BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

Welcome to Late Night Woman's Hour with me, Emma Barnett.

Each week we bring together brilliant women to talk literally about anything they want.

Work, love, relationships, politics, sex, everything that matters and everything in between,

which matters too, including the fluffy stuff.

Who have we got round the table? Let me tell you. Writer and broadcaster, Sally Hughes, the author of

the book's Pretty Honest and most recently are Rainbow Queen. Hello to you. Hello.

And Miranda Sawyer, broadcaster and writer. She writes on music and radio for The Observer. She's also

the author of Out of Time. Welcome. Thank you very much. I'm not reading you on radio. I'm just talking to you on it.

It's brilliant. Miranda, this is quite a painful one. I think I've always been fascinated by this.

Friendship breakups, and you specifically wanted to talk about in middle age and how that

comes about and how it makes people feel. Tell us more.

Okay, so I wanted to talk about it, I think, because it's another, I mean, this is another

thing that happens in middle age. I do think that people kind of shift around in middle age.

It might not shift physically, you know, they might not move house, but things shift or they

settle or some things come up or things get things are sheded you know shed shed

shed anyway they you know you lose certain things and that can be to do with the fact that you

become more embedded in your relationship so you have kids you settle down you don't want to go

out as much you know those kind of things everyone gets more busy you know I used to think

that middle age was possibly a kind of plateau where everything would be sorted and you know what we're doing. Actually, I think genuinely you get busier and

busier and busier and busier. So middle age is really busy. And so because of that, it can be quite

difficult to maintain your friendships. They can change? And can I just check when we say middle age, what sort of age? I would say 40s. Forties. And now my 50s. But, you know, I would say I'll, you know,

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