About this episode

Vicki Notaro discusses her new novel and the pressures women face around age milestones while sharing her personal health journey.

Vicki Notaro is back! Her new novel, Anywhere but Here, follows three friends all hovering around 40 and living completely different lives. As Vicki puts it, you can be 40 and you can be a granny, or trying to conceive, or single, or divorced. She and Laura talk about the pressure women feel to have everything sorted by a certain age, and why marriage or a mortgage was never meant to be a finish line. Vicki also gives an honest update on her women's health journey: years of very painful periods, a suspected endometriosis that turned out to be ovarian cysts, a PMDD diagnosis and cyclical depression alongside lifelong anxiety, a coil, surgery, a recurrence, and the oral progesterone that cleared her brain fog within two days. From there the conversation turns to what young people lost when magazines disappeared. Vicki spent four years at Kiss from the age of 22, acting as a "big sis" to teenage readers, and she makes a warm case for edited, expert-checked advice over the "wild wild west of TikTok" — before Laura hands her a pile of anonymous listener confessions to answer. 🔑 Key Points Women the same age are living completely different lives "You can be 40 and you can be a granny"…

People in this episode

Host: Laura Dowling

Guest: Vicki Notaro

Topics covered

• women's health
• age milestones
• mental health
• friendship
• societal pressure

Keywords

• PMDD
• endometriosis
• ovarian cysts
• mental health
• women's health
• age pressure
• friendship

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Anywhere but Here

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