Navigating Midlife When You Live According to a Different Script than Those Who Came Before You...
Announcing my "Ask Us Anything" session with poet/memoirist/newsletter writer Maggie Smith, tomorrow, Friday, 11/10, from 2-3pm ET.
Readers,
I’m excited to announce that tomorrow, 11/10, from 2-3pm ET, I’ll be doing an “Ask Us Anything” text chat with poet
, who writes the wonderful newsletter, and whose New York Times bestselling memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, was one of my favorite books this year. We’ll be talking about forging our own unique paths through midlife, especially as Gen X-ers who are doing things somewhat differently than those who came before us.
This means you Ask Us Anything in Substack Notes, and we answer as many questions as we can, in real time. Download the Substack App to be notified when the event starts.
Per the Substack announcement:
Living creative lives, boasting several tattoos each, poet/memoirist Maggie Smith and writer/editor Sari Botton are two Gen Xers moving through midlife differently than the women in their families who came before them.
At 46, Smith—who writes the For Dear Life newsletter—thinks of herself as a nesting doll, carrying all the earlier versions of herself at once, and trying "to honor and make space for all of the people I’ve been."
At 58, Botton very much relates to this, and writes often about feeling internally 10 and a half, or 15, or 35—feelings that gave birth to Oldster Magazine and its popular weekly Questionnaire, which Smith responded to in April. Ask them anything about how they're writing their own scripts for moving through midlife.
Perhaps you, too, are moving through midlife in a way that’s different from those who came before you, or different from what you expected, or what people expected of you. Or maybe you’d like to! Come chat with us about this.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Maggie Smith, her memoir and poetry collections are incredible.
And Maggie’s Oldster Magazine Questionnaire was one of the most popular to date:
I hope some of you will join us tomorrow for our “Ask Us Anything” event — which will be all text, no video.
When: Friday, 11/10 from 2-3pm Eastern
Where: On Substack Notes
How: Sign up here. Download the Substack App.
-Sari
I think your goals are excellent in terms of reminding people that we are all aging no matter when our birthday was. A non-judgemental forum for peaceful discussions on personal experience of any kind is always a good thing!
I do enjoy many of your posts -- thank you. But as I am 82, I find that I don't bother reading anything unless it's written by those in their 70s and more. Call me elitist, but there you are. It also used to infuriate me when people in their 20s viewed me (in my 40s or 50s, let's say) as OLD!