Taffy Brodesser-Akner: ”Everyone taught me to be afraid of middle age - I wish I could have started in it!”

If there’s anything more daunting than interviewing a professional interviewer it’s interviewing an award-winning professional interviewer.

Today’s guest Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff-writer on the New York Times and a legend amongst journalists who often find themselves on the monosyllabic side of a celebrity. (Her interview with Bradley Cooper refusing to be interviewed for is a masterclass.)

Her debut novel Fleishman is in Trouble was a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller and then, never having written a screenplay before, she adapted it into a hit miniseries, starring Claire Danes, for which she won an Emmy. I mean.

Her new novel, Long Island Compromise, has just been bought by Apple TV and looks set to go the same way. It follows four decades in the life of a wealthy Jewish Long Island family whose patriarch is kidnapped in 1980. The fall out is the story. Wealth class privilege trauma BDSM and controlling mothers abound.

I met Taffy in her publisher’s office when she was visiting London to talk about her joy of turning 40 and realising the thing she’d been taught her whole life to be afraid of (middle age) was actually her ticket to freedom, the mystifying effect of money, the unlikely promise she made her mum and why her superpower is spotting a nose job.

* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.

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