The Shift with Sam Baker Charlotte Mendelson – middle-aged women are entitled to want more
This season is dedicated to helping you pick your summer reads and my guest today is the novelist Charlotte Mendelson whose writing has been compared to “late Shakespeare meets Modern family!” So you know where to turn if you’re looking for a painfully funny, on the nose look at the dynamics of love and marriage.
Charlotte worked as a publisher for twenty years before becoming an award winning novelist. She’s written seven bestselling novels, the most recent of which are The Exhibitionist and Wife, both out now in paperback, which are kind of a pair in that they both deal with the reality of being married to monsters!
She has also been gardening correspondent for the New Yorker and now writes for The Observer.
I met Charlotte at her home in North London to snoop around her houseplants and her bookshelves while we discussed how to go grey without looking like you’re looking after chickens in the wood, the puberty midlife confluence, the disproportionate stress of deciding what to wear, the lifelong impact of growing up nerd, being a pre internet lesbian, internalised homophobia, finding love as a grown up, perimenopausal horniness and so so so much more.
It’s chaos but delightful chaos!
* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Wife by Charlotte Mendelson as well as the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.
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