The Shift with Sam Baker

The Shift with Sam Baker

The Shift is a podcast that aims to tell the truth about being a woman post-40, created and hosted by writer and broadcaster, Sam Baker. Did you ever wonder why you stop hearing so many women's voices once they pass 40? That's where The Shift comes in - a frank, funny, sometimes heartbreaking, always honest look at what it means to be a woman in midlife and beyond. Work, life, love, health, sex, money, identity, body image... What does it all mean when everything around you (and inside you...) is changing? Each week, award-winning author and journalist Sam Baker asks a different woman how she got here, where she's going - and how it feels to be where she is right now. Expect intimate conversation, big laughs, occasional tears and an awful lot of ripping up the rule book and stamping on it... Past guests have included Nicola Sturgeon, Marian Keyes, Guilty Feminist Deborah Frances-White, Minnie Driver, Philippa Perry, Anita Rani, Tracey Thorn, Isabel Allende, Bobbi Brown, Barbara Blake-Hannah and many more, talking everything from confidence to career reinvention, mental health, menopause and so much more. If you enjoy The Shift podcast, and you'd like to show the love, you can buy me a coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theshiftwithsambaker And if you really love The Shift and would like to hear more conversations with women over 40, why not become a member of our community and receive a weekly newsletter, get exclusive transcripts, join The Shift bookclub and so much more, please visit https://theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com/ For advertising enquiries, email sales@auddy.co

Episodes

Clover Stroud on grief, love, sex & sisterhood - THE SHIFT REVISITED

April 28, 2025 • 56 mins
Last of my trips back into The Shift archives is this conversation with Clover Stroud. Since this conversation, Clover has written another memoir, The Giant on the Skyline about our relationship with home (borne in part out of moving her family from her home in Oxfordshire to Washington DC where her partner's job is based). Since then A LOT has changed. She has also launched an excellent substack, On The Way Life Feels. The origin...
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Tracey Thorn on being a woman in a bloke's world, hormones and going "statement grey" - THE SHIFT REVISITED

April 21, 2025 • 44 mins
This conversation with legendary musician Tracey Thorn from one of The Shift's very early seasons is one of my very favourites. Back then covid was still a thing and these chats on zoom with incredible women were my life rafts. Anyway, we're revisiting Tracey because by the time you listen to this episode, Everything But The Girl will have very tentatively put their toe back on the stage at a couple of very small gigs in London. I'...
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Maggie O'Farrell on Hamnet, imposter syndrome and why she didn't think she's the marrying kind: THE SHIFT REVISITED

April 14, 2025 • 43 mins
Back in the mists of time, Maggie O'Farrell was one of my very first guests on The Shift. So, as she celebrates the 25th anniversary of the publication of her very first novel, After You'd Gone and we wait with bated breath for the movie of her smash hit bestseller Hamnet (starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, directed by Oscar-winning director of Nomadland, Chloe Zhao, and co-written by Maggie and Chloe), I thought now was a go...
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The "other" Maggie Smith on her midlife reappearing act - THE SHIFT REVISITED

April 7, 2025 • 54 mins
As we put the finishing touches to the Spring season of The Shift, I thought we'd raid the archives for a few of my favourite episodes. First up, "the other" Maggie Smith (as she says she will always be), who I first spoke to when her memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful was just creeping into the world. Little did we know back then that it would be the leading wave in a tsunami of divorce memoirs written by midlife women. A...
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Lorraine Kelly on menopause, misogyny, toxic men in telly, being a granny, Botox, you name it!

March 31, 2025 • 67 mins
My final guest of this season is the British TV legend, Lorraine Kelly. You know, Lorraine off the telly!  Her show, Lorraine, which airs every weekday morning, revolutionised Daytime Telly, she’s now been doing it for an astonishing 40 years. She took so called soft telly and turned it into a must take notice of for politicians and people who thought they were too good to watch telly during the day. She has won a Royal Televisio...
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Jenni Fagan: I'm 46, nobody thought I'd make it past 16

March 24, 2025 • 60 mins
My guest today is the award winning author, screenwriter and poet Jenni Fagan. Jenni has written four novels, several poetry collections and been named Scottish novelist of the year.  18 months ago Jenni and I met in a suitably spooky basement in Edinburgh’s old town to discuss her incredible, harrowing memoir about growing up in care, Ootlin. An ootlin, according to Jenni, is ‘someone who creates their story without first seekin...
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Ione Skye: I'm still working on being seen in the world – and I'm 50

March 17, 2025 • 56 mins
My guest today is a Gen X legend and someone I’ve been a little bit obsessed with ever since I saw her star in the definitive (late) 80s movie, Say Anything. Ione Skye. There was a time when It seemed like if there was a hot young actor - John Cusack, River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves - she got to snog them on screen. (I know, shallow, much.) Ione has spent her life in the centre of the Venn diagram of film, music and celebrity. The dau...
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Denise Lewis shares her secrets for adapting to a big life shift

March 10, 2025 • 60 mins
My guest today is a woman who knows better than most what it takes to adapt to life’s big shifts. Dame Denise Lewis is one of the UK’s best known athletes. She won gold in the heptathlon in Sydney Olympics in 2000 and bronze in Atlanta in 1996. She has won medals at the Commonwealth games, the European championships and World Championships. After retiring from athletics in her early 30s she built a successful career as a BBC sport...
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Liz O'Riordan: When breast cancer surgeon becomes breast cancer patient

March 3, 2025 • 54 mins
My guest today is Dr Liz O’Riordan. Liz is what’s apparently known in the trade as a double doctor; a breast cancer surgeon with a PhD in molecular oncology.  But more than that Liz is also both expert and patient.  She received her first breast cancer diagnosis aged 40. Her second aged 43 and her third, just two years ago, at the age of 48. Her experience of life on both sides of the cancer patient-doctor fence makes her unique...
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Martha Beck on creativity, anxiety & finding your life's purpose

February 24, 2025 • 67 mins
I first encountered today’s guest back when I was editor of Red magazine and - for some crazy reason - went to an Oprah convention in Atlanta. I know right? I can literally hear everyone who knows me in real life laughing. So, Yes! I went to Atlanta to see Oprah but really I went to see someone else - a woman who Oprah described as “one of the smartest women I know”. Martha Beck. Martha is a Harvard trained sociologist and life ...
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Diana Evans on expectation, ageing & turning 50 without her twin

February 17, 2025 • 51 mins
My guest today is the novelist, journalist and critic Diana Evans. Diana is the award-winning author of four novels 26a, The Wonder, Ordinary People and A House for Alice. She has been shortlisted for countless awards including the Women’s Prize and won the South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature for Ordinary People. She has, as she puts it, been writing against invisibility her entire life.  Before all that she was a dancer, wi...
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Kate Fagan on success, ambition and ageing alongside the L-word!

February 10, 2025 • 62 mins
This week's guest is the Emmy award-winning American journalist Kate Fagan. Kate started out playing college basketball before making the move into sports journalism. She worked for the American cable channel ESPN (for brits, that’s THE sports channel in the US) and wrote the number 1 NYT bestseller, What Made Maddy Run.  Then, just before she turned 40 and at the top of her professional game, Kate took a hard left. She stepped a...
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Miranda July on the unexpected wildness of ageing - THE SHIFT REVISITED

February 3, 2025 • 49 mins
I was the very first person to interview Miranda July about All Fours this time last year. To say she was nervous about how it would be received was an understatement. "Will you have my back?" she asked me (and the rest of the female world) towards the end of our conversation. Yes, I said, yes we will. And how! Since then All Fours has taken the world by storm - women over 40 have a sex life, who knew?! So I've decided to replay th...
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Ruby Wax on building an emotional toolkit for the second half of your life - THE SHIFT REVISITED

January 27, 2025 • 52 mins
Today’s guest is someone I’ve wanted to get on The Shift for the longest time. You might know Ruby Wax as a successful comedian and presenter, one of the funniest women of her generation. Or you might know her as a mental health campaigner and best-selling author. One thing’s for sure, she has been using humour to make the rest of us feel better for decades. Having suffered depression her whole life, Ruby had a breakdown after los...
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Dani Shapiro on family secrets and coming into your full potential at 60 - THE SHIFT REVISITED

January 20, 2025 • 54 mins
My guest today is the bestselling writer Dani Shapiro. Dani is best known for the memoirs that made her name. Startlingly honest works of self-investigation like Slow Motion, in which she examines the questionable decisions her younger self made (let’s face it, whose younger self didn’t?). And the book that catapulted her to the top of the bestseller lists, Inheritance.  In Inheritance, Dani explored the impact of taking a DNA tes...
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Bryony Gordon on burnout, binge eating and perimenopause - THE SHIFT REVISITED

January 13, 2025 • 49 mins
Today I’m delighted to welcome back one of The Shift’s very first guests, journalist and mental health campaigner Bryony Gordon. Bryony has been a columnist on the Telegraph for over 20 years and for ten of those she has been writing candidly about her own experiences of addiction and mental illness. She is the best selling author of Mad Girl and The Wrong Knickers and in 2016 she founded Mental Health Mates a global peer support ...
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Sarah Knight: why selfish isn't a four letter word - THE SHIFT REVISITED

January 6, 2025 • 54 mins
Today’s guest is the anti-guru behind the massive No F*cks Given franchise, Sarah Knight. What started life with the Marie Kondo pastiche, The Life Changing Magic of Not Giving A F*ck, now comprises 7 guides and three journals which have sold three million copies and a TED talk that’s notched up ten million views.  But Sarah wasn’t always the queen of giving zero f*cks. Scroll back to her mid-30s and you’d have found her having a ...
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Dr Gladys McGarey: a 102-year-old shares her life lessons - THE SHIFT REVISITED

December 30, 2024 • 45 mins
Dr Gladys McGarey died, aged 103, in September of this year, so I wanted to honour her by making her episode the last to go out on the last day of the year. Rest In Power Gladys. ---- A few months ago I read an article that took my breath away. The author was 102 years old and in it she wrote candidly about losing her partner in life and work after 46 years. Not because he passed away, but because he handed her divorce papers! Tha...
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Barbara Kingsolver on why life gets better with every passing decade - THE SHIFT REVISITED

December 23, 2024 • 54 mins
For this bonus episode of The Shift, I’m delighted to welcome a very special guest: the award-winning author of ten bestselling novels, Barbara Kingsolver.  Every so often, a book comes along that you want to press into the hands of everyone you meet. For me, Demon Copperhead, is one of those books. A reimagining of the Dickens classic, David Copperfield, translated to the Appalachian mountains in the midst of the opioid crisis th...
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Katherine May: why we all need a little more wonder in our lives - THE SHIFT REVISITED

December 16, 2024 • 47 mins
We’ve all had those moments in our lives when everything feels… darker, colder, a little (or a lot) less hopeful. Those emotional winters were perfectly encapsulated by today’s guest, Katherine May in her transatlantic bestseller, Wintering, the power of rest and retreat in difficult times. Her new book is another soothing antidote for the way we live now, Enchantment, Reawakening wonder in an exhausted age. I don’t know if it’s t...
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