We are thrilled to share an exclusive extract from Much More to Come. Out 1st August.
INTRODUCTION
By the time we reach fifty, over half of women have been through at least five big life challenges, including: divorce, bereavement, redundancy, abuse, bankruptcy, illness, coping with tricky teenagers, or elderly parents falling ill and dying. Not to mention our own health issues and menopause. Often, these challenges hit us all at once in a midlife maelstrom, leaving us spluttering and stranded. And because we are a pioneering generation of women – one of the first to reap the benefits of greater equality – there is no guide for how to pick ourselves up and persevere; no map for what our lives could look like from here on.
This book provides that map, drawing on inspiring tales of how women have survived and thrived; how they moved into, through and beyond adversity in midlife. This is a positive book – a guide for how women can make the most of their third quarter. It’s a rallying cry for a new kind of woman hitting midlife. For, after all, if many of us will live to nearly 100 years old, fifty is only halfway through. The old map may have run out but there is so much more life still to come. And midlife women have the wisdom and strength to see these years through – they just need to know what the next phase might look like.
I hit my own midlife maelstrom when I was made redundant from the job that had defined me for twenty-five years. I searched in vain for a guide to what came next, for what the next version of me might look like and what I needed to do to find it. The redundancy section of the HMRC website was not what I needed. Nor was scrolling through lists of ‘Things To Do When You’ve Been Fired’. I couldn’t find anything out there to help me navigate my next chapter.
So, for the last number of years, I have been on a journey of discovery. I have pulled myself back up again after a professional whacking, through a mixture of hard work, determination, bloody-mindedness and rage that the world was writing off women like me when we still had so much to offer. I knew from a decade of being a weekly newspaper columnist on the UK’s highest-selling broadsheet that if I was exercised about something then other people probably were too – so I set up Noon, a community for women pivoting in midlife, and started gathering stories to inspire other women not to give up. I’ve always loved the phrase, ‘You can’t be what you can’t see.’ I wanted other women who felt lost and on the scrap heap in midlife to look at Noon and read my story and know that they weren’t done, it wasn’t over, there was a path to reinvention and a good act to follow. That there is a positive answer to that dreaded question: what next?
I like to think of fifty as the age when we finally become the women we always wanted to be. It’s why I coined the term Queenagers. I wanted to communicate that sense of us coming into our prime, becoming our true selves – a kind of through-the-pupa-and-out-of-the-chrysalis period when we spread our wings into our own brave new worlds like midlife butterflies. The word Queenager was inspired in part by a woman in one of our Noon focus groups who said, ‘I feel like a teenager, but in my own house, with good sheets and proper tea.’ I was also inspired by my frequent trips to Jamaica, where they talk about women as ‘queens’, which I love. In my funny old headline-writing brain the two ideas came together and – boom! – Queenager was born. I’m proud to say it was listed in roundups of 2022 as one of the new words of the year and is catching on fast, having made appearances all over the UK press and now the Washington Post and Bloomberg too. For me, it sums up the experience and transitional nature of this time in a woman’s life: that we are in a kind of young-old phase – a bit hormonal, in a period of change but packing wisdom and dignity – midlife queens, if you like. Queenagers.
I love stories. As a journalist, ink is in my blood. So this book is full of the conversations that have helped shape my transition into a new, happier, more whole version of myself; accounts gleaned from the community of women in midlife that I have created at Noon and through my bestselling Substack newsletter, The Queenager (one of the ten most read globally last year). My audience responds to the optimism of the tales I tell about this transition; these stories of transformation that become the stepping stones to our own reinventions. These tales are like the white pebbles which shone in the moonlight for Hansel and Gretel and provided a path out of the dark wood, away from the wicked witch’s house and safely home. Much More to Come is the guide I was seeking when I was lost in that midlife wood. I hope it helps point the way for others.
In fact, I want all the women following along after me to look forward to being fifty as the point when they come into their prime as Queenagers – not dread it. Women have no sell-by date! Women of fifty today are pioneers – we are feeling our way to a new kind of later-life adventure. While on this journey, I have created a new vocabulary to help us talk about this time in our lives, which you can find in the glossary at the end of this book.
Of course every loss leaves a hole, but what I’ve learnt is that in that void something wonderful can grow – if we have the support and confidence to let it. At fifty, we women aren’t done, unseen, invisible, all the things popular culture would have us believe. We are just getting going. Just hitting our stride. As one Queenager put it to me: ‘I feel like I am just getting the hang of things.’ But we need to hear these stories in order to emulate them. We need to see what others have done in order to recreate and reimagine what the later stages of women’s lives can look like.
You can read this book from the beginning, or you can dip in and out, to focus on a story that relates to something specific you are going through today. The sections are there as signposts to help you through your own dark time into a brighter future. This book is a bit like a patchwork quilt – the stories hang together as a narrative or can be dipped into individually. The story of my own becoming weaves them together. At forty-nine I thought my life was going swimmingly – then the bottom fell out of my world and I had to reinvent it from scratch. And I am not the only one. Many of us have spent the first two twentyfive- year chunks of our lives playing out other people’s expectations looking after others, putting our own dreams aside. Well, the good news is that fifty – when we hit the third quarter of our lives – is our time, when it finally is all about us. And no, it’s not too late, and you aren’t too old!
What all these stories from women all over the world, in midlife, moving through trying times into better ones demonstrate is that in the darkest moments there is always light, just as the black of a shadow can accentuate the brightness of the most sparkling day. When I was a young woman, I loved Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying – it summed up how women felt as they set out from the shores of the sexual revolution, relishing the freedom but also trepidatious about the unknown. Much More to Come is a similar positive, poignant guide.
It is time for a new script. I offer these tales from midlife to encourage you on your journey, wherever you are. I found that these conversations buoyed me up when times were tough. I hope these women who share their stories can inspire you just as they did me. I also offer you my own story. I know that it is a tale of privilege – I admit I am a white, privately educated Cis woman, born in London, which is an extraordinarily lucky bit of inheritance – but there is so little out there tackling the midlife maelstrom for women that I hope I have something to offer this discussion. This book is intended to lift you up when you are down, and light the way to the next part of your life.
Maybe it will help you through a bad day or provide suggestions to guide you through the pinch points and on to the sunny uplands of this stage in life: not caring what others think and instead living and speaking your own truth. Researching and sharing these stories guided me on to a new and happier phase in my life. I hope that with the help of this book and all these wise women you will find your way there too. It is okay to find it difficult. It is difficult. But if we dare to dream, we can do it – and our individual stories of flourishing and living well from midlife onwards can build a whole new sense of what this time in life can look like. A whole new movement. I call it the Queenager Revolution. Come and join us!
Much More to Come is out 1st August.
