experience is the same as Miranda, having a child late, kind of jostles where you think you are in your life in very good ways, as well as ways that put a bit of a constraint on them. Yes, you'll have spent the next 18 years, you will be bringing up a child. So I think the biggest psychological challenge for most people

is that it's something that only limitedly we can plan for. So luck is a massive component in how we age. It's a huge component in our health. It's a huge component in the health of the people around us that matter to us most, as our families, our friendship groups, that kind of thing. And it's a huge component mentally, because what you're describing is the good experience where you keep on being yourself inside your mind. But a lot of the debate about aging now is about dementia

and about the fact that we've kept the body going but at the price of more and more people living to experience the failure of the mind so all of those things make it really quite a complicated personal thing to navigate through ruby you have spent an illustrious career you know making people look fantastic but and i would guess as well that part of that involves spending quite a lot of time in front of the mirror you know even if you're kind of working with with other people did you have that kind of recognize that Simone de Beauvoir moment that I was describing I do and I think it's very odd because in some ways I'm a little bit different from the ladies here because I had my daughter quite young I was 25 when I had her my daughter's now 30 and I was working as a jobbing

makeup artist so my industry and the kind of work I do is about youth and it's about youth at its peak you know I'm always working with whether they're actresses but it's mostly models and they are youthful so I've always looked at young women in front of me and then I'm behind them so I'm constantly there two faces in the mirror and when I'm engrossed in work I don't actually look at me I'm just seeing the faces so that line of faces hasn't changed for me they're just younger and younger and they're younger and they're younger and they're younger then gradually you sort of it might be and it usually starts with a ache or pain of your own you notice something so they're they're very flattering and now they kind of as soon as they

say then I think oh my god this one's 16 and then I think she's my daughter's double her eight and that's when it comes and then you suddenly look and then and then I noticed my first bits of grey and um it came at an unfortunate time where my mum was diagnosed with cancer and I was 50 and my hair literally went grey overnight and this is only the second time I've coloured my hair so I'm not used to I don't even know how to come to terms with that so I have hairdresser colleague friends and it's not just about the superficial how you look it's everything inside it's that bit of and then do you think you try and hide it or do you kind of say this eggs like eggs kind of twinges and yes and they're there and then I heard myself and I thought I can't keep they're all young here I can't keep twinging on like that it might scare

them or scare myself or i scare myself or they might think um it's really weird because you do stand away from yourself because in your mind you're right you're not any different as michelle but you feel different it's yes gets worse and worse watch out girls bad news there from michelle i mean obviously you know ruby's in a particular situation because she is surrounded by these images of perfection. I'm helping create some of those images as well. Exactly, you're part of it. But I mean, I wonder whether we aren't all of us surrounded

by more of those images now. I mean, Miranda, you wrote about social media and the effect that the kind of extreme monitoring of our own lives, ourselves, and also the lives of others and the kind of influx of our own lives ourselves and also the lives of others yeah and the kind of influx of of imagery of perfection and aspiration well it's interesting because the imagery doesn't necessarily have to be about your face it's about people's lives so i interviewed quite a few kind of psychotherapists for the book and one of the things that they said is that things like facebook i mean facebook literally when you tap something in about

facebook what are you doing you're updating your your status. It's about status. It's a status update. So what happens is that if you're feeling down, you can look at a kind of stream of Facebook updates and you think, oh, my God, look at these lives. They've got fantastic kids. They're going on amazing holidays. They've won an award. And I'm sitting at home in my rubbish jeans jeans writing a terrible piece. This is awful. But what you have to remember about all social media is that essentially you can't judge your insides by other people's outsides. It's what we're taught to do, and it's a very natural human instinct. We judge people by their outsides all the time. If you see somebody walking down the road and they look scary,

you cross the road, you do it all the time. But actually, that's not who they are, the same as it's not who you are. I think it's not who you are. You know, I think it's really interesting when you're talking about how we feel inside and how we feel outside, because really basic things like if I look out of a window, the light comes in to me through that window exactly the same as when I was two. You know, I haven't changed.

The way I perceive the world hasn't changed. Maybe I'm, you know, more forgetful or I get angry quicker or I'm more patient with kids. But the way I perceive the world hasn't actually maybe I'm you know more forgetful or I get angry quicker I'm more patient with kids but the way I perceive the world hasn't actually changed it's the same so to then regard yourself and think oh I have changed it's really those things are very very hard to to rectify yeah to mesh because also you never age how you think you're going to so you know you're going to get wrinkles you kind of accept that but you know i got wrinkles and they were kind of shooting up around the corner like they weren't doing what i expected you know i thought i just scalp wrinkles i think those are the ideal wrinkles assuming you still have hair yeah they're the perfect ones to carry i mean ruby you're

nodding and so that's true you never age the way you think you do i think i being asian or being darker skinned the issue wasn't so much wrinkling but pigmentation. Or now I'm reading all kinds of things. Apparently, when you have got darker skin, you're not going to worry about the wrinkles, but you're going to sag quicker than your fair skinned people. And I was like, you see? How does that work? Why?

What? That means your diet, again, you have to not have sugar. And I think, what do you mean you're going to sag? Sag where? That was it. So now I'm looking for sagging because I'm not really looking for my wrinkles anymore because they're there. They are there.

They're there when you compare yourself. But then I'm looking for something else to go wrong. And I don't know how to get the sort of swathe of chin that I've got that none of you have got yet, which is a bit depressing. Michelle, so you're talking about the neck wrinkles. I mean, do you relate to what Miranda's saying, that you don't age the way you would expect to? No, you don't. It reminded me of my mother because I took her shopping for a nightie in Marks and Spencer's when she was in her 90s.

And they all had little flowers and were pink, you know. And she said, I don't want to wear one of those. I'll look like an old woman. And I thought, well, she didn't feel like that. She wanted something with big colours and turquoise and purple or something. And it was all mimsy little flowers for old ladies. And that's part of it, that we've all got to look like that. I wonder a bit about that, because there's a stretching of teenagerdom,

which we kind of accept. It's gone into middle age. That's one of the things that's quite hard to deal that, you know, because there's a stretching of teenagerdom, which we kind of accept. You know, it's gone into middle age. You know, that's one of the things that's quite hard to deal with middle age because there's an aspect of you that still feels like a teenager and is allowed to be a teenager. But it hasn't quite got into old age yet, has it? So if you look at the clothes that older women are offered, I think it's got a lot better around middle age. But it hasn't quite got to older to older age you know because obviously you want to be comfy when you're older but it is still pastel colors a bit kind of victorian somehow you know bad fabrics there's really bad shiny yeah i would have thought this would be the time when fabric was most important because you seriously can get quite sensitive as you get older as well yeah i think this is there is a problem with what people think older women

want and probably older men as well helen you know we're talking about perspective miranda was talking about there as well as experience and your book the long life considers how aging has been thought and written about through the years and you say that we are trapped by the need to see life as a narrative that we are kind of addicted to progress. We like to think that, you know, things are kind of trucking along. What's the problem with progress? Well, a lot of philosophers have written on this assumption. A lot of social science is based on this assumption. A huge amount of the fiction, you know, the different modes that we read in literature, just assume that there is a basic psychological thing about us, that other things

being equal, we prefer the model of a life that gets better to certainly one that gets worse, but also one that just remains stable. So it seems to be something inbuilt. There's a nice thought experiment that I do in the book that I find a kind of useful tool for thinking with. Imagine that you've got a certain amount of bad stuff that happens to you in your life. Where would you want to place it in order to have the best overall life shape that you could have so there are different possible answers to this but it's an extraordinary amount of agreement that says that we would rather have the bad stuff up front and have a life that progresses and gets better and that that assumption makes it really hard to think well about old age because what are

you going to do with this long you know this sort of unformed trajectory in which your expectation that the more that comes will be better it's to become diminishingly likely, diminishingly true for a lot of people. So we don't really have very good ways of taking that really common assumption. All our lives are like stories. We make the best stories we can out of them. We like to think that they're progressive. We like to think that upward mobility is a really common common one they don't really serve us very well for thinking about what a good old age looks like so but it's quite it's quite funny because when i was having a bad time with middle age i actually thought completely differently so i had a picture in my head and it was like i got to the top of a mountain and then it was like downhill exactly

you know this is it i've got as high as i'm going to get and i'm just going to slide down it's terrible but obviously it's a metaphor. Exactly. It's just a metaphor in your head and you can change that. So I kind of very carefully thought, okay, well, either I am at the top of the mountain. Lucky me, I can see everything. I can see the past. I can see the future. What a great position.

Or, and this is the one I chose in the end. It's just interesting given your idea about progress. I said, no, no, no. Okay, in my head, I'm on a rocket and I'm going to go up to the stars. And this is my new metaphor. But what's also weird is actually it's just all how you think. You know, the research shows that in terms of happiness, mostly what happens is you're happy,

if you're lucky enough to live a longer life, you're happy when you're young and you're happy when you're old and there's a big dip in the middle. And, you know, it's generally a U-shape of happiness. You just get happier when you're old because I think, you know, until the final moments, which can be obviously very difficult, but, you know, you tend to get happy because you just forget about the stuff that you're not bothered with.

Michelle, in your columns there is a real kind of sense of cheerful rebellion, rebelliousness, and a kind of sense of freedom from the constraints of that might have been there in the past are you enjoying your 70s yes i do like it because i don't feel so self-conscious and weedy i you know it doesn't really matter so much what i do anymore and i'm not like uh going up or down i feel like i'm on a conveyor belt and i'm getting nearer to the edge and at the edge it's going to just plop off it and I don't want to get there yet you know I want it to go on a bit longer I hope that it will be all right and I'm

all right at the moment you know I'm just disintegrating physically but I am very frightened of dementia that's the most frightening thing I think most people are and because the other you know little things happen to you as you get older well they probably happen all the time but you don't notice I put the dog's tripe in my muesli by mistake instead of its bowl and I thought you know this is it I'm on the way out but I was most unhappy I think but in my 20s and 30s I was really miserable I didn't realize that I had a thyroid deficiency which probably didn't help and I was always very unhappy when I was young I was always agitated and worried thought I looked ghastly this that and the other didn't have any boyfriends all the boyfriends were horrible now it's I think a bit

easier except for the physical stuff all right I wonder about the the pressure to stay young and we talked a little bit about about Rubyy you know you working in in the beauty industry which is obviously a big driver of that but also presumably a kind of route to people feeling that they look great and feel better about themselves how much do you feel that how much of a pressure is it i mean miranda what do you think there is a pressure around that and it's whether you take it on or also actually whether you have the techniques to take it on. If you're not very good at it, I'm not particularly good at makeup. And I just was never very good at it.

It wasn't something that was my bag. And so when you hit your 40s, it's quite interesting because you shouldn't think, oh, I need to get a bit better. But when I look at you from coming from the industry, you know, as an expert in that way, not in anything else, I look at her and I think, God, my God, she's so youthful. Her hair's all short, she's all funky. It's not about the make-up. Even though I'm a make-up expert, that's not what I'm looking at. And I think all of us, we look all right.

Yeah. We're not being paid even to be a model or represent a brand or do this story or do something. So I think you look great. And I think it's more about the sort of youthful spirit and I think that comes through and there are a lot of younger women I also do and they're young biologically young and I've never seen anything as old as you know I think oh my god not that so you think it's actually yeah there isn't it there's a kind

you know it's not like a hippie but you know we're all hippie sometimes you know there's a kind of aura around people I think is quite interesting yeah, there isn't it, there's a kind of, you know, it doesn't sound like a hippie, but, you know, we're all hippies sometimes. You know, there's a kind of aura around people I think is quite interesting because if you obsess about your looks, and I think there's a point, you know, at some point, if you're feeling down in the dumps, you look at yourself and you pull your face around and you're awful. I mean, A, the part of it is just take the mirrors out of your house. Take a few mirrors and get rid of them. Just have like one or two. That helps. Hang on, I'm getting a bit writing this down.

But also there's a point you know if you did get something like botox or whatever that works very well i'm sure in photos because you look lovely in a photo because your face is like that but actually when we're talking you move all the time your face moves all the time so the impression you get of somebody is not a static thing is it you feel their you whatever their personality or their aura is this is it even with the social media and all those looks, you know, this contouring, these things I have, I'm looking at those and I think they look great in that one Instagram,

but how do they look in real life with natural light? So sometimes women say, make me look like that. And I think, yeah, but this is with light, with professional, with lots of things. That isn't how you'd want to look in real life. Have we did too much contouring? Trust me. Honestly. You wouldn't want to look in real life every day too much contouring honestly you wouldn't want to look like that less is more and just get used to how you are don't look at the things don't pick those things because even we don't sometimes i've seen contouring where there's

a young woman and she basically looks like a viennetta because there's just it's just too i'm not one to judge you know i'm very makeup positive but i have i've almost staged an intervention on several occasions and i want to move on to language a bit and the language of of kind of growing older michelle what what do you think about this because you know it can be quite contentious a friend of mine was recently who is who is middle-aged and she was talking using the term middle age she was middle aged actually well this is what is it well officially it would be like around between 40 and 50 i mean if you assume that you're going to live to 90 ish you know 80 90 there's around 40 five years left if you say that oh you'll be all right you're okay you look all right

helen's probably the best person to ask i mean helen what do you think middle-aged what does that mean it normally means in your prime okay so the ancient greeks had a definition of in a working definition of in your prime which seems to have meant around 43 okay so it's not really halfway through your life course so much as where you're you know you see the benefit of your education and any sort of professional gains or you know having making a good living okay so kind of like full bloom yeah full wax but we don't have any of the grades well actually they did in the past so for example you know or making a good living. Okay, so kind of like full bloom, full wax. But we don't have any of the grades. Well, actually, they did in the past.

So, for example, Shakespeare's England, they have a fine terminology for old age. They talk about green old age as early old age, for example. We don't really have that. We don't have refinements on what those last years mean. I wonder about gender as well in all this. How much of ageing is gendered? There was a photograph that was shared a lot a while back where Heidi Klum had attended a Halloween event in a makeup and an outfit that

just made her look like an elderly woman you know it was yeah quite controversial yeah I mean is female aging really the stuff of Halloween horror I think so yes I think much worse than men isn't it old men sort of sophisticated what's that word for men who have mustaches and smart suits silver fox yeah well so it's a bit chic isn't it there was an old woman with gray hair and it's just not really around at all but there is a thing where the a woman has to be like helen mirren extraordinary and then she'll be looked at in that way yes i don't look as good in a bikini as Helen Mirren now and I'm still not 40, so I'm just looking at that. The bar is too high of what we expect.

But there's also a factor. I mean, money is a factor. So essentially, in general, the average age of a peak of a man's earnings is when he's 50, and for women it's when they're 34. Is it? Yeah. So that's because we do a lot of caring.

So because there'll be a point in your life where you're caring for parents or caring for kids or something like that. And you peak at, that's the average. You peak at 34 and men peak at 50. So if you've been earning more, you know, your earnings have been going on all the way up to your 50. You've got more money to kind of like get your old age feeling great and looking good, you know. I mean, you've had the status that entails entails the you know the good meals that that entails you've not been kind of schlepping around caring for people it's just you know that it is entirely gendered it's just hard for us to recognize that because we all work you know what do you think

kellen i think it's getting a bit too depressing i think i'm just saying i'm just if i would be throwing things at the radio by now. There's never been a better time to get older, at least in this country. In the West, in the privileged West, the medicine is better than it's ever been. Life expectancy is higher than it's ever been. You can expect to enjoy the goods of life for much longer. And the period when you can expect or fear it going wrong is shorter and more can be done for you. So there are things that we could be talking about like old age care,

which I think are really problematic. And until we value those, we have got trouble in that last period. But the baby boomers have reshaped middle age for us. They've reshaped job expectations, retirements going out the window as a concept, compulsory retirement. And the prediction was that they will reshape old age homes, that we will have fabulous kind of communal living on a sort of 60s or 70s model, and it will be fun. And we won't take any of the rubbish about being treated

as homogenous groups of people who all wear floral. So I think we wait to see. There are really good examples in the States. Unfortunately, most of them require a lot more money, and that's the big social problem. We started out by talking about uh midlife and midlife crisis and you know miranda i want to i want to know how you kind of came out of the other side of that you know was there a moment when you knew that you'd got over it yeah a bit i mean you know it's

a privilege i think sometimes being a journalist because you basically get to go and talk to people who know more about it than you do so i was having a huge panic you know i mean when you read the opening piece about simone de beauvoir you know that that paralysis i was having that but in the middle of the night i kind of think okay i must just run away this is it i'm having a proper midlife crisis i'm going to throw it all away and you know i have to go now and then think but i can't i love my kids and actually i love my husband so and so i didn't really know what to do you know i mean it was having a kind of proper midlife crisis but it wasn't manifesting as buying a sports car and running off with somebody younger

so I didn't really know what to do so having spoken to loads and loads of people the the privilege of journalism talking to people who know more than you and reading books and researching it and writing I find that you know if you're lucky enough to write a living, but you don't have to do it for a living. If you have any form of creative outlet, whatever that is, maybe you like to draw, maybe you just like to write at home. There's something about that that will help you through crises, I think. So I was just writing terrible, embarrassing stuff that I never used, just huge, panicky stuff. But the very fact that I was doing that helped me through it and I think that that partly is obviously it helps order your mind but also it's to do with time so one of the reasons

that you're panicking is because you feel like you've got no time left but if you're involved in something that's creative whatever that is maybe it's cooking people like cooking or whatever time stretches you know you get into the flow and you actually that time will stretch for you and you'll have spent three four hours doing something that you really, really enjoy. And that is how you can make your life seem longer or more purposeful is to get involved in something where you get into the flow. And I found that writing did it for me. And that's actually Simone de Beauvoir's answer. Having made her sound so depressing, her answer in the end is we all need projects. We need things that are bigger than us,

that are outside ourselves, that keep us going. Helen, you've read more than most about, you know, ageing and the ageing process. If someone's listening to this tonight and kind of tackling the subject and feeling like they're in the depths of a crisis about it, where would you recommend that they turn? Who should they read?

You can always go back to antiquity. You can go back to Cicero. So there you have the great stoic. It doesn't work for everybody but it's a beautiful piece of writing it's written after his daughter dies and it's a fantastic declaration of what you can do if you just put your mind to sustaining yourself through it and again thinking of projects bigger than yourself but there's also some fabulous writing coming out at the moment by people who are thinking about old age and are writing creatively around it. Penelope Knively,

Maggie Drabble. There's some very, very good new literature on the subject. Well, that's all we've got time for tonight. Thank you very much indeed to my guests, Miranda Sawyer, Helen Small, Ruby Hammer, and Michelle Hansen. Thank you. I'm Sarah Treleaven, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started, like, warning everybody. Every doula that I know.

It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story. Settle in. Available now.