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In this week's episode, I talk to one of my old school friends, Marie Phillips. Marie is a writer and storyteller, based in London and publishing and performing across the world. Her debut novel, Gods Behaving Badly was released in 2007, was an international bestseller, and was made into a film starring Christopher Walken and Sharon Stone. Her subsequent novels include the Baileys Prize-nominated, The Table of Less Valued Knights, Oh I Do Like To Be…, and Create Your Own Midlife Crisis. Marie wrote her first radio series, Warhorses of Letters, with the playwright Robert Hudson in 2011, which starred Stephen Fry and Daniel Rigby and ran for three seasons on BBC Radio Four. She has been storytelling since 2019, touring Europe with shows including Lalaei, a reworking of Ovid accompanied by music.

Topics that Marie & I cover are:

how Marie and I are old school friends;
how she has added storytelling and performing to her repertoire;
the new one-woman show that she will be performing for the Amsterdam Storytelling Festival in November which is all about her maternal grandmother;
the idea of redefining not just spinsterhood, but womanhood, as more than just a relationship and children;
the often complicated stories around women who have children, and those who don’t;
how Marie is childless due to a combination of choice and circumstance, and how she has often struggled with the narrative of who a woman is when she doesn’t have kids;
how although she felt that she didn’t want children from a young age, Marie’s discovery that she fertility issues led to a period of grief around not having them;
her frustration that a romantic relationship is so often seen to be THE most important thing in our lives;
how Marie has always found living alone to be a lonely experience, and how until recently she lived with housemates;
how the only difference between single people and those in relationships is simply 1 person;
the years Marie spent living in Amsterdam and her motivation for moving there;
the difference in the stories we tell about women and men;
the continuing pressure on women to continue to look younger than their years;
the importance of being a positive role model so younger women realise that there isn’t just one path in life;
how Marie found being single in her thirties far more difficult than being single in her forties.

Follow Marie on Twitter:
@mpphillips

Marie’s W

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