About the show
The Shift is a podcast that aims to tell the truth about being a woman post-40, created and hosted by writer and broadcaster, Sam Baker. Did you ever wonder why you stop hearing so many women’s voices once they pass 40? That’s where The Shift comes in – a frank, funny, sometimes heartbreaking, always honest look at what it means to be a woman in midlife and beyond.
Work, life, love, health, sex, money, identity, body image… What does it all mean when everything around you (and inside you…) is changing? Each week, award-winning author and journalist Sam Baker asks a different woman how she got here, where she’s going – and how it feels to be where she is right now. Expect intimate conversation, big laughs, occasional tears and an awful lot of ripping up the rule book and stamping on it…
Past guests have included Nicola Sturgeon, Marian Keyes, Guilty Feminist Deborah Frances-White, Minnie Driver, Philippa Perry, Anita Rani, Tracey Thorn, Isabel Allende, Bobbi Brown, Barbara Blake-Hannah and many more, talking everything from confidence to career reinvention, mental health, menopause and so much more.
If you enjoy The Shift podcast, and you’d like to show the love, you can buy me a coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theshiftwithsambaker And if you really love The Shift and would like to hear more conversations with women over 40, why not become a member of our community and receive a weekly newsletter, get exclusive transcripts, join The Shift bookclub and so much more, please visit https://theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com/
The Shift is a podcast that aims to tell the truth about being a woman post-40, created and hosted by writer and broadcaster, Sam Baker.
Did you ever wonder why you stop hearing so many women’s voices once they pass 40? That’s where The Shift comes in – a frank, funny, sometimes heartbreaking, always honest look at what it means to be a woman in midlife and beyond. Work, life, love, health, sex, money, identity, body image… What does it all mean when everything around you (and inside you…) is changing? Each week, award-winning author and journalist Sam Baker asks a different woman how she got here, where she’s going – and how it feels to be where she is right now. Expect intimate conversation, big laughs, occasional tears and an awful lot of ripping up the rule book and stamping on it… Past guests have included Elizabeth Gilbert, Martha Beck, Siri Hustvedt, Jojo Moyes, Nicola Sturgeon, Marian Keyes, Guilty Feminist Deborah Frances-White, Minnie Driver, Philippa Perry, Anita Rani, Tracey Thorn, Isabel Allende, Bobbi Brown, Barbara Kingsolver, Zandra Rhodes, Liz Earle and many more, talking everything from confidence to career reinvention, mental health, menopause and so much more.
If you enjoy The Shift podcast, and you’d like to show the love, you can buy me a coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theshiftwithsambaker
And if you really love The Shift and would like to hear more conversations with women over 40, why not become a member of our community and receive a weekly newsletter, get exclusive transcripts, join The Shift bookclub and so much more, please visit https://theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com/
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My guest today is the writer and award-winning poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths.
Eliza is a woman who has been through A LOT in a short space of time. In September 2020, on the day she married her second husband, the globally renowned novelist Salman Rushdie, her best friend of 17 years, her ‘chosen sister’ Kamila Aisha Moon, died. Then, eleven months later, in the midst of her grief, her husband was brutally attacked as he prepared to go on stage to give a talk. For a time his life hung in the balance.
Salman survived, with life-changing injuries, and the dual traumas left Eliza transformed forever.
Now, five years on, Eliza has written her first memoir, The Flower Bearers, in which she revisits those two terrible griefs and the glorious relationships that lay at its foundations. It’s a story of friend love, romantic love and self-love, of trauma and recovery, and it’s a gut punch.
Eliza joined me from her home in Manhattan to talk about her two great loves, Aisha and Salman, and how she found her way through a kaleidoscope of grief. We also discussed the importance of not prioritising romantic love and why everyone needs an inner village of women, being denied access to your intuition, her extensive toolbox of coping mechanisms, learning to swim in her 40s and Tina Turner.
• The documentary Eliza refers to in this conversation is KNIFE: The attempted murder of Salman Rushdie, directed by Oscar Winner Alex Gibley and including never before seen footage shot by Rachel Eliza Griffiths. It’s released on 2 October.
* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including The Flower Bearers by Rachel Eliza Griffithsas well as the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 – and you can too, by Sam Baker.
* If you enjoyed this episode and you fancy buying me a coffee, pop over to my page on buymeacoffee.com.
• And if you’d like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including exclusive transcripts of the podcast, why not join The Shift community, come and have a look around at www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com
• The Shift is created, hosted and produced by Sam Baker and edited by Juliette Nicholls at Pineapple Audio Productions.
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