Poorna Bell: "Women want more, not more to do!" How to put yourself first
Happy Place
Fearne Cotton
4.7 • 15.6K Ratings
🗓️ 23 February 2026
⏱️ 64 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What more do you want from life? What more do you want for yourself? Award-winning journalist and author Poorna Bell reckons it’s time to start really asking ourselves these questions.
In this chat with Fearne, Poorna explains why it’s important to aim for goals you set for yourself, not the ones set by society. They talk about why challenging the narrative that women become invisible as they age is so important, and why we should be turning to elders for life wisdom.
Poorna also reflects on what she wishes she’d known about marriage before her wedding, and how we can all strengthen our relationships with our parents and children.
Poorna’s book, She Wanted More, is out now.
If you liked this episode of Happy Place, you might also like:
Poorna’s first Happy Place episode
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Fern Cotton and this is Happy Place, the show that gets you thinking about what you want out of life. |
| 0:08.1 | And today, I'm chatting to Paul Nabel. |
| 0:10.7 | I, as one of my hobbies, do weightlifting and I could see how I was getting physically stronger and stronger year on year, |
| 0:18.4 | which seemed to me to be evidence that this narrative that we're told |
| 0:21.5 | about aging, which is that you get weaker, the default is diminishing. And so I think I just felt |
| 0:27.4 | that there was the narrative, which was constantly telling me that I just wasn't good enough |
| 0:32.3 | and who I was and who I wanted to be, I needed to aim for different things. And I think there was also |
| 0:38.6 | a realisation that we are surrounded by institutions that are never really going to hand us |
| 0:43.2 | that power. I'm so excited about this chat. Do you know why? Because Pornner is an amazing person |
| 0:48.9 | and also a friend. I'm one of those friends that I've made through my job that I luckily love because |
| 0:55.5 | it's interesting and I get to meet incredibly interesting people. That is the best thing about |
| 0:59.4 | what I do. And to have amazing women in your life as you navigate your 40s, I think, is absolutely |
| 1:07.8 | key. Women that you can have deep and interesting and curious conversations with. |
| 1:13.1 | And Pornor has certainly always been one of those people. I think we met, we were trying |
| 1:18.8 | to work it out maybe a decade ago, maybe a little less than a decade ago when Pornor was |
| 1:24.0 | working at Huffington Post. And I'd gone in quite nervously to do an interview |
| 1:29.1 | about the first book I ever wrote, which is a book called Happy, which is about depression. |
| 1:33.7 | And Pornor had not long since lost her late husband Rob to suicide at this point. |
| 1:40.3 | And we just clicked massively and had this really interesting chat and I became totally |
| 1:47.5 | obsessed by her actually but her first book which we talk about a little a little in this |
| 1:53.0 | conversation is about grief and I mean it's so poetically written I would highly |
| 1:58.1 | recommend you read Porners first book if if you can. All of her books have been |
... |
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