Jennie Godfrey: 'midlife is a powerful place if you lean into it'
About this episode
Jennie Godfrey shares her inspiring midlife transformation from corporate HR to bestselling novelist.
My guest today is the bestselling novelist Jennie Godfrey. Jennie has experienced the kind of midlife turnaround most of us can only dream of. She started her career working in HR and rose to the top of her chosen industry working for a large corporation. Life was a whirlwind of high powered meetings, swanky job titles, frocks and heels - and boozing to release the pressure valve. Cue burn out - and drying out! In her mid 40s, in the midst of what she now knows was perimenopause, Jennie took voluntary redundancy and stepped back from her corporate job. Without a packed diary and a plan for the first time in decades she took a job in her local bookshop and signed up for a creative writing course. There she started writing her debut novel, The List of Suspicious Things, loosely inspired by her childhood growing up in West Yorkshire during the reign of the Yorkshire Ripper. It became the subject of a massive publisher auction, went to number one in the Sunday Times Bestseller lists and was the biggest debut of 2024. Now she’s followed it up with The Barbecue at No9, set in the summer of 1985 amidst the biggest music event in history, Live Aid. Jennie came to my flat to…
Topics covered
- midlife transformation
- creative writing
- personal growth
- publishing journey
- mental health
- perimenopause
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