Kit de Waal on race, class, privilege – and her exceedingly cool hair!

The Shift with Sam Baker

Sam Baker Ltd

Society & Culture, Health & Fitness, Personal Journals

4.8 • 525 Ratings

🗓️ 9 August 2022

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today’s guest is the award-winning writer, Kit De Waal. Until she was 21, Kit had never read a book voluntarily. But once she started there was no stopping her. Kit started writing in her mid-40s and published her award-winning debut, My Name Is Leon, at 56. Since then she has used her success to work tirelessly to promote the voices of working class writers. Using some of her advance to set up the Kit de Waal Creative Writing Fellowship (aka the Fat Chance scholarship!) and editing Common People, an anthology of working class writing. Now she’s turned her attention to her own childhood. Her memoir, Without Warning And Only Sometimes, is the story of growing up in poverty, one of five children with a Black father and Irish mother who brought them up Jehovah’s Witness… Kit joined me from possibly the most envy-inducing workroom I’ve ever ogled via zoom (and I’ve ogled a few!) to talk being single and reclaiming your own space at 60. We discussed race, class, privilege, the impact of a childhood spent not stepping on the cracks and why she hates that “fucking overused word resilience”. Plus why she’s not interested in a man on the downward slide, being a Tuesday friend and her exceedingly cool hair * You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including Without Warning And Only Sometimes by Kit de Waal and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! * 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 transcripts of the podcast, please join The Shift community. Find out more at https://steadyhq.com/en/theshift/ • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. 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 twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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. Raising Chelsea, a Hulu
0:23.7	original series streaming exclusively on Disney Plus. 18 plus subscription required T's and T supply.
0:30.2	Hello, it's me, Sam Baker. And before we go on with the show, I want to tell you about an
0:35.1	exciting new initiative coming from The Shift.
0:42.2	Many of you have asked how you can support the podcast further and get more shift into the bargain.
0:46.4	Well, now you have the opportunity to do just that by joining the Shift community.
0:52.2	You can go to study.media forward slash The Shift and become a member of the Shift. In return for supporting the podcast, you'll receive
0:55.2	exclusive weekly newsletters, community membership and plenty of other perks aimed at bringing us
1:00.2	all closer together. That's steady.media forward slash the shift.
1:09.8	Hello and welcome to The Shift, the podcast that aims to tell the no-hold bar truth about being a woman post-40, created and hosted by me, writer and broadcaster Sam Baker.
1:20.0	Today's guest is the award-winning writer Kit DeWal. Until she was 21, Kit had never read a book voluntarily. But once she started, there was no stopping her.
1:29.3	Kit started writing in her mid-forties and published her award-winning debut, My Name is Leon, at 56.
1:35.4	Since then, she's used her success to work tirelessly to promote voices of working-class writers.
	...

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