The Queenager | Eleanor's Letter

Sunshine after the rain: I meet Minnie Driver and am inspired at a 60th birthday bash

“We are literally coming into our own, coming into our prime,” said actress and author Minnie Driver when I interviewed her for Noon last week about being a Queenager. (She loves our new moniker for midlife so much that she asked for an I’m a Queenager t-shirt! Watch this space - they’re coming.)

I realised how right Minnie is about the richness of this time of life for women at a party I went to in Hastings last weekend. It was one of those golden days, sun shining off the sea, the fishing boats pulled up on the beach, the hills and architecture of the old town glinting with spring fun. And best of all my friend, Sam, glowing and gorgeous in a blue kaftan surrounded by fifty of her best mates all there to celebrate her and her 60th birthday.

It was quite a do. Chaps in lilac and lime green, artists, journalists, writers. Long trestle tables piled high with lobster and crab, deep bowls of golden mayonnaise, champagne flowing and the roar of excited conversation. It felt like lockdown was well and truly done – heaven for extraverts like me who’ve found the lack of parties particularly trying in the pandemic. It was such bliss to chat and laugh and be swept up in celebrating our friend. And most of all to see her on such joyous, fantastic form.

You see, it hasn’t all been champagne, lobster and fun for my friend. In fact, in the last decade, she’s been through the wringer – a beloved child died, she lost a job she loved, the pressure meant she had to sell her family home, move to a new place and start again. And she is far from the only one. Our Noon research The Rise of the Queenager: the truth about Midlife Women (the largest ever study of this cohort, conducted with Accenture this year) shows that over half of us have experienced at least five traumatic life events by the time we get to this point. But what was most striking is that the women who have really been Forged in Fire, who have been through the mill, thrown their lives upside down and then remade it – are then the happiest.  The experience of tough times brings them huge reserves of hard-earned wisdom. Not only have they survived but they have crafted the lives they want.  As one of the women in our focus groups put it: “The fact that we have seen, that we have endured, that we have won through IS the power in the room, it is what gives us our strength, our joy. We are on a firm foundation now. We know who we are.”

That is certainly true for my friend Sam. About halfway through the lunch she came over and gave me a big hug. “What you are doing at Noon, that whole message that there is so much more to come, that midlife is the age of opportunity, when we come into our power – that is so right. It has been dark, sure. But I’ve never been happier than I am now. I love my life, I love my family, my house, my friends. It has all come together.”

I believe her. We’ve been friends for 30 years, I’ve never seen her look so well, seem so centred and confident. She is, as the French would say, “bien dans sa peau.” She gave a lovely speech at the end of the party about how her own mother had died when she was 35 and how lucky she felt to be 60, what a gift it was to be allowed to get old, how her life felt so sweet, so full. Her daughter got up and followed her on the stump: thanking her for being an incredible mother, such a source of fun and wisdom – that even though they fought (like all mums and daughters) she loved her so much. Honestly, there wasn’t a dry eye in the place.

When I started Noon a year ago, I did so because when I hit my own tough time I couldn’t find anything out there which provided some hope and reassurance and most of all a path out of the dark wood I found myself in. (I won’t bang on about it now it’s all in my Founder’s Story on the site, but basically I got whacked from the job I’d devoted myself to for 23 years, that had become a huge part of my identity and felt incredibly lost, humiliated – all at sea). Even bigger than that, I couldn’t find optimistic, positive accounts of how a woman can start again at fifty, how things could get better, what the next phase of my life could look like. I remember one particularly depressing afternoon Googling '“life after redundancy” and getting the HMRC website – it was not inspiring.

I was lucky enough to know lots of incredible older women, doing fantastic things. They encouraged me to pick myself up, follow my passion. But their stories were not being told in the mainstream media - or anywhere else. I shouldn’t have been surprised. As Chair of Women in Journalism UK  from 2014-2021, I’d campaigned constantly about what I called the ‘male lens’ of the media – the way women, their stories, their lives were judged by a patriarchal eye. The worst/best example I can give of this is when Nicola Sturgeon went to meet Theresa May to discuss Brexit – at the time they were both the leaders of their respective nations. The headline in the Daily Mail the next day was “Forget about Brexit, it’s all about Legsit!” They showed two pictures of the two leaders’ legs – the implication being that no matter how important you become as a woman you will still be judged not on the efficacy of your leadership, or your policies, but on the sexiness of your legs. That was a particularly egregious example of the male lens, but you’ll find it everywhere. I became very boring in News conferences at the paper where I worked about how women were being depicted – the majority of women in stories were either arm-candy or victims. I began to insist on stories about women with agency, doing stuff in their own right. 

Hitting fifty I realised that age exacerbated the male lens. That older women hit an intersection of ageism and sexism – known as gendered ageism. The mainstream media isn’t interested in stories about older women – if you took a story to the usually male editor about an older woman they’d usually insist on running a picture of them when they were younger.  It was standard practice in newspapers to use women to “brighten up a page” – (if you don’t believe me, just check out any business section. It’ll be a sea of white blokes with the odd picture of a model on a catwalk to “cheer it up.”)

I wanted Noon to be a counterweight to all of that – to tell the stories of the amazing transformations and lives women were leading in midlife and beyond. To change the narrative about our lives and what we are capable of – the voices of older women are marginalised in all societies. If you’d like to read more, head to our transformation page on the Noon site, I particularly love Vicky Whitford’s story of giving up her career as a diplomat to become a doctor at 48, Liz Dawes on ditching being a City lawyer to teach Forest Bathing, or this week’s new story by Helen Barnes on changing direction.

Only by telling those tales, celebrating each other and showing what older women are capable of and doing can we change the tired narrative that women are like peaches, one wrinkle and they are done, while men age like fine wine, improving with age. I reckon BOLLOCKS to that.

So that was where the Queenager was born – women in midlife are amazing. We are starting businesses at a faster rate than any other demographic. We’re bossing it, we’re behind 95% of all household spending decisions and outspend millennials by 250%  - and yet most of the commercial and media world ignores us. So at Noon we are going our own way and doing it for ourselves – and as my friend at 60 shows (and says often on her Facebook page) – we are winning at life.

The whole point about being a Queenager is that this stage of our lives can be whatever we want it to be – there has never been a generation like ours before, we are pioneers. We can create new stories about the next chapters of our lives. My ambition is for my daughters to look forward to being fifty as the point when they come into their prime, when they become the women they are supposed to be. Just imagine if we embraced our power. We Queenagers aren’t going gently into the night, we’re just getting started!

So that’s why I was delighted to interview Minnie Driver about her life as a Queenager because she too is breaking the mould, challenging the Hollywood status quo about what women should do. I loved her tales of surfing at 3 am, living next to the ocean and living her best life. She talks movingly about being a single mum and the death of her own mother – I interviewed her on Zoom last week and the whole chat is available on the Noon YouTube and on the site.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter – do get involved in the comments and tell me your own stories of midlife. Maybe we can feature you too on Noon. And if you’d like to support our campaign, and the Noon site, do please think about becoming a paid subscriber (only £6 a month) to The Queenager. I want to keep the site free so no one feels lost like I did and can’t find the path out of the dark woods. We’re a reader-supported platform, so the money goes to paying for Noon and our contributors.

And it’s a no-brainer really. In addition to extra perks and content, you’ll get free access to our monthly Noon Book Club as well as a copy of the book we are discussing. Our next one is on May 30th at 7 pm, with Clare Poole. We’ll be talking about her new book The Authenticity Project which is all about how admitting the messy truth can transform your life. Click here to sign up and get your free copy (worth £8). So do sign up and share with your pals.

Lots of love,