A few weeks ago, I was having breakfast with a new writer friend I can’t believe I get to be friends with, a woman who’s exactly my age. We were talking about friendship and creative dreams and ambition and everything we still want to do and how to keep going when what we’re living through isn’t normal but we’re forced to act like it is.
It was exactly what you talk about when it’s 2025 and you’ve reached a certain age and you’re teetering between giving up and everything feeling more urgent than ever, when you’re simultaneously curious in a way you’d never knew you’d be and equally over every. fucking. thing.
At some point in the conversation, I realized this is all I want to talk about right now, my book’s postscript, the themes that pick up where Ambition Monster left off: How do we create meaningful lives in this shit-tastic moment that are not stupid phony Instagram aphorisms or rah-rah, no-fucks-given, aging-lady clichés? What do you do when you feel raw and sensitive and alive and also like you’re tired and grieving old versions of yourself and maybe seeking something you wanted — love, pleasure, deeper connection, creative fulfillment, a sense of meaning and purpose — but have yet to find?
How are we redefining personal and professional success for ourselves now? What does earnest ambition look like as we age?
What do we actually want to do before we die?
And anyway, welcome to Extended Scenes the podcast, made to celebrate the launch of the paperback edition of my book, what I think will be limited summer series about dreaming and working and living right now, especially if you’re in the second half of life.
For the next 8? 10? weeks on this show I’ll be interviewing someone I think is cool and interesting about success and failure and ambition and what they’re dreaming about now. I’ll probably also be ranting about whatever’s haunting me this week and, maybe, if there’s an appetite for it, answering listener questions about beauty/aging/writing/ambition/the assholery of my weighted vest. Ad-free episodes will live here on this Substack and also on all the other platforms. Right now, every part of this is free.
To kick things off, I’m talking to the truly wonderful, smart and real-deal inspiring writer and thinker Angela Garbes. If you don’t know Angela, she’s the author of Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy and Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change, which came out in 2022.
P.S. I know, I know: Who needs another fucking podcast? Turns out, I kind of do.
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