Jenny Knight gave a reading from her book Wild Moon Rising then spoke with NOON about the scene from Fleabag that inspired her to write it, what she thinks about smooth foreheads and toned bodies, and why it’s important her protagonist is an artist.
Watch the full video and see the transcript below. Use timecodes (in brackets) to forward to those parts of the video.
[Note: The transcript was automatically generated so my include stray words and occasional mispellings.]
Jenny Knight, Wild Moon Rising, on NOON Book Club [transcript]
Eleanor Mills: hello everybody. We are just waiting for everybody to come in. Welcome to the NOON Book Club. Um, we are really delighted to have Jenny Knight with us today. Um, lots of you will have read her amazing book. I’ve got the original proof copy while me rising.
Jenny’s got the posh looking hard back. I think I need to get my hands on one of those. Um, but we are really delighted to, um, have Jenny with us this evening. Um, I, I, I actually think probably of all the books that we’ve done in the book club, um, this one feels particularly kind of queen age and noon appropriate.
So, um, I’m sure lots of you have got some good, uh, questions and, um, hopefully you’ve really enjoyed reading it. Um, and while we get some new, um, while some more people kind of come in, because I realize we’re interested. Um, kind of half past. We will, um, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll kind of do a few [00:01:00] pleasantries.
Um, remember we are really delighted to take your, oh. Um, we are really delighted to take your questions, um, and put them in the chat and we’ll try and do that and tell us where you are as well. It’s good to know, um, where you are and what you know, where you are, where you’re joining us from. And we’d also really like to know what you thought of the, what you thought of the book.
This is Jenny’s first novel. Ah, Jenny Jennifer’s joining from Dulwich. Well, on Jennifer, um, I am joining from Kentish Town in North London. I was just saying that I’ve got a, um, whole house full of Devon relations who have, uh, come to see us. They’re going to see some marching bands or something down in, uh, tower Hamlets tomorrow.
’cause their, their brother is over from America. So it’s one of those times when you’ve got like many, many relatives all kind of squished in. And so I’ve been trying to kind of look after them and. Do various other things, but it’s all good. We will now concentrate on this. Oh, Winchester. Hello Laura, have you been to our Winchester Circle?
If not, you should. Yes. Not good. [00:02:00] It’s one of our new ones. Hello hin. Nice to see you. Hin, um, has, uh, ni became a pilot as part of her midlife pivot, um, and has written a lovely piece for us about it, which is on noon. So we love ni Hello Antonella. Nice to see you. Um, and Joe and Debs. Hello everybody. So what we’re gonna do, oh, ni, sunny London.
I know it’s been really hot today, so I’m going to, um, so while Moon Riding Rising, I’ve really, um, I really loved this book. I thought it was a really, um, a kind of wonderful read and also such a brilliant exemplar of what we talk about at noon, about, um, not being done yet, about the kind of best being yet to come.
And lots of our ladies also talk about how six their sixties they think are their, their best decade. So it definitely talks to that. Hi Leah. Hello Fiona. Um, and. I, I just really, I really like the kind of optimism of it. I like the friendship between, um, the younger woman and the older woman. Um, and I really love the, the kind of [00:03:00] metaphor of kind of gardening and tending the garden, kind of becoming a metaphor for kind of tending to herself.
I just, I really liked it. Um, and it’s also, we should say it’s part of, um, a, I dunno how she pronounce it. Aan AAN books. AAN books, which is a new imprint, um, done by my friend, um, Jean Sarong, who some, some of you will have, some of you will have met because we did a big. Um, at her, uh, exhibition at the Atch Gallery and we did a new trip down there.
We took lots of people down, which was really fun. Um, and Jenny is her, I think you are her first publication are, aren’t you? After, um, the, uh, calling Una Martin, which
[00:03:42] Jenny Knight: There was, yeah, there’s calling Una Martin and then Charlotte ISS Overspill, which came out in April. Yes, I heard that one. Which is the much younger, a kind of 20 something and Yeah.
Than me.
Yeah, so you are the third, you are only the third book from the New Imprint. So it’s a new imprint from Harper [00:04:00] Collins, which is dedicated to voices that don’t always get heard. Um, so Jenny, um, is, is is a prize-winning writer of short stories, fiction and memoir, um, and is a contributor to Kit Celebrate collection, common people and anthology of working class writers.
So we do bio, um, and Jenny, you’ve taught creative writing in prisons. Um, worked with storytellers and actors for the UN and comic relief in Somalia and Kenya. Chaired and spoken on panels, have workshops about writing, rejection and resilience as a degree in English, literature and drama. Studied creative writing at U-U-A-U-E-A, which is incredibly prestigious.
Um, and then it says you’ve also worked on farms in pubs, factories as a roadie, a short term temp in the eighties music industry in London, and renovated a former pigsty. So I think we can have quite a varied conversation today. One of the things that we’ve been talking about this week is, um, how you sing the song of yourself in midlife.
How you kind of boil down all those things that you’ve [00:05:00] done and to kind of create a kind of coherent narrative about who you are. Um, and I can see that that might be, that might be a tricky one for you. Well, not now. ’cause you’re, you’re a published author. Um, so. Welcome, Jenny. Welcome to Nin. Um, it’s really lovely to have you here.
Really lovely to be here. Thank you. So do you wanna, um, we usually kick off with a little kind of reading from the book. Do you wanna, do you wanna kick us off? Yeah. So
[00:05:22] Jenny Knight: I’ll do a little reading and I’m gonna start with the prologue. I’m not gonna read the whole prologue ’cause that’ll take a, a good few minutes.
But to set it into context, the character Claire is driving out into the countryside into, uh, to go and see a cottage that she’s rented that’s kind of in the middle of nowhere. So her marriage has ended, the family home has been sold. The the, the kids are, are kind of, are leaving. One has already gone, the other one’s going.
Um, so yeah, she, she’s, and she’s an artist. So she’s, she’s driving and it’s a hot day and she’s looking at the fields around her and the artist in her. Stirred the same way a child raises a [00:06:00] drowsy head to ask, are we there yet? The last time she lived in Suffolk, she was 18. More than old enough now to be that girl’s mother share little but a flash of familial resemblance.
Still, at least it made sense of that shock in town. About to apologize to the older woman, glaring at her as they narrowly avoided collision. The jolt of pure horror in understanding. She was about to, sorry, a mirror, but whatever. Here she was there yet
more trees than she remembered. Some sort of hedge attempting to salvage the field behind it. A lot of what she didn’t do. Gardens, plant stuff. Then shrubby stuff. Fieldy stuff. Garlands of those sticky green balls that drape like cobwebs everywhere. And which she re remembered, picking endlessly off her white ankle socks as a child.
And sew. Sew, quiet. She stood eyes [00:07:00] closed, listening to the gentle shush of summer. Tired leaves a rich scent. Drifted past. Unmistakably arose and she opened her eyes again. Scanning the few leggy blooms. A cabbage of deep red, black, sensual as velvet caught her eye and she dodged a thistle, her own height to stick her face into it, only to find what her grandmother would’ve called.
All mouth and no trousers. There was another, as she straightened taller smattered with white pink petals so thin. She thought of the diaphanous dresses of golden age film stars smiled at herself for that. She and her easel as dusted shutters. That gate had spent too long out of one another’s company.
What she wondered with another of those strange shivering thrills would come out of her in all this silence, this space after all these years. A little disappointing to find most of the rose, spindly and peppered to the core with Beatles. The whole thing clinging to a tree in such a way that if it too were a film star, this one would [00:08:00] be wrinkles, sagged, and trying to stop mascara clumping in the crinkles of its eyes.
She had a vision of a potential future. Her tanned smiling head carved brown curls, made blonde by sun, clothed paint, splattered by daring creations, perhaps a plaster on a finger even where she’d smacked it with a hammer putting up her new prize winning canvases. Lighting candles by the juiced apples and homegrown veg picking, preserving pickling even as she baked sugared and harvested her way through the autumn.
She’d see in her year here, contented, fulfilled alone. At last, at peace, her phone pinged her youngest son. My scabies is back. Can you get more cream please? Her estate agent, a polite reminder to send measurements of bedroom slope heights for Bayer as requested. And finally, Ben thought we agreed you to sort twice.
Estate agent. [00:09:00] The moon was already rising in the open blue as she walked back to her car. Faint as a faded photograph, but there nonetheless. She was curious to see how it would look out. Here. Night would start to come so much sooner. Now days start that little bit sharper. But best not think about winter here.
Now, in this last shout of summer, she just hoped that when she did finally sleep under tonight’s FD moon, she’d be spared the weird dreams of late, particularly the sex ones. She didn’t know any of the tall spikes of yellow or ground level blue stars as she walked back towards the house. But she did recognize Butler, both Rasputin and Rabbit of the plant world as she thought of it, breeding as it would in the sort of a train station wall.
In spite of the lack of light, she’d always admired it for that alone. Actually, the last thing she did before she opened the gate was reach out and touch one heavy bloom bend to see if it’s delicate. Bud of smell, a little like opening a jar of raw honey might still be in there, [00:10:00] and it was for all its cones of pink and purple were as summer spent now as the dying end of a bonfire night.
Sparkler.
Lovely. Thank you. I think that gives us a really good sense of that, kind of that sense of coming home, but also moving into a kind of strange new chapter. I. Mm.
[00:10:21] Jenny Knight: She’s very much doing that and I think, I think it’s very much a part of midlife, to be honest with you. I think that when I fir, it’s interesting when I first wrote the book and, and it went through various iterations, but my title for it before it went to a publisher was 400 full moons.
[00:10:37] Jenny Knight: I wanted to call it that because if you take, when you averagely start your period at some point in your early teens, and when you stop them, at some point in your early fifties, you will have seen 404 moons. Wow. And it felt very much to me, like a, a kind of a complete sort of circle almost. Because there’s so much about that part of midlife that is about coming home to yourself, [00:11:00] isn’t it?
Yeah. There’s so much about the part of you that’s reconciling almost like you, you, you change very much when you, you start that journey. And I wanted to explore the journey of maiden motherhood. I’m not gonna say chrome because we don’t like that word. I’m gonna say wise woman, because we do like that word.
Um, so yeah, it, it felt very much like I wanted her to go home kind of metaphorically, but also, you know, literally, because I think you are drawn in the second half of your life, you’re quite often drawn. I’ve noticed that with various friends of mine. They, they tend to go back to where they came from.
Have you done that?
[00:11:40] Jenny Knight: Yeah, to a point I have. Yeah, it’s interesting and so have so many of the people and we couldn’t wait to get out of, um, the middle of nowhere, you know, when, when we were growing up. And yet that that’s what we’ve all come back to in one way or another. And certainly my female friends have expressed, uh, certainly [00:12:00] in their fifties and and sixties have expressed much more interest.
If they can’t metaphorically go home, then a lot of that interest in gardening I think is, is that need to earth to kind of come?
No, I think, I think, I think that’s really true. Um, this just put in the chat that CR comes from Crown. So actually in a way it’s kind of linked to, it’s kind of linked to wise women, isn’t it?
And it’s also linked to our, our, what we talk about here at noon as queen ages, um, which we, which I like in terms of kind like kind of coming into our power, um, at this point. Chron ages system, chron ages.
[00:12:36] Jenny Knight: I like that more. I think it’s the connotations that go with it.
Yeah, exactly. Like you said,
[00:12:41] Jenny Knight: I researched that word the same, and I, I realize it came from, from Crown and certainly it used to be a good thing back in the days when we were still kind of, you know, into the whole matriarchal society and it wasn’t a negative thing.
But now, I mean, I, you know, one of the reasons I wanted to write this was I pure [00:13:00] rage really in one way. Mm-hmm. How dismissed you get to kind of 50 and, and at the time I started writing it, there were women being laid off, left, right, and center that, you know, there were women disappearing from, from the public eye.
Yeah. Simply because they looked older.
Yeah. You know,
and that was one of the things that my sort of sheer sense of rage, I mean a percentage of, I think it’s something like 84% of roles in Hollywood still go to men over 50, 84%. And you’re like, well. Where are we? You know, come on, we’re, we’re over half the world’s population and certainly when it comes to book buying, we are the biggest buyers of books, women of, of this age.
And where are we and why are our stories not represented? So it like,
[00:13:47] Eleanor Mills: I know you are, you are preaching to the converted here we are not only the biggest buyers of books, we’re the biggest buyers of everything where the kind we’re behind 75% of all discretionary spending and also women over 50 make up a quarter of [00:14:00] the population.
And yet we are not, we are not kind of, um, we don’t appear. I mean, it’s something that I’ve been particularly interested in as a, as a journalist and also as a chair of women in journalism for a long time. ’cause I was interested in the kind of the male lens, which stops seeing and therefore doesn’t, you know, doesn’t want us there.
Um, I wrote, written about that a lot in my book about, um. What it was like actually being inside, you know, inside the Sunday Times and going up to the, to the editor with a, um, there’s a picture of, no, there aren’t too many, was on school, so I can be on as well. It was a picture of Charlotte Rampling who I’d had shot in Paris in black and white.
Um, and I remember taking the cover up to the editor and saying, here we go. We’ve got Charlotte Rampling for the weekend. He was like, oh no, I don’t wanna see her looking like that. I wanna see her looking like hot. Like she was in the night port when she, I had her on my wall when I, when I was like 21 or whatever.
And I was like, yeah, but Martin, she’s, she, the whole point is that she’s 70. We can’t put a picture of her from like, you know, 50 years ago on the, on the cover [00:15:00] of the magazine. Everyone’s gonna be like, what on earth are we doing? You know, the whole point is that we’ve had her shot and it’s iconic in her now.
And I had such a huge fight with him about it. I, I just about won, but I, um. I, I kind of always remembered that and, and just this always this sense, um, in newspapers that women were there to, as my old picture editor, she used to put it, brighten up the page, girl, oh God. Put on page darling. That meant putting a picture of a pretty girl.
[00:15:25] Jenny Knight: And it’s the same, I think even now, if you say to people, oh, you know, you don’t see older women, they go, you do, you see Judy Densch, you see Helen Mirren. You’re like, name me one more.
[00:15:32] Eleanor Mills: Yeah, yeah, exactly. There’s about three. Yeah. All um, other ones that you see are, um, oh, and Miriam Margo, she’s allowed because she’s funny and rude.
Yeah. Yeah. Um, and then everyone else who you are allowed to see is kind of 50 or 60, but looks 25 as the kind of Carol Carol order. Yeah. Joe Brown’s another one, but she’s funny. So she kind of gets away with it.
[00:15:49] Jenny Knight: Yeah. You’re allowed to be funny that that’s acceptable. ’cause you make people laugh, so you Yeah.
[00:15:53] Eleanor Mills: Or you can be Sandi Toksvig, but it, but otherwise you’ve got to be kind of Claudia Winkleman or, [00:16:00] um. Or kind of Fern Britton, or all those women who don’t, who are, might be the same age as us, but certainly don’t look at
[00:16:05] Jenny Knight: Absolutely. And that was another thing. That’s another thing. It’s a point I make in the book.
I hate that toxic narrative of, you know, I mean, I’ve been that age. I don’t need to particularly be that age again. And I certainly don’t want to feel some pressure to look at why would I do that? Why, why what is so wrong? You know, with, and I think it is kind of summed up with, if a man writes a book about, and Geoff Dyer very famously did this.
He wrote a book about, um, a midlife crisis effectively, and which he kind of goes off the rails and that’s great. That’s a work of literary fiction. But if a woman in her 50s writes a book about a midlife crisis, it’s domestic. But it’s this whole kind of narrative of how it, you’ve got to be, you know, you’ve got to be up there competing with a 30.
I don’t wanna bloody compete with a 30-year-old. I’ve got experience, I’ve got value. I, you know, that’s one of the things that, and in fact, the thing that actually really started me [00:17:00] off with this, I can remember watching Fleabag. I loved Fleabag. Yeah. Completely adored it. I thought it was fantastic. But when Kristin Scott Thomas came on Fleabag and did her speech involuntarily, I saw my arm doing this punch and I was like, yes.
Because that speech I felt seen.
[00:17:18] Eleanor Mills: Yeah. For the first time. Exactly.
[00:17:20] Jenny Knight: Yeah. And when I kind of looked at that, I was like, why am I not, I’m hearing all these different women telling me these things. I’m watching them change their lives. I’m watching them, you know, discover parts of themselves and rediscover new chapters of life.
And I’m not seeing it represented. I’ve just seen one tiny, I Googled that speech. It is the most Googled speech of anything on Fleabag.
[00:17:42] Eleanor Mills: Yeah.
[00:17:43] Jenny Knight: And it’s this much of two series. Yeah. And that made me go right, there’s a market. There’s a market. Because I’m not the only one looking this up. Yeah. I’m not the only one feeling this need to, and, uh, something in me, just like I say, partly rage and partly the the need to go, [00:18:00] can’t you just shut up with this?
bollocks of, yeah. I need to not be able to move my forehead. I need to be, you know, working. I need to, I don’t want to try and look like I did 20 years ago. It’s a different part of my life.
[00:18:14] Eleanor Mills: Yeah. And I think that’s the problem is that it’s the kind of lack of value which is put on us. Well, I mean, I, I mean, I write about it a lot because I think it’s the, it’s the kind of, it’s the male lens, isn’t it?
It’s kind of patriarchy values, um, women for being kind of young and fanciable and second, and when we’re not, then they’re not entrusted at us at all. And so for me, it’s the kind of clearest exemplar that we’re still, you know, living in that paradigm. Um, I wrote in my newsletter last week, I went to the House of Commons last week for a big new thing, which has been launched by Lynn Franks called What Women Want.
Hmm. The really depressing thing. One of their co-sponsors is Good Housekeeping. And they’d done a, um, a thing of, of all their, um, you know, all their readers or they said they’d done this huge survey and uh, they came back saying, yeah, [00:19:00] the thing that all women really want, according to their survey, you know, wasn’t World Peace or the End of Violence against Women, it was to be half a stone lighter.
Yeah. And I stood up in the comments and I said, you know, this is like (a) I don’t believe it’s true. And (b) think it’s like massively depressing that women are still evaluating themselves through that paradigm. I mean, that’s the kind of internalized misogyny that we got from having been fed all that crap for, for kind of, for so long.
[00:19:26] Jennifer Howze: I think it’s really, sorry, I just had to jump in there Els because you and I have talked about this, it makes me wonder if that was a multiple choice question.
[00:19:34] Eleanor Mills: Yes. I dunno. I dunno if it would, I mean, I, I, I also think it was a, it was a, um, it was a question asked by a glossy magazine. And glossy magazines are basically there to sell women expensive kind of makeup and, uh, perfume that they don’t need.
It’s that kind of old thing about, you know, why, why do, why do women need a, uh, makeup and perfume? Because they’re ugly and they smell, you know, that was, that was the. And it’s, and it’s also ’cause it’s the, [00:20:00] it’s the products with the highest margins of any other, you know, anything within the whole kind of retail sector.
So I think it’s really important to remember that there’s a kind of military, industrial, complex arms race, um, involved in women feeling bad about themselves and buying very overpriced products. You know,
[00:20:16] Jenny Knight: I also think it is the same thing. I think you are, you are kind of, you know, as women we, we, we are kind of damned when we are fertile because you are judged like health to, for being a young woman on how attractive you are on, on how you view sex on your, the way you use your sexuality, all of that.
We are damned as hell for being fertile and then we’re damned all over again when we’re not fertile because we are not, you know, considered beautiful enough or young enough or whatever enough
or valuable enough within that lens, which only values you for the things that men value. So I think that that’s the important thing, that it’s, that that’s only one way of valuing women.
And a lot of what we’re trying to do in NOON is to try and change that, try and change that inside ourselves as well, because I think that that’s, uh. We’ve been told that so often that that’s the [00:21:00] matrix through which we should value and see ourselves that it’s quite hard to kind of unpick it. I mean, I had such a front row seat, um, in journalism for so long, could kind of see that matrix being created all around me.
You know, the bingo wings, the, the kankles, you know, all that crap. And, and, and how women were kind of taught to see those things in themselves and criticize them in others, you know, because that was kind of what was helpful to society. And I only think that we change things when we begin to point that out.
And one of the things I think’s interesting about what we’re doing here is. How much younger women respond to the idea that actually being in your fifties, sixties and seventies is quite good fun. You know, it’s when it kind of gets interesting. You’ve got quite a lot of power, you have more confidence, you kind of can step into your, you step into your kind of prime, into your power and that’s not something that’s talked about in the culture really at all.
So I think it’s some another reason why books like yours are are, are so important. So will you tell us a bit about the kind of, um, how you came to write this [00:22:00] in about Claire, your heroine and how you got the idea?
Wow. Yeah, I mean, like I say, the, the, the, there was a massive spark with the Kristin Scott Thomas thing, and I, I can remember watching Fleabag and thinking, this is really interesting, you know?
And it is fascinating because you should not like that character really. You know, she’s flawed, she’s done terrible things. And, uh, and of course we loved her and we rooted for her, but I couldn’t stop thinking like, you know, where will she be in 10 or 20 years time? Because that was the point in my life I was at, and I was starting to listen.
Eric, so much of what I write is sparked by conversations and what’s going on around me. And I was listening to all of these stories, living my own story, and it was more and more and more I was thinking, why, why am I not seeing this? Why are the people that I’m seeing at this age, why are they the olive ridges?
They’re difficult, or they’re killing their husbands, or they’re. They’re not just like normal women just living their lives going, which we all were doing, going, okay, well, I’ve played all these roles for all these years. I’ve, I’ve kind of done motherhood, I’ve done [00:23:00] this. I’ve been a wife, I’ve done, and where am I?
Who am I? What do I actually want? Yeah, okay. It’d be great to lose half a stone, but actually that’s not gonna make my life complete. And what I want is No,
[00:23:10] Eleanor Mills: I mean, it’s not gonna change anything. I mean, it’s so pathetic in the kind of,
[00:23:13] Jenny Knight: My clothes will fit more nicely or something, you know, maybe my bum is smaller, but actually, where does that leave me?
Four in the morning when I’m lying in bed going, how do I want the rest of my life to look? What shape do I want my life to be?
[00:23:27] Eleanor Mills: Yeah. What is, what’s my purpose in being here? You know what’s, yeah.
[00:23:29] Jenny Knight: Yeah. What, where, who am I? What am I now? I’ve been these things. I’ve been those things, but now I’m not that.
And when you’ve hit menopause, I think one of the biggest things about it, and I think there’s such a lot written about perimenopause and rightly so, but there’s a huge change when actually all of that stops and you have no hormones governing you anymore. Yeah. You can completely trust your own brain for the first time, probably in, I don’t know, 40, 50 years.
You are not, I love that idea. Yes. No, you’re not governed by cyclical. And I, that was part of the [00:24:00] demise of my marriage was when, when I realized when I’d kind of, it all finally stopped, I thought, oh, it’s not just me. I’m not the only person who makes these rows happen or upsets people in the house.
Actually, they are responsible for this as well, because I’m completely on a level and it’s still happening. So it can’t just be my cycle, my moods, my mm-hmm. So you learn to trust yourself in a very different way, and there’s a different space in your life and a certain element of liberation. Yeah. For the first time in many, many, many years, you can ask yourself the question of what do I want?
What do I want? Not, what do these people want? How do I fit around these requirements and this care of giving? And you may only get a window of. Space in between elderly parents or the needs of of kids or whatever. But suddenly you are in a place where you’re not having to think about other people’s lives.
Here. You can actually just think about your own. And I really, really wanted to explore how that is.
[00:24:58] Eleanor Mills: No, I think, I think that that’s so [00:25:00] important, Jenny, isn’t it? And I think that also for so many of us, we haven’t really been encouraged to ask ourselves what we want. Um. It was one of the things that really struck me when I, you know, when I, I got tipped out of the Sunday Times and kind of started on a new path that when I really began to ask myself that question, it was like, my brain tried to shut it down so damn quick.
It’s like, well, don’t be ridiculous. Of course you can’t ask yourself what you want. You know, who cares what you want. There are all these things that you got to do for everybody else. And so it’s almost feels like a kind of question, which is, um, like, like verbatim, you know, kind of like what kind? Don’t be ridiculous.
Of course, you can’t ask yourself what you want. And I do think that that’s, that’s a kind of radical act for women. And there’s a really interesting, um, a question on the chat from, um, za about, um, whether we think that they’re are, she says a question, Virgin and Ellen, do you think we go through different ages of wisdom?
[00:25:53] Jenny Knight: Hmm.
[00:25:53] Eleanor Mills: Um, and I think that that’s kind of related. ’cause I think that the end of the hormone fog. Kind [00:26:00] of clears a bit and we’re suddenly like, hang on a sec, when’s it my turn? And we see that in the research that we did, um, with noon, that, that, that’s the question that people are beginning to ask themselves.
It’s like, hang on, when, when, when do I get a go? And when does it finally become about me and what I, what I want? And actually that it’s not selfish to do that. Um, because see, Katrina’s put on this, you know, and the freedom. And I think that there is a freedom in finally being able to say, well, actually what would I, what would I like to do?
But I think it’s also quite, um, I think it’s also quite, can be quite disorientating, um, because we haven’t, I. Yeah, exactly. Jacqueline, she said abrasive fact that you can say what you think. Feel it’s only taken most of us nearly half a century to say our piece authentically. I think that’s true because I think that women are so often squished into the shapes.
That’s how I talk about it in my book, that that suit other people and we, and we fit ourselves into those shapes because it gets us, um, you know, affection or belonging or connection or all the things [00:27:00] that we’ve been told that we’re supposed to want, like, you know, and, and, and so I think that it takes, I think it takes a long time to slough that off and finally ask yourself or dare to ask yourself the question, you know, what do I want?
What can I be? And I think the difference for us as a generation is that we can finally. Ask that. And we’ve got a bit of time. We’ve got the kind of, um, the longevity dividend of thinking actually at 50. We might only be halfway through, um, an actuary in the mean circle in London last month, uh, said, actually sat there and said, she said, you know, if you’re a 63-year-old woman, you’ll pretty likely to literally, or 97, you know, that’s the chart thing they have on their charts.
So if that’s the case, it this, this, this act of asking oneself at 50 or at 60, what do I want? What could I be? It, it is actually a real question ’cause you’ve got some time to, to become that. And that’s what I really loved about your books. I think it’s a great book about becoming, um, at, at [00:28:00] 50. So, so tell us a bit about kind of Claire and her artistic ambitions and to what extent does, does that mirror maybe your own experience or those of other women that you know?
[00:28:11] Jenny Knight: Yeah, I wanted her to be an artist because I think, um, and I think this ties in as well to gardening, you know, famously, and it’s happened with so many women. I know, I mean, I got into gardening younger, but so many women I know who hated gardening got into gardening in, in midlife. And I think there’s, there’s something to be said for this need to creatively express.
I mean, you in what you were just saying just now, you know, I mean, I think we also carry an enormous amount of emotional baggage, women, because we take the emotional burden for a family. So we learn very much to kind of pick our battles and there is hard, bloody work, all of that emotional stuff, quite honestly.
Um. And I think when you get to this point and you, you, you need something, I think to, to, to nurture. Which, which I don’t mean you need to care for people because my God, we’ve done [00:29:00] enough of that. But I think what happens is that with something like gardening or art and creativity, you are giving something out, putting something out, and it’s giving something back.
And those, those things in life are quite rare. I mean, you go to work, you get paid, you do that for money. And one of the things with Claire and that mirrors my own life is for years and years and years and years, I did writing work I did for money. I still do. I do editorial work and copywriting I don’t particularly love, but I need the money that it brings.
My creative stuff is the stuff that brings me joy. And when I think about the conversations I had more than they want to lose half a stone. What most midlife women seem to want as far as I can make out is peace and joy. Yeah, a sense of joy and a sense of peace and a sense of wholeness, of being able to be authentically, completely wholly who we are.
[00:29:56] Jenny Knight: Yeah. Without kind of all these caveats and everything. So I wanted Claire to, to [00:30:00] express herself artistically and to have sat on something that, that she almost didn’t dare to do, couldn’t financially afford to do. And I think, you know, again, it’s that thing, isn’t it? There are, so, there are so many more years behind you.
Even if, you know, we, we’ve still got a good few years ahead of us, that sense of time and we don’t know if those years are gonna be healthy, good years.
No, exactly.
[00:30:23] Jenny Knight: That’s, there’s definitely a drumbeat of, if not now, when
[00:30:25] Jenny Knight: very much so. And you, you know, the older you get, the more that happens around you and the more it happens to you and and to people that you love.
And so there becomes this pressing sense of, if not now, when you know, I need to find that this is for me and I want to do, and quite often we go back to something that we love doing at 18.
[00:30:44] Jenny Knight: yeah. Yeah. You know, I’ve heard people go, I haven’t played the piano since I was a teenager and I’ve taken it up again, or I haven’t, or becoming a pilot, you know, fulfilling these dreams, making that change, marking that.
I wanted to explore that with Claire. I wanted it, and I wanted it to [00:31:00] be art, I think because I, I certainly didn’t want it to be anything to do with words, and I didn’t want it to be something huge and dramatic. I wanted it to be something accessible, because the other thing in midlife, I mean, my marriage ended like Claire’s, it, it, my marriage ended.
I’m so suddenly you’re going, right, well, I have to think about money. I have to think about money. You know, I’m, I’m not, and I don’t know whether my parents are gonna need care for years. So I don’t, you know, all of these things come into it. And so I wanted it to be something that you could affordably do.
[00:31:33] Jenny Knight: Yes. Um, do you know what I mean? Sort of accessible to anybody. It could have been. You know, playing an instrument, it could have been challenging yourself to, to go and do a walk around the late district, whatever. I’ve got a friend who goes off now and does tough mothers.
Yeah. And
[00:31:47] | Eleanor Mills: this sort of stuff, you know, so
I’ve got several friends who are kind of walking the coast path, not just because of the Salt Path or kind of have started doing kind of pilgrimage walks or it’s a kind of per, I think it’s some kind of sense of a [00:32:00] personal quest, isn’t it?
I, I do, I do silent retreats. I mean, what, you know, whatever, whatever place you’re pay, you know? Yeah.
[00:32:07] Jenny Knight: I mean, I used to teach yoga, and it’s astonishing how many people used to come to yoga because they, they, they want to try and find this new way of, of finding this, this thing inside. It becomes about the inside, I think for half your life, certainly, uh, as women in careers and families and whatever, you know, it, it’s about the externals.
It’s about what’s around you and who’s around you. And at this point it becomes very much more an inward thing and how you find something. I’m reading a book at the moment about a woman who dealt with grief and all the stuff that went on for her midlife by, um, you know, sea swimming, cold water, deep water, sea swimming.
Again, that’s not something that you can afford to do if you live near the coast. But yeah, I certainly, and
I think, I think what’s interesting what we see though, is that. Kind of what, wherever you are and whatever you are, whatever you have been doing, and it’s not [00:33:00] just kind of, you know, rich middle class ones, which are, you know, certainly where you have a few more choices.
But I was really struck when I was in Devon I was talking to, um. I was talking to a lady who was actually kind of, she’d come to do some cleaning with the Airbnb we were at and she was talking about how she’d left her job at the council. She’d absolutely had enough of it and she’d taken up crocheting, which she laughed and she cleaned, did a bit of cleaning of, um, some Airbnbs to make a bit more cash.
And she spent more, more time with her grandchildren. And she was saying, I don’t, um, you know, I don’t have as much money as I did, but I just got to a point where I had to do what I wanted to do. And I was sick of sick of not doing that. And that was really interesting to me that it wasn’t just ’cause I, ’cause I thought, oh gosh, is this sort like a kind of posh women’s prerogative?
And she was saying no, or, you know, that all her friends had pivoted so that they could spend more of their time. Doing what it was that they loved in whatever small way. Whether that was spending more time with their dogs and kind of walking on the beach ’cause we were near the beach, or, you know what, whatever it was, it was a, [00:34:00] it was a really definite shift of, no, hang on, I wanna do something for me.
And we really see that so clearly in the no research that after their health and having enough money to live the fir, the most important thing to, to women at this point was having time for myself and my own interests. Yeah, it’s really interesting. I mean, and that is a switch. I don’t think you get that.
Um, or maybe, I mean, to go back to Correa’s question about the kind of ages of wisdom mm-hmm. What I see in the different gener in different generations. So I’ve got a daughter who’s 23, who’s just spent the last year in Paris and she has spent the entire year going to different galleries and incredibly like, um, you know, go way over my head, kind of art movies and kind of, you know, hanging out in like extremely trendy bookshops.
And she’s basically been completely honing her kind of critical faculties, her kind of sense of who she is and what she likes. And, and I love that. ’cause I don’t think, when I was her age, I had. I had that, you know, I was quite confident, but I didn’t have that confidence. [00:35:00] I didn’t have that sense that I had the right to really kind of go off and finally hone who I was.
My artistic judgment, you know? Yeah. I’ve always been a writer, but I didn’t feel that I could go and spend that time doing that. I was much too busy thinking, oh, I, you know, I need to get a flat, I need to get a job. I need to cut maybe. ’cause we came out into the recession of the kind of early nineties.
But it was a, it was just a different sense of what we were kind of entitled to take for ourselves of God. So, lorenza to your thing about ages of wisdom, I, I mean, I hope that that’s changing with the younger women, that they do feel more entitled to that kind of sense of self-expression when they’re younger.
[00:35:38] Jenny Knight: I think they do. And I think, I think it’s very, although sometimes I actually think it’s worse for them in some ways than it was. I mean, it’s a difficult juggling act because on the one hand, I can remember my sixth form tutor telling me not to bother applying to university. Wow. So I was, oh yeah, it was, I mean this working class kid and he was like, don’t kid yourself about who you can be.
And he [00:36:00] Wow. You. You, oh yeah. You are good at, I mean, this is 1986.
Yeah. So it’s not 1950.
[00:36:06] Jenny Knight: Yeah. It’s like you were good at writing. I mean, you know what you’re gonna do with that you journalism secretary until you have a baby. That was the kind of aspiration, was not encouraged, you know? And one of the reasons I wanted to get out so desperately, and the same with Claire is because I wanted to, I mean, we were the girls of Thatcher.
We were like. We can be anything we wanna be. We can be that VW advert woman chucking off her purse and her diamond ring and we can, and then in the nineties we were sold the lie that we could have kids and we could still have a career, and we could still, and it was all bollocks really, wasn’t it? I mean, all it meant was we didn’t have it all.
We just did it all. That that’s, that’s what it meant. And then, you know, there was a backlash to that. So I look at women now and I look at them not dating, not taking on boyfriends, not putting up with men’s crap. I mean, they phone up work now and go, I’m not coming in. I’ve got a bad period. And that’s [00:37:00] acceptable.
Yeah, I know. Whereas for us, we were just, it was just like, you couldn’t even have said it. Even if it was the reason why you were coming in. You had to say that you had flu or food poisoning. I mean, the only time I ever mentioned kind of women’s problems to any of my, uh, editors, they were, they would just be like so horrified.
They’d just be like, so you only did it if you really had to kind of late get
[00:37:22] Jenny Knight: them off your back. Really? Yeah. But
so I do, and I remember a very senior woman. I, um, I remember saying to a very senior boss of mine, um, oh, congratulations on appointing, um, a female CEO. And later on, the woman turning around to me and saying, never remind the boss that I am a woman.
Wow. So, yeah. So it wasn’t just like, you didn’t mention your kind of, you know, period problems. It was like, you, you would get on much better if you pretended to be a bloke. I mean, and that used to be said to you, said kind of quite openly, you know, the more you could behave like a man in that situation, the more likely you were to be [00:38:00] promoted, basically.
[00:38:01] Jenny Knight: Yeah, absolutely. I can remember a neighbor of mine who was editor for a while of Mother and Baby Magazine who cut her hair short, so she’d be more androgynous. And that was for Mother and Baby Magazine. Yeah, exactly. Phenomen, but wisdom. Yes. I think young women do have a certain level of more wisdom and I think in some ways they have us to learn from.
We had no roadmap.
[00:38:22] Jenny Knight: Yeah. You know, our mothers, I can remember my mom when she had a hysterectomy, and this would’ve been the early eighties, she still had to have my dad sign the form. Wow. You know, I mean, it’s only, it’s not that long ago that women still needed, they couldn’t get a mortgage on their own.
They couldn’t. Yeah. My mom, my, my parents split up in the mid seventies. My mom was a university lecturer at the time and she couldn’t get a mortgage on her own. She had to get her dad to, um, uh, to guarantee the mortgage ’cause she was a woman on her own and with three small children and she wasn’t allowed a, a mortgage in her own name.
[00:38:55] Eleanor Mills: Yeah. So I think they, they, in some ways they have us and we were the generation [00:39:00] that didn’t have a voice. Very, I mean, that’s again touched on in the book. You didn’t have a voice, you were not encouraged to have a voice. Women were certainly in the seventies and eighties meant to be a certain way. Yeah.
And men had every right to do whatever they wanted to grope you on a tube, they groped you on. I mean, we wore tube shoes in the eighties to step back onto their feet when they stuck their dick into your back, you know, so that you actually designed certain things and we were, you know, someone flashed at you, laugh it off, be flattered by it.
This is the kind of stuff that we, I, I remember, I remember being flashed at in outside my flat in common garden when I was about 23. And very kind of smart, a chap and a kind of smart. Overcoat kind of coming up to me. I thought he was gonna ask me the way, and him kind of exposing himself. And I was really scared because I was on my end.
I remember running back to my flat and ringing the police. ’cause I thought, well, you know, and actually there’s loads of research now that shows that people who flash go on to be a rapist. And it’s like a real, like CA continuum. And I remember ringing the police and them saying to me, oh, it’s, you know, oh, [00:40:00] it’s nothing, you know, don’t, you know, not even bothering to kind of report.
And I insisted and they came round to my flat and they sent two men. And I felt really kind of like, I I, that didn’t feel good.
[00:40:09] Jenny Knight: That didn’t feel good. Yeah. You feel like the one who said something wrong. You feel like in some way you’ve been, you know, kind of flimsy or something because it’s upset. Yeah.
It was like, oh, don’t be sympathetic. Why are you making such a fuss? But I think they are the girls now. I mean, I’ve got two sons and I see the impact on me. Katrina’s saying, the girls today get bit dick. Oh God. Yeah. Yeah, they do. I mean, they do. And not just the girls, the Queenagers too. I, I mean, we’ve heard quite a lot of stories in some of our circles of what some of the women get sent.
I mean, yeah. It’s like, that’s like a whole thing. These things kind of mutate, don’t they? They don’t go away. Yeah. So I think our daughter, Katrina
[00:40:45] Jenny Knight: says
it’s horrific.
[00:40:46] Jenny Knight: It’s horrific. And I think our daughters are lucky. They have us, you know, we are giving them more of a roadmap than our mothers could give us, and their mothers could give their, oh.
So I think it kind of goes on through the generations and. I think that’s one thing [00:41:00] I also wanted to explore in the book. And that’s again, again going back to the thing with, as I was saying to Jennifer before, the
Ella says she’d rather have a picture of a garden than a take,
[00:41:10] Jenny Knight: but we’d all rather have a picture with you.
Dunno is a fox club any day. I mean, the thing I never understand about men, I will never, never, never, in all the years I live, get my head around why they think that part of the anatomy is attractive. You know, it looks like a dead Turkey. I’ve seen nicer things at Christmas lounging around in my freezer than I’ve ever seen on a dick pic or a nude.
That isn’t, I think’s true. I think even if you’re quite fancy
a man and you might like him, I don’t you really want to see a picture of his penis. None of
[00:41:40] Jenny Knight: us do we, none of us do. I mean, you know themselves
on the, that’s really funny. Anyone who’s actually like really delighted to receive a dick pic, even from someone that they quite like, you know, I just don’t think it’s erotic.
[00:41:56] Eleanor Mills: It’s many things and sometimes it’s laugh out loud, but it is [00:42:00] absolutely not erotic in any, I mean a forearm. Lovely. Yeah. Something like shoulders, but that’s really funny. No, I, I’ve just, I’ve gotta say, I went to, I went to interview Joe Wood yesterday, who’s just written a book, which is a bit of a kind of fair, queen age of fairy tale about leaving her marriage.
Funnily enough, it’s about a 52-year-old whose husband runs off with a 19-year-old. Sounds a bit like Ronnie Wood, so it’s real, like thin, thinly describes autobiography, but does have some hilarious anecdotes about dating in your kind of fifties and sixties. She has one boyfriend who’s got a prosthetic leg who takes it off and crawls to the sea, and then she’s really funny, but she doesn’t tend see him anymore.
And another one who is a kind of porn son has a kind of permanent erection, which she can’t also can’t get her head around. Um, she’s, she was very honest about it. When I talked to her, she was like, yeah, they’re all kind of real stories either from her life or, or her friends who, that she’s kind of, um, that she, I mean that one I thought it was quite funny that.
At least, you know, this is [00:43:00] beginning to be talked about. There’s another book coming out, this Sweet team, Fiona Lambert, who’s, uh, another one of our, um, of our queen ages. She’s a mate and she’s got a big book out coming out about dating in your kind of sixties. So I, I really like the fact that this is beginning to be talked about, because I think, you know, even when I set up noon like four years ago, people wouldn’t, you know, it was, it was, there weren’t books around about, you know, women shagging in their sixties.
I mean, they just, they just weren’t, I don’t think Joe Wood’s book is a, is a brilliant book. I mean, your book’s beautifully written, which is like a, puts it in a whole different zone. But I do think it’s interesting that we’re beginning to get more stories about this more stuff, you know, on the tv. I mean Okay.
Most, it’s mostly Nicole Kidman who definitely falls into one of the categories we were talking about earlier. But I do think that there’s a, there’s a sense that. When the, the kind of interior lives of women at this point and their sex lives and, you know, the, just, just the focus on their lives is beginning to come back.
And I hope that’s because, you know, I, I hope that’s partly ’cause of some of the things that we’ve been doing. And [00:44:00] also because we are such a huge, um, financially lucrative demographic. I mean, that’s what seems really crazy that they, they won’t do, um, Katrina, the book is called The Resurrection of Flow, um, and it’s all about a woman who gets divorced in her fifties and then kind of, um, who’s an actress who kind of, you know, then goes around shaking lots of younger men and taking coke and running to go to a beater and taking ketamine and stuff.
It’s, it’s quite racy, you know, though, I read. Yeah, it’s a, it’s an interesting, it’s just an interesting perspective. She’s 70 now as well, so she’s a bit older than us.
[00:44:36] Jenny Knight: I mean, I read, I was talking to Jennifer before the thing started saying that. Then in some ways my book’s been quite, and a couple of my friends, well, in terms, certainly in terms of the sex thing, I mean, some people don’t like the structure.
They don’t like the way, you know. But the sex thing, and I’ve noticed this, I went to Women’s Prize Live a couple of weeks ago, and the conversations, I’ve never had so many conversations about a [00:45:00] book as divisive as all fours by Miranda July. Yes,
I have read. Yeah, I’ve read that. Yeah.
[00:45:04] Jenny Knight: Which very famously, when it came out Christmas time, lots of women went running off and tried to shag younger men and.
We now know that there’s an enormous market in kind of, you know, midlife, women’s sex toys, lubes, you know, these are all things that are starting to become much, much, much more mainstream.
Yeah.
[00:45:20] Eleanor Mills: None of this was happening when I was writing this book, you know, three years ago. No, I agree. It’s, it’s really new.
When we first set up, we had a session where we had some Italian sex therapists come and talk to us who were creating a vibrator for kind of older women. Um, and we had a very, we had a very quite extraordinary evening where certainly, I mean, I’m jealous. I’ve heard a lot. I had, there was a lot of things that were definitely new to me on that.
But I do think that there’s been a shift even in the last kind of couple of years on, you know, on this. And it’s interesting that you say that since you wrote the book. So what kind of reactions have you had had from it?
[00:45:52] Jenny Knight: Oh, I was saying, uh, to Jennifer and to, um, uh, Women’s Prize, which kind of made people laugh, but, well, I gave an early [00:46:00] copy to two really good friends of mine who’d read.
I wrote a memoir some years ago that, that should have been published, but wasn’t, um, well maybe it got published now, now.
[00:46:08] Jenny Knight: They loved it. They loved that. They loved it. Yeah. Very, very, very different to this. And I love them dearly. And they were very honest, but I was kind of like, you know, gave them a proof copy.
And when I went to see them, there was just silence. Well, horrified silence.
Yeah.
[00:46:24] Jenny Knight: Just this doesn’t bode well. And I was kinda like, how did you get on with it? And one looked at the other one and she went, oh, there’s a lot of sex in it, Jenny. There’s a lot of sex in it, isn’t there? We don’t really do that, do we?
We, we just want a nice cup of tea and the dog. That’s what we do. I just don’t think that’s true.
[00:46:39] Jenny Knight: We don’t want all this sex. We don’t Who, who are these women? Who would? And I was like, um, oh God, maybe I’ve written something and there are gonna be all these women out there going, well, I don’t, honestly to God.
I don’t know. You know? And I have found that there are, and it’s surprising. Some people that I’ve thought will love it haven’t, and some people [00:47:00] have been like, I love that. And I love the way you talk about desire, and I love the way that you, because we are not dead yet. No. You know, very far from it changes, but it also changes for men.
You know, I mean, there’s that famous quote, is it Bette Midler, who’s like, you know, if I’ve got a problem, you know, and, and all the rest of it, then, then what are you with your limp dick and your Viagra? You know, like, how dare you judge me when you know you get a problem? Well, it’s also great for you either.
But, but I also think that that does, I think that also does us a disservice. I was having a conversation with some, some really good friends the other day, and we were all saying that we thought that we are having much better sex in our, in our fifties, in our mid fifties than we have done before. Um, and it was kind of, we, we, we know each other quite well.
So it was kind of really quite an honest conversation. And I, I think that that’s really true. I think there’s a sense of knowing yourself better, knowing what you want better, being less self-conscious. Um, you know, if you’ve been with your partner for a long time, they, you know, you know, you kind of really know what’s [00:48:00] going on and there’s like a different kind of level of trust.
And I think that there’s, I think it does a disservice. To all women to imply that you have to kind of look like a porn star to be enjoying sex. I actually almost think it’s the opposite, that the more you are seeing yourself through a kind of a lens from the outside of, what’s this supposed to look like?
What am I supposed to look like? Rather than, how is this supposed to feel and how does it feel? Kind of, you know, for me and being in the moment, I think that those two things are really, really opposite. I, I wrote a lot about, um, pornography, um, before I, uh, you know, before I set up noon. It’s one of the things I wrote about lots of columnists.
Um, and one of the things that I was really struck by then was younger women talking about it was all about what it looked like. I was talking to a psychologist on the South coast who talked to a lot of younger women, and they were saying they, you know, they’d, that they’d step with a lot of men. They had never had an orgasm because the women were.
Entirely. The younger women were turn entirely obsessed by what it was supposed to look like, how [00:49:00] they were supposed to look like a porn style, how they, what they were supposed to be performing in a way that I think it wasn’t for us because we had no idea what it was supposed to look like. And also most, most men, when you were like, you know, kind of 80, what we had got into bed with them in the eighties, we had no idea what we were supposed to look, what it was supposed to look like, or you know, whether it was meant to be porn or whatever.
And most, most women were pretty, just pretty happy to have a real life girl kind of in their bed. You know, you didn’t feel like you were being compared to things and the way that they do now. Whereas I think that there’s now a huge ’cause of the kind of I ramification and the kind of filming of things.
And also because a whole generation of young men have been bred on internet porn. I think it’s a very different kind of. I think it’s a very different kind of game. And so in some, I think we’re quite lucky to be in our generation in that, on that
[00:49:46] Jenny Knight: we do. And I think we, we can own our sexuality in a different way.
And that was something that was very, very important to me to explore because it has always fascinated me this dichotomy between how, uh, a man can [00:50:00] have a very strong sex urge or sleep with people and all the rest of it. And it’s celebrated. It’s almost a badge of honor. And yet, and it still happens now, there are still these girls now that are going, you know, oh, am I a freak?
Am I, oh, it feels a bit slutty. Oh, I feel a bit, because you’ve got a healthy sex design. I mean, we are, we are women, we are governed by reproductive cycles. And you know, it’s that thing of for, for half your, your life, when you are a young woman, you, you are governed by, by what your body is telling you. And I can remember being young and ovulating and literally craving.
So like, oh, you know, I need to find myself. I’m gonna go and club one down, drag him back to my cave. If I’d been a man to acknowledged, that would’ve been absolutely fine. But I can remember having boyfriends who are like, you know, most women, most most women are, are, are kind of, don’t ever say that Jenny.
You know, you are kind of like a bloke who’s also like a woman, which felt like a very backhanded compliment. Yeah. And I would stand in bars when I worked in [00:51:00] bars and I, I could, if I had a pound for every married man who would, who would tell me how the wife doesn’t understand him and how the sex was boring because, you know, you know, it’s quite pedestrian and she’s not exciting enough.
And I thought, but if she is exciting, she’s a slut. Yeah. So make her mind up. What do you
So I, I wanted to, yeah, that’s a, that’s an, an kind of impossible double standard. But I, what I thought was interesting about Joe Woods book actually is there’s a total lack of any kind of. Um, kind of guilt or kind of, you know, any sense of that she thinks she’s behaving in a kind of sussy way.
The, that it’s, she’s very, and I think in your book too, it’s very kind of, it’s very free. And I also think that one of the things about kind of being older is you can damn well do what the hell you like and nobody needs to know about it. And I was really lucky in my early twenties because I lived on my own in a flat and Drew Lane in Calm Garden and nobody needed to know what I was getting up to.
And I always thought, you know, and that I felt quite free about that. It was like, [00:52:00] you know, that this is good. And I think that there’s this, there’s a sense as in, in midlife, if you are kind of, you know, you come out of relationship and you’re dating again, it’s like. You know, you can do what the hell you like and who’s to judge?
Who needs to know? Karen Derman was good on this too. She was like, yeah, I have like, you know, four or five different kind of people I’m involved with. Everyone knows what’s going on, and we behave in a kind of adult way. You know, why not? So I think that there’s a, maybe we finally get beyond that kind of, that sexual kind of double standard, partly because maybe the stakes are lower.
’cause you know, the patriarchy doesn’t kind of think we’re worth kind of worrying about, but we still have desires and we can do what the hell we like. Absolutely. And I think that’s important.
[00:52:38] Jenny Knight: And I think ownership and wanting, again, wanting the, the sweetness and the joys of life. I mean, I watched, um, what is it, goodbye Leo Grand or Farewell to Leo Grand, the Emma Thompson film.
I watched that. Writing this.
Writing. Yeah. Somebody, some, somebody’s mentioned that here, um, you’ve got Emma Thompson recommending sex workers as their friends who seem to be doing in their sixties. I was saying, I don’t think you necessarily need
[00:52:59] Eleanor Mills: No. Maybe wouldn’t go [00:53:00] that far, but I, I would say that you don’t necessarily need a partner to have a nice time on your own.
There are plenty of fun things out there for sure you can do. And it’s another, you know, another added layer and joy to life that I think is much more open now and we can be much more liberated and own that a lot more now.
Yeah, exactly. And, and, and in quite an un in, in a kind of a non shameful way.
Yeah. And I think, but again, that, that is, again, that is again, quite, quite recent. I mean, I think even kind of within our new community, a few years ago when I was like, who wants to come and talk about sex and kind of vibrators for queen ages, a few people were a bit like. Really, she’s really gonna do that.
But actually, but actually it was very, it was a very liberating conversation. So I do think that there’s a shift and on noon we try and be very, um, upfront about that. It’s a great piece on the site about going to kind of a swingers club, kind of, you know, in your, in your kind of fifties and sixties. And if indeed at one of our recent circles, there’s a whole load of conversation about going on some site I’d never heard of called Field, which is literally for [00:54:00] like, just, you know, quite transactional sex.
[00:54:04] Jennifer Howze: Also, yeah, go on. Yeah. Also just, we have recently updated with, um, new reporting, um, on, um. Sex toys for older women and lube with now that lube is no longer a four-letter word, it’s really fighting because I mean, everybody remembers back when it used to be something that was only really talked about in the gay community.
[00:54:26] Jenny Knight: Yeah. Oh my God. I can remember my mom. I mean, my parents always had this amazing sex life. I mean, they really did. And I absolutely love story. My parents, I’ve been together 60 years. Oh. And she was a nurse, so she was really open about everything. But I can remember me and my sister were like, oh, we found this thing and it was Ky Jelly, and it was this sort of very hush hush thing of, oh no, that that’s because of an infected mosquito bite or something.
All this different stuff that, that even my open mother, you know who, I mean, I went home once and said, mom, what does wanker mean? ’cause someone had written it on the bus and two and a [00:55:00] half hours later I emerged with pages of drawings. And you know, I was very determined to be this. He sounds great, you know.
So I think, and it’s one of the things that Tanzi the older character says in the book is, make no mistake, you know, we can quite often be harbinger of doom. And that’s one thing that I think our generation don’t want younger women to feel. We, we look at them, we see how hard it is for them. And so, look, there are these things that will come to you.
It’s not just that you’re going to, you’re gonna get a bit craggy and saggy. Yeah. That’s gonna happen. And maybe you’re gonna try and fight that. That’s, that’s your decision. But at the end of the day, it’s not gonna make you happy. What’s gonna make you happy is how you find your joy. Yeah. Your sense of purpose, your meaning, and the layers that go on top of that.
And fuck yeah, have some fun, have some nice orgasms, have some, you know, you’re not dead. You go, you know, you are dead for a very, very long time, but until that happens, you are not. Yeah,
yeah. And be, and I think there’s something very powerful about kind of, you know, being joyful [00:56:00] inside one sentient body while, while one has the chance, you know, whatever kind of, whatever form that, you know, whatever form that takes.
Um, and I think that there’s a, I I love, I love the return in your book to that, the kind of natural world, her sense of a return to the, to the seasons, to, um, her, the place of her roots. Um, and I, I think you’re right that there’s a sense of kind of grounding or those kind of early homes or just really literally the earth becoming, becoming, um, very important.
There are various places that I go back to kind of in the cots world where I grew, where I spent a lot of time as a child, and it, it literally moves me to tears walking down some of those paths or seeing some of those trees as just such a sense of a, kind of like a visceral connection to those places.
And I thought that you really got captured that beautifully in the kind of, um, in that sense of the Suffolk landscape and, and that return.
[00:56:59] Jenny Knight: I had that [00:57:00] conversation with June, who’s always been a city person and is now moving out to the countryside. Yeah.
She now lives in a commune, doesn’t she? Outside Oxford. She was telling me about it the other day. I now do this. I now go walking barefoot on the grass and I find this, and again, it’s peace. It’s a sense of peace. A sense of being something bigger and a sense of something that that gives something back to you.
Yeah. That.
[00:57:21] Eleanor Mills: And I mean for all the caring we do for all the different roles we play, I think that, that, although they, they, they give you various things.
There is something very, very deep in Mother Earth. And I think there’s a reason why it’s called Mother Earth. You know, there, there is something about us as we get older that connects very much in a different way to nature.
Yeah. And I, I think that it surprises you if it, I mean, it kind of has surprised me ’cause it wasn’t something that was so important to me when I was younger, but I now feel it’s, it’s, you know, it’s kind of massive.
Massively important. And I also think that the other piece of this, the jigsaw, which isn’t talked about so much, almost, you know, more of a taboo than sex is, is the kind [00:58:00] of spiritual shift. Mm. Um, and a sense of feeling kind of connected to the earth, but also connected to everything being, feeling like no one’s a kind of part of a bigger kind of, you know, web of connection of a
[00:58:13] Jenny Knight: kind of, yeah.
I think again, it’s, it’s part of that full cycle thing that you, I mean, we all know that, um, women will sink. Period. If they’re, if they’re putting a space together, we also know, um, my ex used to work for Bounty, the people that did bounty packs when you had a baby. There are more babies born on full moons.
There just are. Mm, no there. The, the way that we connect to nature, the way that we connect to cycles, the way that we connect to things like full moons, I think. Becomes even more prevalent, like you say, as you get older. And I think if you are connected to nature, you are automatically connected to something bigger.
Yeah, definitely. And I found myself the last strawberry moon running around on the heath with some friends kind of banging drums and Oh, yeah.
[00:58:55] Jenny Knight: Howling. Yeah, howling at the moon. Exactly. Which, which would’ve been an [00:59:00] anathema to my, to my younger self. So I think also a lot of these things that we would’ve kind of, you know, gone what, and we kind of also begin to see the kind of point of as we, as we get older.
Um, oh, Jenny, thank you. It’s been such a, such a huge pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on. Thanks for your wonderful book, um, and for kind of being so generous in the way that you’ve kind of shared your kind of thoughts with, um, so much of us. Um, oh yes, someone does think Qigong in the park this morning.
Love a bit of Qigong, bit of, bit of kind of energy q um, and oh no, Jenny, honestly, it’s been, it’s been a real delight to have you. I really, really loved your book. I think you are beautiful writer and I’m really interested to see kind of what you do next. And I hope you’ll come back and. Talk to us about it again.
[00:59:43] Jenny Knight: I’d love to. I am writing a second one.
Alright.
[00:59:46] Eleanor Mills: We will About the same, same character?
[00:59:49] Jenny Knight: No. Oh, no, no, no, no. This will be completely different. Oh, good. Everything I write is completely different, so No, I mean, at some point I might come back to Claire, but no, this, this is completely different again. But [01:00:00] obviously women will center, but also, um, well, we’ll, we’ll, yeah, we’ll come back to that to be, we’ll come back
[01:00:06] Jenny Knight: to that.
Yeah. I love this, this comment from Jo. She says Tanzi was almost like Claire’s guardian angel. She didn’t know that she needed a friend to guide her from a distance and observer on her journey in her new life. But yeah, but I think we all do. Jo I think you’re totally right that there’s a sense that, that we all need somebody who goes, I see you and I can see that you can be, you know, more than this.
Or I kind of, I see your potential. And I think in some ways it’s a bit like now, like we were, when we were kind of kids or kind of teenagers or, I, I said this before, but what, when, when you come out of university and you’re looking around going, oh, crikey, what am I gonna be? And that there is a sense of.
Somebody can see something in you which you don’t know yet, know yourself. And I think we’re kind of back there again in midlife that there’s a sense that we can all do for each other and say, I can see that you would be bloody amazing at that. And we see that in the circles, this amazing sense of, um, of kind of community and of support and of [01:01:00] creating a kind of web or co-creating a possibility of what this next stage might look like.
And I think we are really at the early stages of that. I, you know, I love your book. Mine is also kind of dealing with some of the same kind of territory in a kind of nonfiction way. And we need more and more and more versions of this so that we all have a sense of the path that we could walk.
[01:01:20] Jenny Knight: Absolutely. I’m gonna, yeah, I just, one thing I wanna add is to, that is orcas killer whales, they’re now doing, aren’t they research on, on women saying, oh, actually maybe we’ve got this wrong. Maybe there’s something to be learned by what Orcas do, which is the value of the grandmother in Orca? Yes, but I, I, I think that that’s true to a point, but I also think it’s really important to say that 30 30% of our new community are child free, and of those in half are intentionally.
Child free. Yeah. So I think that there’s a kind of problem with saying, defining us as going, oh, well we, because there’s all this kind of, um, Lucy Cook actually who’s one of the main, um, zoologists who kind of writes about orcas, is an old friend of [01:02:00] mine. I was with her at a festival the other day and we were talking about this and I was saying yes, but that again, puts women back into a kind of biologically determined box that we are only here for kind of breeding and, you know, that we, again, puts us in within a kind of patriarchal framing.
And actually, I think what’s interesting, and for me the last bit of the kind of last basing of feminism is women mattering whether or not they’re mothers, grandmothers, you know, whatever of themselves. That, that the fact that we are here and we have something to give and some joy and some creativity to put in the world, that that’s enough that we are valued for.
Ourselves not as kind of breeding or kind of grandparental breeding. Oh God,
[01:02:38] Jenny Knight: yeah. That’s definitely what I mean. More than, but I mean, yeah, Tanzi. Yeah. No, no, I just, I think it’s really exactly, I just think it’s really important to, to say that because I think so many women feel, you know, who are child free feel so unseen in that, in that kind of perspective.
And I’m so aware of how many of them, um, of, of us, you know, are in that situation within this, [01:03:00] within this community that I think it’s also really important to. Have, have that perspective about the value we have, isn’t it? It’s about the wisdom we have to share and the connections we have to make and the way, because we are connected to something bigger, as we get older and we are more wise, we have that to give.
We can help. And I think that there is, yes,
and I think we can help, we can help across the, it doesn’t have to be biologically determined, I think. I think there’s a huge amount of kind of mentoring and help and, and kind of, you know, stuff that we can put back into the world and share our wisdom. We started off talking about wise wi women.
I think that, you know, that’s definitely it, but I just think I’m just wary always about seeing that within a kind of biological determinism. Absolutely. Yeah.
[01:03:39] Jenny Knight: It’s been absolute joy. Thank you so much. And I really hope if, if anyone hasn’t read the book, I really hope if they do, they like it lots.
[01:03:49] Eleanor Mills: So I’m aware of that, but yeah.
Yeah. Um, we’ll also, we’ll put the, this chat out on the, on noon, ’cause often it’ll get a lot more views kind of after the events. There’ll be a lot of people who’ve read the book and [01:04:00] will wanna see it. Thank you so much. Thank, we’ll be talking about Oh, it’s great Gretchen. We’ll be talking about Wild Moon Rising, um, by Jenny Knight, published by ACA Books, which is part of, um, yeah, that’s what it really looks like.
Which is part, part Harper Collins, which is also my publisher, Harper Collins too. Oh yeah. So yeah, they, we, we’ve, you know, it’s load of them out in the community. We, I think we had a hundred Oh oh
[01:04:23] Eleanor Mills: Wow. Thank you so much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it’s really amazing, isn’t it, when your book first comes out to, um, to see it in other people’s hands.
[01:04:31] Jenny Knight: It’s lovely. It’s really, uh, it makes all the time that I sat there writing it going, no one’s gonna read this. No one’s gonna want this. No one’s gonna buy this. It’s beautiful to see. Thank you so much.
No, no, no. They’re reading it. They love it. And, um, somebody’s saying, lovely cover art. Which is true, which it should be.
Given that it’s all about an artist, it would’ve been, if you’d had a really terrible picture, that would’ve been great. Um, someone’s five. Good. Deb, are you liking it? Thumbs up. I really loved it. Um, anyway, I’m gonna let you all go. I’m gonna go back to all my Devon [01:05:00] relatives who are downstairs waiting to be entertained, so I’m better let you all all go, but, and I hope to see lots of you at the, um.
Noon circles next week and we’ve still got a couple of places at the Waysin retreat if anyone fancies coming to that on the of July. Yep.
[01:05:15] Jennifer Howze: Little little thing. Um, so we’ve just put up all the July circles, so please do go book your place in. We’ve got just like a very small number of Wasing places, There’s still an opportunity to save some money to go on a trip of a lifetime to Egypt.
Check that out all in events and uh, we’ve got some great new content coming up. And Nushin here, Nushin, wave your hand. There is a piece on the site, um, you can see it on our homepage that is about learning to fly. So do read that as well.
Eleanor Mills: Oh, and one more. Um, Christmas party date is coming soon, Jo.
We’re gonna be, we’re um, all bright next week, um, for our first Circle back there and I’m gonna chat ’em up and [01:06:00] ask about the Christmas party, but I thought it was good to, um, get, get our feet under the table first before I started going more Christmas party. And then the other thing is I’m interviewing Rena Wynn, um, and we are doing a private showing of the salt path in Oxford on the 10th of July with some money going to crisis.
Come Jenny. Love to be there. Love to. I’ll be there. Yeah. Yeah. Come. Um, lots, lots there. Thank you. Thanks Jen. Being in charge of it all. Thanks everybody for coming.
