You Are Not For Everyone

The Body, Brain, and Books: Eleven Questions with writer, podcaster, learner Sam Baker

Welcome to another edition of The Body, Brain, & Books. If you enjoy reading these quick, insightful interviews brimming with wisdom and hope, please subscribe to Beyond!

sam baker

is a recovering magazine editor. After a couple of decades spent editing British magazines, including Just Seventeen, Cosmopolitan and Red, she realised that women over 40 (ish) were massively under represented in the media landscape. After writing the book, The Shift (how I lost and found myself after 40 and you can too) about her own experience of perimenopause and (she later realised!) burnout, she founded first The Shift with Sam Baker podcast and then the Substack of the same name, to amplify older women’s voices. In 2020 she moved to Edinburgh with her husband, writer, Jon Courtenay Grimwood and cat Sausage. It was the best thing they ever did.

1. What are you reading now?

I read omnivorously, because books are a big part of my job as well as my love, so I always have a few on the go.

Right now I’m reading Wise Women, Myths and Stories for Midlife and Beyond by

Dr Sharon Blackie

, for The Shift bookclub. I love Sharon’s work and inhaled her previous books, Hagitude and If Women Rose Rooted. This book puts older women - the hag, the crone, the witch, the usual! But also the seer, the mentor, the elder - centre stage in folk tales and fairy tales.

I love crime and psychological thrillers. I guess they’re my twisted version of a comfort read. I’ve just finished Ice Town, the latest in Will Dean’s Tuva Moodyson series - Tuva is a deaf journalist based in rural Sweden and she’s a character unlike any I’ve ever read. And now I’m on to Mad Woman by Chelsea Bieker.

Next up is Deborah Levy’s latest essay collection, The Position of Spoons. I’m a Levy obsessive. She could write a post-it note and I’d buy it.

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

One that springs to mind is Marianne Dreams by Catherine Stott. It’s about a young girl stuck in bed convalescing, she starts drawing a house that she then returns to night after night. I must have read it when I was about 9 - I had a tonsillectomy and then haemorrhaged so I was off school for ages. I think I over-identified.

I don’t remember actively hiding books from my parents, but I certainly got a lot of stuff out of the library that they would never have signed off on. And luckily they never had the slightest idea what went on in the Flowers in the Attic books!

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time? 

Every winter, around about now, I reread

Katherine May

’s Wintering as a reminder that every season has its purpose. I live in Scotland and I love the proximity to the changing of the seasons, watching the light change, shrink and grow, as the seasons progress. I’ve also reread Heartburn by Nora Ephron countless times and bought it over and over for friends in need

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

It probably makes me the dullest person in the world, but I have to say jeans. I live in them and own, probably, somewhere in the region of 20 pairs of various different shapes and sizes. Right now I’m alternating a pair of dad jeans from the now defunct label Raey and a barrel leg pair from Hush. As a magazine editor I spent a lot of my life trying to dress like a grown up (ie like someone I wasn’t). Exhausting! I firmly believe clothes are armour but armour can be as constricting as it is protective. Dressing for the person I am, not the person I thought I should be has been a revelation. (I also waste a lot less money.)

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you've encountered recently?

One of the joys of recording The Shift podcast is that I am lucky enough to speak to fascinating older women every week, so I am endlessly on the receiving end of hard-won wisdom. One that comes up regularly is “you are not for everyone” and I try to remember that every time I find myself wanting (which is more frequently than I’d like, but not as frequently as I used to).

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

Our rescue cat Sausage is the four-legged love of my life. He’s such a character -  a total hustler who can scam the sandwich out of a teenage boy’s hand. (I’ve seen him do it.) He has this curious cat-dog hybrid thing going on: needy and chatty and cuddly and friendly half the time, and absolutely screw you the other half. I miss him almost as much as my husband when I’m away.

7. What's one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

My marriage. J is a decade older than me and his son was six when we met. No-one thought it would work out, but here we are, 30+ years later. Our relationship has been the making of me.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

How about screaming into a pillow?!

I love the idea of dancing in the kitchen but I’ve got zero rhythm. It breaks my heart. Instead I’m a big walker. If I go more than a day without getting out I get a bit unhinged.

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

That I can continue to embrace the change that has been a constant in midlife. And that I never lose my curiosity. (Oh, and on a practical level that I retain my eyesight and an ability to stand on one leg with my eyes shut for as long as possible!)

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

A couple of years ago, when I’d been drowning under the weight of Long Covid for months, a mutual friend suggested I speak to the writer Kate Weinberg. Kate was an early sufferer of Long Covid and had written a brilliant piece about it. I’d read it several times but been too chicken to contact her, loathe to be just another person in her inbox asking for something, when I knew from my own experience that she probably had very little energy to give to other people right then. (To be honest, at that time I was also totally lacking the energy to do anything about it anyway). But the friend’s urging prompted me to be brave and message Kate on Instagram. Thank goodness I did. Her response was instant, offering sympathy (she knew how I felt), telling me what had eventually helped her, offering to speak on the phone and much more. To cut a long story short, it was through her that I found my way to vitamin B12 jabs and the beginning of the long road to something resembling recovery. Thanks to Kate’s kindness and generosity I found hope that there was a road at all.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

After a lifetime of over-working as some sort of badge of honour, I’ve finally realised that no-one is going to thank me (or even notice!) if I almost kill myself working. I can’t say that’s been a guiding force in my life, but it is a guiding force in my life right now.

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If you enjoyed Sam’s questionnaire, you might also enjoy this one with Michael Estrin:

Like The Dude, I Abide

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