Charlotte Mendelson – middle-aged women are entitled to want more

The Shift with Sam Baker

Sam Baker Ltd

Society & Culture, Health & Fitness, Personal Journals

4.8 • 525 Ratings

🗓️ 26 August 2025

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This season is dedicated to helping you pick your summer reads and my guest today is the novelist Charlotte Mendelson whose writing has been compared to “late Shakespeare meets Modern family!” So you know where to turn if you’re looking for a painfully funny, on the nose look at the dynamics of love and marriage. Charlotte worked as a publisher for twenty years before becoming an award winning novelist. She’s written seven bestselling novels, the most recent of which are The Exhibitionist and Wife, both out now in paperback, which are kind of a pair in that they both deal with the reality of being married to monsters! She has also been gardening correspondent for the New Yorker and now writes for The Observer. I met Charlotte at her home in North London to snoop around her houseplants and her bookshelves while we discussed how to go grey without looking like you’re looking after chickens in the wood, the puberty midlife confluence, the disproportionate stress of deciding what to wear, the lifelong impact of growing up nerd, being a pre internet lesbian, internalised homophobia, finding love as a grown up, perimenopausal horniness and so so so much more. It’s chaos but delightful chaos! * You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, including Wife by Charlotte Mendelson as well as the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me. * If you enjoyed this episode and you fancy buying me a coffee, pop over to my page on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠buymeacoffee.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. • And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including exclusive transcripts of the podcast, why not join The Shift community, come and have a look around at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Juliette Nicholls at Pineapple Production. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/ review/ follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on Bluesky @theothersambaker.bsky.social or instagram @theothersambaker or message me on substack The Shift with Sam Baker. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Jamie Lang and Sophie Haboo have arrived on Disney Plus.
0:04.5	We're having a baby.
0:05.5	We're having a baby.
0:07.2	I've always wanted to be mom.
0:09.4	And we're bringing you on our journey through everything.
0:12.4	I have no idea what we're doing.
0:13.6	Thank you. I have more of an idea.
0:15.6	I think of it like a Tamagocchi.
0:17.8	At the end of all of this...
0:20.0	We're going to have a little baby.
0:21.8	Raising Chelsea, a Hulu original series streaming exclusively on Disney Plus.
0:27.3	18 plus subscription required T's and T supply.
0:34.7	Hello and welcome to The Shift, the podcast that aims to tell the no-holds about truth about being a woman post-40, created and hosted by me, writer and broadcaster Sam Baker.
0:47.0	Now, you know this season was dedicated to helping you pick your summer reads, and summer's nearly over, but we won't let a little detail like that stop us.
0:55.3	Anyway, so my guest today is the novelist Charlotte Mendelsohn,
0:59.0	and her writing has been compared to
1:00.8	late Shakespeare meets modern family.
1:03.7	So you know where to turn
1:05.1	if you're looking for a painfully funny on the nose,
1:08.3	maybe a little bit confronting.
1:10.5	Look at the dynamics of love and marriage.
1:13.3	Charlotte worked the publisher for 20 years before becoming an award-winning novelist.
	...

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