Oldster Recommends: "Everything is Fine" Podcast
And not just because they had me on this week. Plus: What are your favorite podcasts? An open thread.
Readers,
Last week I had the good fortune of appearing as a guest on the wonderful Everything is Fine podcast, talking all things Oldster Magazine, and my recently published memoir-in-essays, And You May Find Yourself…Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen X Weirdo.
This was an especially big thrill since Everything is Fine, a podcast for women over 40, is one of my favorites. So I thought I’d take a moment to recommend it to you. (I’m going to start recommending stuff here and there.)
I also want to hear about your favorite podcasts. Tell me in the comments…
Each week, EIF hosts Kim France and Jennifer Romolini discuss the things we’re all thinking about: career struggles at midlife, menopause and all the changes that come with it, friendship, dating, sex, sleep, beauty, fashion for our morphing bodies. Sometimes they talk about these things with guests (like me), but sometimes it’s just the two of them conversing, and as you listen you identify so strongly you feel as if you’re hanging out with two smart, funny friends.
If you’re not already familiar with Kim and Jenn, you might recall them from the pieces they contributed to Oldster Magazine. Kim wrote a fantastic essay about starting over on her own terms after being fired from Lucky, the magazine she’d founded:
Between Everything is Fine and the blog, I feel a real community, of myself and so many other women, all of us feeling our way through this alternately exciting and bewildering time of life.
And Jenn took the Questionnaire:
These days I identify most with my 9-year-old self, the earnest, gentle weirdo I was before I started performing femininity, before I started performing an identity, period, and before I started competing with other women for prizes that were never worthy of us in the first place.
While I’m recommending things made by these two, you will also want to check out Kim’s excellent style blog, Girls of a Certain Age, which has been going strong for over 10 years now. I also enjoyed Jenn’s first book, Weird in a World That’s Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, part memoir, part career guide. (I published an excerpt of it on Longreads when I was an editor there.) I’m looking forward to Jenn’s second book, Ambition Monster, which will come out in 2023.
You can’t go wrong reading, perusing, or listening to anything these women create, is what I’m saying. Hot tip from me…
Two of my favorites (besides EIF) are You’re Wrong About and Maintenance Phase. Both do deep dives into cultural phenomena (MP especially looks at diet and wellness culture) and items that were newsworthy in their day.
I am tearing through the Patreon backlog of You’re Wrong About, because I am obsessed. Also love Throughline and Threedom and other shows starting with Y and T.