00:00:02
Speaker 1: Welcome to Get Connected with Nina Del Rio, a weekly conversation about fitness, health, and happenings in our community on 106.7 Light FM.
00:00:13
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to Get Connected. For those women who have just arrived at a certain age, a lot of you who may be Light FM listeners, guess what? You don't have to spend the next 40 years stuck with whatever choices you made in your first 40 years. The era you've entered is not a midlife crisis. Think of it as a midlife plot twist. That is the title of the book for my guests, Lindsay Goldwert and Gabrielle Moss. They are the authors of The Midlife Plot Twist, How to Reboot Your Life Without Burning It Down Even If You Really Want To. Lindsay Goldwert and Gabrielle Moss, thank you for being on Get Connected.
00:00:48
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for having us.
00:00:50
Speaker 4: It's an honor to be here.
00:00:51
Speaker 2: This is a humorous and practical guide to rejecting the outdated cliche of the midlife crisis, instead offering a fresh, empowering vision for any woman in her 40s or 50s looking for reinvention, courage, and clarity. Lindsay Goldwork has worked as an editorial director, writer, and podcaster. She's also the author of Bow Down, Lessons from Dominatrixes on How to Be a Boss in Life, Love, and Work, a Glamour magazine best book. And Gabrielle Moss is the author of Paperback Crush, the Totally Radical History of 80s and 90s Teen Fiction. And those are very different books. So how did you write this book. And I wonder to what degree were each of you working on your own midlife plot twists, so to speak? Lindsay, I'll start with you.
00:01:38
Speaker 4: So we definitely wrote this book while having our own midlife plot twists, for sure, which definitely made this book emotional to write. But also I felt very lucky to have a partner to write it with who was going through something different but similar. But yes, I'm Gabby and I met, we're both writers, and I've always been a huge admirer of her writing. And we met on social media, which is such a modern way to meet people. Certainly not how we thought we'd meet people back in 1995. The funny thing about.
00:02:09
Speaker 2: One of the funny things about this book to me, as you bring up in the There is this cliche of midlife, and we think of about men, men getting a Corvette and leaving their wives for their 20-year-olds. And there is some, we all have a story in our world about somebody who's actually done that. But as you point out in the book, women don't even really have a cliche. The father of psychology, Sigmund Freud, you have this amazing quote in the book, which kind of sums up how women have been thought of all these decades. I'll read it. A man of 30 strikes us as youthful, somewhat informed individual, a woman of the same age, often frightens us, however, by her physical rigidity and unchangeability. There are no paths open for further development. For most of history, women were kind of thought of as useless after childbearing years were over. And so, Gabrielle, we're kind of in this weird moment of a modern thing, building our own midlife.
00:03:07
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, that's such a great point that we don't have this history of what rethinking things in midlife looks like for women. Because until so recently, if you look to popular culture, just once a woman was no longer able to bear children, like people were, you know, society was just through with you. And we have a very exciting story. point in history right now where we do get to say, actually, I still matter. Actually, I have a whole other half of my life to live. But we don't have as many role models. Some of us might have had mothers or older women in our lives who hit this point and really looked at things and made a big change. But a lot of us might not, and we might be tackling this in a way that feels kind of on our own with no map.
00:03:58
Speaker 2: You did talk to dozens of women for this book. Who were they and how many of them also had this idea of blowing up their lives and starting over?
00:04:07
Speaker 3: Well, we surveyed kind of the backbone of the book is we surveyed about 150 women in their 40s and 50s about how their mid-lives were going, you know, kind of their inner feelings, the things they're maybe not, you know, talking about at lunch or at work. But We were surprised to find out, you know, one of the things that really connected me and Lindsay when we started working on this is I think we thought we were maybe the only people having a is that all there is moment in their 40s. You know, we thought that women around us had everything figured out just because it's not really something you're encouraged to talk about so much. And once we started interviewing these women, we were shocked to find out that around the 70% of women, so 70% of this group of 150 women had fantasized about just absolutely blowing up their lives. And I think to the extent that there are any role models or guides to how to rethink your life in the middle, that's what we have. We have Eat, Pray, Love. We have How Stella Got Her Groove Back, movies about people who made tremendous, tremendous changes that are Probably beyond what most of us are able to make in our own lives. But so, you know, that's a very compelling wish for a lot of people. But we also found from talking to everyone for our book that you don't need to completely burn down your life to tweak it and make it something that feels right. feels better and more meaningful to you.
00:05:48
Speaker 2: I like the way you separate it in the book. You talk about burning down your life and singeing your life. But before we get to that, Lindsay, when people were talking about what they wanted to blow up and what they thought was going pretty well, what fell on either side of that divide? Maybe money's on one side and what's going pretty well?
00:06:04
Speaker 4: So despite the fact that people have, women have fantasies about burning it all down, about faking their own death and moving to a private island, changing their name, meeting a younger lover, you know, after we talk about that and we laugh about it because fantasies are fun to talk about, we really do have a lot in our lives that we do want to keep. And that's great. It's a sign that you didn't, even if you feel like you did, make a mess of everything. You know, chances are you have some friendships, you have at least one nice person in your family who you know, you like some part of your life, probably a part of your life that you work pretty hard on to keep going. So we really wanted women to say there's a happy place between, you know, just being passive and just letting the sea take you and, you know, moving to the outback, you know, and starting a dingo farm, you know, that you can do these small three-point turns and That will get you to where you want to go. It just won't happen overnight. There's no one quick fix. But it starts with forgiving yourself for not having had all the answers when you made all these big decisions. When we were 20 and we were choosing our college majors, when we were figuring out who the best partner was, we didn't have so much information. We talked a lot about data. You only had a few years worth of data to give yourself about who would be What would be the best way to live your life? When we say singe it, don't burn it, we're saying that you didn't do as bad as you think. And you might want to keep a lot more than you think you are. And you can make big changes by making small changes. And a few small changes over time can lead to a really big change. Even if you thought that I could never get another job ever, like I've been doing this for too long, it's like, okay, well, there really are these small steps you can take to making your professional life a little more tolerable. And that could give you the freedom to start making other areas of your life more tolerable. You deserve it.
00:08:05
Speaker 2: My guests are Lindsay Goldwert and Gabriel Moss. Their book is The Midlife Plot Twist, How to Reboot Your Life Without Burning It Down, Even If You Really Want To. You're listening to Get Connected on 106.7 Light FM. I'm Nina Del Rio. And I do love that section on singeing your life, just making small changes, like taking away energy, sucking things, that kind of thing. That said, talking about the burning down point. 80% of the women you spoke with, again, had very detailed descriptions of burning everything down. A third of them had actually done it. Can you tell one of those stories and maybe what was the common thread among the people who did that?
00:08:45
Speaker 3: Sure. So one of the stories that always jumps to my mind, because I think it is so close to a fantasy, so many of us have had one woman we spoke to, She had a high-pressure corporate job, and she had been doing this her whole adult life, and she hit a point where one job wrapped up, and she just thought, enough, I've always wanted to live in the country. And she moved to the Australian outback, which had, you know, been a longtime fantasy of hers. And I just, I kind of love this story because it's sort of the anti-eat-pray love. She got out to the outback, and she thought, This is actually very difficult and not that pleasant. But the sort of great thing about that story to me is she made this massive change. It turned out it wasn't for her. And so she just worked her way back into a different change. You know, even if you do totally burn down your life and change everything and then you go, oh my God, this was a mistake. It doesn't mean you're stuck doing that forever either. I think the most fascinating thing we learn talking to all these women is you know, no matter what, you're kind of not stuck with this life forever. You know, some parts of it, you might not be able to change, but some part of it, you almost always can, which I think, you know, is a message that we get so rarely. And I guess if I was going to say what is the through line between every woman we spoke to who really did burned down her life. I think usually something happened with careers, actually. And that's interesting to me. In our survey, the arena that women had the most trouble with and were most surprised to have trouble with at this point in their life was money and careers. That is the thing that is really getting people down. Women were a lot more satisfied with parenting, with their friendships, with their self-image on levels that they had not anticipated. But career stuff was very rough for them. And that usually seemed to be the inciting incident for a woman who goes, you know what? I've had enough and I'm out.
00:11:00
Speaker 2: There's a really interesting thing you bring up about that. There's a McKinsey study in the book you cite that kind of says it all to me, one of the points of it. It was a quarter of respondents, female respondents, said they worked more hours than they had the year before in their current job. And they were too... More times likely to be mistaken for a junior employee. And I think those shenanigans kind of go on throughout our careers in probably every field. You work really hard. You never get anywhere. You get paid less and everybody thinks you're lesser than the man standing next to you. And so by the time you're middle-aged, you're just tired. You're just tired of that. And women leave jobs. How are you still, or how can you still look at yourself as a success story when that has been your work history?
00:11:44
Speaker 4: I think that's a really great point. And that's something in 2026 that a lot of women are coping with. There's been a mass exodus of women in the workplace, leaving their jobs because of dissatisfaction, because of overwhelmed, taking care of an ill parent, taking care of children. It's just the workplace has become very inhospitable to women. And many of the helpful aspects of the pandemic that were employers gave women a little more flexibility and a chance to review their hours in a way that worked more for their schedule. All that was rolled back and that had a very deleterious effect on women. And now as women are starting to see, you know, that things didn't go quite the way they wanted to, to be able to convince yourself that I didn't fail in my career, my career failed me, takes a lot of effort and it takes a lot of self-love and it takes a lot of friends around you who can help you feel that way. But it is true. But we work so hard at our jobs, our jobs can become our identities. And if our careers fizzle out, or we get laid off, or we start to feel marginalized, it doesn't just hurt our feelings, it hurts our sense of identity. So it's really important that we're able to really take stock of what our accomplishments are outside of the The employers who heard us.
00:13:10
Speaker 2: I want to spend the last couple of minutes. We just have a couple of minutes left to talk about part two. You talk about midlife sex lives, which is a huge thing. Your sex life changes in a relationship, but it also changes for reasons that are sometimes out of your control to some degree. You have physical changes. Your partner's libido or confidence may be changing, right? For some people, just talking about it with their partner, you need a reset. but it can feel like blowing up the stability of your entire relationship. So where do we go from there?
00:13:41
Speaker 4: It's so funny how it's, it's so hard to be honest with the people who've already seen us at our most vulnerable. And if we have a long-term partner, they've seen a lot more of you than, you know, than most people have. And yet telling them that you're not satisfied with some aspect of your intimacy, you know, you don't want to hurt their feelings. You know, you don't want to rock the boat, you know, and people, you know, women will go on and they'll continue to have the sort of intimacy that they're not really interested in having anymore, just to kind of keep the, you know, keep things moving forward, just to make sure the other person knows that they're loved, you know, just to kind of keep things moving. And that is, that's sort of kicking the can down the road, you know, because in the end, if you're married to, or if you're with a good partner, they want you to be happy. So if you're sort of faking it, that's not really doing a service to the, your partner so much.
00:14:33
Speaker 1: Either.
00:14:34
Speaker 4: So starting these conversations of why you're not happy, what you want, you have to see that through like, well, if I have this conversation, where would I like for it to go? And what will I do if it doesn't go the way that I would like for it to go? And that's the part where it's very important because people love to give, especially on social media, really easy answers. Just say this, just say that. It's like, okay, well, you can say what you want, but you might not get the answer that you want. And How can we keep going? How can we keep questioning? Don't just make one big ask. Think about all the other asks you can make. But it's very challenging. But that's what we were really excited about was talking about women who just, they still love their partners. They just weren't loving having sex with them as much anymore, but they didn't want to let the marriage go. So what do they do? And that's the eternal question.
00:15:23
Speaker 2: Yeah. There is so much more in the book. We have to end it there. But there's more on families. There's more on friendships. There's, of course, more on work and money and sex in this great book, The Midlife Plot Twist, How to Reboot Your Life Without Burning It Down, Even If You Really Want To, by Lindsay Goldwert and Gabrielle Moss. Thank you for being on Get Connected.
00:15:42
Speaker 4: Thank you.
00:15:44
Speaker 1: This has been Get Connected with Nina Del Rio on 106.7 Light FM. The views and opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect the views of the station. If you missed any part of our show or want to share it, visit our website for downloads and podcasts at 106.7lightfm.com. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Get Connected with Nina Del Rio, a weekly conversation about fitness, health, and happenings in our community on 106.7 Light FM.
00:00:13
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to Get Connected. For those women who have just arrived at a certain age, a lot of you who may be Light FM listeners, guess what? You don't have to spend the next 40 years stuck with whatever choices you made in your first 40 years. The era you've entered is not a midlife crisis. Think of it as a midlife plot twist. That is the title of the book for my guests, Lindsay Goldwert and Gabrielle Moss. They are the authors of The Midlife Plot Twist, How to Reboot Your Life Without Burning It Down Even If You Really Want To. Lindsay Goldwert and Gabrielle Moss, thank you for being on Get Connected.
00:00:48
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for having us.
00:00:50
Speaker 4: It's an honor to be here.
00:00:51
Speaker 2: This is a humorous and practical guide to rejecting the outdated cliche of the midlife crisis, instead offering a fresh, empowering vision for any woman in her 40s or 50s looking for reinvention, courage, and clarity. Lindsay Goldwork has worked as an editorial director, writer, and podcaster. She's also the author of Bow Down, Lessons from Dominatrixes on How to Be a Boss in Life, Love, and Work, a Glamour magazine best book. And Gabrielle Moss is the author of Paperback Crush, the Totally Radical History of 80s and 90s Teen Fiction. And those are very different books. So how did you write this book. And I wonder to what degree were each of you working on your own midlife plot twists, so to speak? Lindsay, I'll start with you.
00:01:38
Speaker 4: So we definitely wrote this book while having our own midlife plot twists, for sure, which definitely made this book emotional to write. But also I felt very lucky to have a partner to write it with who was going through something different but similar. But yes, I'm Gabby and I met, we're both writers, and I've always been a huge admirer of her writing. And we met on social media, which is such a modern way to meet people. Certainly not how we thought we'd meet people back in 1995. The funny thing about.
00:02:09
Speaker 2: One of the funny things about this book to me, as you bring up in the There is this cliche of midlife, and we think of about men, men getting a Corvette and leaving their wives for their 20-year-olds. And there is some, we all have a story in our world about somebody who's actually done that. But as you point out in the book, women don't even really have a cliche. The father of psychology, Sigmund Freud, you have this amazing quote in the book, which kind of sums up how women have been thought of all these decades. I'll read it. A man of 30 strikes us as youthful, somewhat informed individual, a woman of the same age, often frightens us, however, by her physical rigidity and unchangeability. There are no paths open for further development. For most of history, women were kind of thought of as useless after childbearing years were over. And so, Gabrielle, we're kind of in this weird moment of a modern thing, building our own midlife.
00:03:07
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, that's such a great point that we don't have this history of what rethinking things in midlife looks like for women. Because until so recently, if you look to popular culture, just once a woman was no longer able to bear children, like people were, you know, society was just through with you. And we have a very exciting story. point in history right now where we do get to say, actually, I still matter. Actually, I have a whole other half of my life to live. But we don't have as many role models. Some of us might have had mothers or older women in our lives who hit this point and really looked at things and made a big change. But a lot of us might not, and we might be tackling this in a way that feels kind of on our own with no map.
00:03:58
Speaker 2: You did talk to dozens of women for this book. Who were they and how many of them also had this idea of blowing up their lives and starting over?
00:04:07
Speaker 3: Well, we surveyed kind of the backbone of the book is we surveyed about 150 women in their 40s and 50s about how their mid-lives were going, you know, kind of their inner feelings, the things they're maybe not, you know, talking about at lunch or at work. But We were surprised to find out, you know, one of the things that really connected me and Lindsay when we started working on this is I think we thought we were maybe the only people having a is that all there is moment in their 40s. You know, we thought that women around us had everything figured out just because it's not really something you're encouraged to talk about so much. And once we started interviewing these women, we were shocked to find out that around the 70% of women, so 70% of this group of 150 women had fantasized about just absolutely blowing up their lives. And I think to the extent that there are any role models or guides to how to rethink your life in the middle, that's what we have. We have Eat, Pray, Love. We have How Stella Got Her Groove Back, movies about people who made tremendous, tremendous changes that are Probably beyond what most of us are able to make in our own lives. But so, you know, that's a very compelling wish for a lot of people. But we also found from talking to everyone for our book that you don't need to completely burn down your life to tweak it and make it something that feels right. feels better and more meaningful to you.
00:05:48
Speaker 2: I like the way you separate it in the book. You talk about burning down your life and singeing your life. But before we get to that, Lindsay, when people were talking about what they wanted to blow up and what they thought was going pretty well, what fell on either side of that divide? Maybe money's on one side and what's going pretty well?
00:06:04
Speaker 4: So despite the fact that people have, women have fantasies about burning it all down, about faking their own death and moving to a private island, changing their name, meeting a younger lover, you know, after we talk about that and we laugh about it because fantasies are fun to talk about, we really do have a lot in our lives that we do want to keep. And that's great. It's a sign that you didn't, even if you feel like you did, make a mess of everything. You know, chances are you have some friendships, you have at least one nice person in your family who you know, you like some part of your life, probably a part of your life that you work pretty hard on to keep going. So we really wanted women to say there's a happy place between, you know, just being passive and just letting the sea take you and, you know, moving to the outback, you know, and starting a dingo farm, you know, that you can do these small three-point turns and That will get you to where you want to go. It just won't happen overnight. There's no one quick fix. But it starts with forgiving yourself for not having had all the answers when you made all these big decisions. When we were 20 and we were choosing our college majors, when we were figuring out who the best partner was, we didn't have so much information. We talked a lot about data. You only had a few years worth of data to give yourself about who would be What would be the best way to live your life? When we say singe it, don't burn it, we're saying that you didn't do as bad as you think. And you might want to keep a lot more than you think you are. And you can make big changes by making small changes. And a few small changes over time can lead to a really big change. Even if you thought that I could never get another job ever, like I've been doing this for too long, it's like, okay, well, there really are these small steps you can take to making your professional life a little more tolerable. And that could give you the freedom to start making other areas of your life more tolerable. You deserve it.
00:08:05
Speaker 2: My guests are Lindsay Goldwert and Gabriel Moss. Their book is The Midlife Plot Twist, How to Reboot Your Life Without Burning It Down, Even If You Really Want To. You're listening to Get Connected on 106.7 Light FM. I'm Nina Del Rio. And I do love that section on singeing your life, just making small changes, like taking away energy, sucking things, that kind of thing. That said, talking about the burning down point. 80% of the women you spoke with, again, had very detailed descriptions of burning everything down. A third of them had actually done it. Can you tell one of those stories and maybe what was the common thread among the people who did that?
00:08:45
Speaker 3: Sure. So one of the stories that always jumps to my mind, because I think it is so close to a fantasy, so many of us have had one woman we spoke to, She had a high-pressure corporate job, and she had been doing this her whole adult life, and she hit a point where one job wrapped up, and she just thought, enough, I've always wanted to live in the country. And she moved to the Australian outback, which had, you know, been a longtime fantasy of hers. And I just, I kind of love this story because it's sort of the anti-eat-pray love. She got out to the outback, and she thought, This is actually very difficult and not that pleasant. But the sort of great thing about that story to me is she made this massive change. It turned out it wasn't for her. And so she just worked her way back into a different change. You know, even if you do totally burn down your life and change everything and then you go, oh my God, this was a mistake. It doesn't mean you're stuck doing that forever either. I think the most fascinating thing we learn talking to all these women is you know, no matter what, you're kind of not stuck with this life forever. You know, some parts of it, you might not be able to change, but some part of it, you almost always can, which I think, you know, is a message that we get so rarely. And I guess if I was going to say what is the through line between every woman we spoke to who really did burned down her life. I think usually something happened with careers, actually. And that's interesting to me. In our survey, the arena that women had the most trouble with and were most surprised to have trouble with at this point in their life was money and careers. That is the thing that is really getting people down. Women were a lot more satisfied with parenting, with their friendships, with their self-image on levels that they had not anticipated. But career stuff was very rough for them. And that usually seemed to be the inciting incident for a woman who goes, you know what? I've had enough and I'm out.
00:11:00
Speaker 2: There's a really interesting thing you bring up about that. There's a McKinsey study in the book you cite that kind of says it all to me, one of the points of it. It was a quarter of respondents, female respondents, said they worked more hours than they had the year before in their current job. And they were too... More times likely to be mistaken for a junior employee. And I think those shenanigans kind of go on throughout our careers in probably every field. You work really hard. You never get anywhere. You get paid less and everybody thinks you're lesser than the man standing next to you. And so by the time you're middle-aged, you're just tired. You're just tired of that. And women leave jobs. How are you still, or how can you still look at yourself as a success story when that has been your work history?
00:11:44
Speaker 4: I think that's a really great point. And that's something in 2026 that a lot of women are coping with. There's been a mass exodus of women in the workplace, leaving their jobs because of dissatisfaction, because of overwhelmed, taking care of an ill parent, taking care of children. It's just the workplace has become very inhospitable to women. And many of the helpful aspects of the pandemic that were employers gave women a little more flexibility and a chance to review their hours in a way that worked more for their schedule. All that was rolled back and that had a very deleterious effect on women. And now as women are starting to see, you know, that things didn't go quite the way they wanted to, to be able to convince yourself that I didn't fail in my career, my career failed me, takes a lot of effort and it takes a lot of self-love and it takes a lot of friends around you who can help you feel that way. But it is true. But we work so hard at our jobs, our jobs can become our identities. And if our careers fizzle out, or we get laid off, or we start to feel marginalized, it doesn't just hurt our feelings, it hurts our sense of identity. So it's really important that we're able to really take stock of what our accomplishments are outside of the The employers who heard us.
00:13:10
Speaker 2: I want to spend the last couple of minutes. We just have a couple of minutes left to talk about part two. You talk about midlife sex lives, which is a huge thing. Your sex life changes in a relationship, but it also changes for reasons that are sometimes out of your control to some degree. You have physical changes. Your partner's libido or confidence may be changing, right? For some people, just talking about it with their partner, you need a reset. but it can feel like blowing up the stability of your entire relationship. So where do we go from there?
00:13:41
Speaker 4: It's so funny how it's, it's so hard to be honest with the people who've already seen us at our most vulnerable. And if we have a long-term partner, they've seen a lot more of you than, you know, than most people have. And yet telling them that you're not satisfied with some aspect of your intimacy, you know, you don't want to hurt their feelings. You know, you don't want to rock the boat, you know, and people, you know, women will go on and they'll continue to have the sort of intimacy that they're not really interested in having anymore, just to kind of keep the, you know, keep things moving forward, just to make sure the other person knows that they're loved, you know, just to kind of keep things moving. And that is, that's sort of kicking the can down the road, you know, because in the end, if you're married to, or if you're with a good partner, they want you to be happy. So if you're sort of faking it, that's not really doing a service to the, your partner so much.
00:14:33
Speaker 1: Either.
00:14:34
Speaker 4: So starting these conversations of why you're not happy, what you want, you have to see that through like, well, if I have this conversation, where would I like for it to go? And what will I do if it doesn't go the way that I would like for it to go? And that's the part where it's very important because people love to give, especially on social media, really easy answers. Just say this, just say that. It's like, okay, well, you can say what you want, but you might not get the answer that you want. And How can we keep going? How can we keep questioning? Don't just make one big ask. Think about all the other asks you can make. But it's very challenging. But that's what we were really excited about was talking about women who just, they still love their partners. They just weren't loving having sex with them as much anymore, but they didn't want to let the marriage go. So what do they do? And that's the eternal question.
00:15:23
Speaker 2: Yeah. There is so much more in the book. We have to end it there. But there's more on families. There's more on friendships. There's, of course, more on work and money and sex in this great book, The Midlife Plot Twist, How to Reboot Your Life Without Burning It Down, Even If You Really Want To, by Lindsay Goldwert and Gabrielle Moss. Thank you for being on Get Connected.
00:15:42
Speaker 4: Thank you.
00:15:44
Speaker 1: This has been Get Connected with Nina Del Rio on 106.7 Light FM. The views and opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect the views of the station. If you missed any part of our show or want to share it, visit our website for downloads and podcasts at 106.7lightfm.com. Thanks for listening.
