The Shift with Sam Baker

How does it feel to have your life turned upside down in your mid 40s? That’s what happened to Laura Friedman Williams when, after 27 years with her husband, she discovered he was having an affair. It was something Laura had always thought they’d somehow get past but, confronted with the reality that he was in love with someone else, she knew this was it. They. Their marriage. Life as she knew it,...

My guest this week has spent a fair part of this year at the eye of a storm. Torrey Peters’ novel Detransition, Baby - a gloriously gossipy comedy of manners - was rapturously received when it was published in January, chosen for bookclubs by everyone from Oprah to Roxane Gay, and TV rights were optioned by the team behind Grey’s Anatomy. It was lauded as “the first great trans realist novel” in o...

My guest this week has come a hell of a long way - from the Derbyshire village where she grew up, to London and the editor's seat of Empire magazine, by way of New York where she was one of Folio magazine’s top women in American media. Ostensibly Terri White was living the 'single woman in Manhattan' dream.  But, uber-competent at work, she was clinging by a thread in her personal life, struggling...

Hello, and welcome to season 5 of The Shift, and I could not be happier to kick off this season with this very special guest. What even is the “right sort of girl?” That’s a question my guest this week has long struggled to answer. Growing up in Yorkshire, TV presenter and self-proclaimed misfit Anita Rani always felt that she was somehow *wrong* - a feeling that was exacerbated when she moved to...

The best way I can think of to describe this week’s guest is that she’s a women’s health vigilante. (A vagina vigilante if you will!) Dubbed twitter’s resident gynaecologist, and the nemesis of snake oil salesmen everywhere, Dr Jen Gunter is the living embodiment of “information is power”. She has made it her life’s mission to give you the information you need to make life better for you - and for...

How does it feel to come from a family with a legend? If you’re today’s guest, novelist and playwright Esther Freud (daughter of painter Lucian Freud and great granddaughter of Sigmund Freud) you work with that legacy to produce some of the finest novels of the last thirty years. Her first Hideous Kinky, based on her unusual childhood, was made into a film starring Kate Winslet and after the follo...

This is a replay of an episode published at the start of the year in which Kate Mosse talked about her experience of caring for both her own elderly parents, and her husband's mother. I'm replaying it now to coincide with the publication of her memoir, An Extra Pair of Hands, in which she writes movingly about that experience and its profound effect on her family. Kate is also founder of the Women...

This week’s guest is the behavioural and data scientist, Dr Pragya Agarwal. A passionate campaigner for gender and race equality, Pragya is the author of the much-praised Sway, about unravelling unconscious bias, and the host of of the podcast, Wish We Knew What to Say: talking with children about race.  Pragya is also - and I tell you this only because it’s relevant to today’s conversation - the...

My guest this week is a business woman, broadcaster, curator, tastemaker and DJ. She headlines festivals, hosts one of BBC Radio 1’s flagship shows, was Europe’s biggest female DJ and has her own hit podcast Changes with Annie Macmanus. And now, as if that wasn’t e-bloody-nough (bc let’s not forget the two kids), Annie has written her first novel, Mother Mother. Oh and she’s cool. And nice. (In th...

The phrase force-of-nature was created to describe this week’s guest. Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy has been fighting back and refusing to shut up for the best part of 50 years. She has been assaulted and detained in Tahir Square, banned from an Australian TV network, and has made it her business to be the scourge of the pale male, and stale everywhere. She is also a huge source of in...

My guest this week is the cartoonist Alison Bechdel. Probably best known for the Bechdel test - a tongue in cheek method she came up with in the 80s for assessing gender bias in movies. She became a household name when Fun Home, her graphic novel/memoir about coming out and her father’s death, became a bestseller and was turned into an award-winning musical. Her new autobiographical graphic novel,...

Entrepreneur and fashion designer Anya Hindmarch is the queen of practicality. The bags for which her eponymous label is famous have long been adored for their pockets, compartments, zips and the fact they’re not weighed down with hardware - I mean seriously who wants a bag that’s too heavy to carry when it’s EMPTY?! It’s that super-sensible but fun, creative approach that saw her lauded as Acces...

This week’s guest is a writer, photographer, sheep rearer (pretty sure that’s not the right word for it), crofter and expert at the dark art of being alone. Tamsin Calidas lived a relatively anonymous life on a small Scottish island, until she wrote her memoir, I am an island, about her experience of moving from London to the comparatively remote Hebrides. In doing so, she was living the dream of...

Like many 80s kids, I grew up with today’s guest. Tracey Thorn started early, forming The Marine Girls (once described as looking like they would “break your arm before they’d let you break their hearts”), while still at school, and Everything But The Girl, with her musical and life partner Ben Watt, whilst at university. Since then she’s released three solo albums, three critically acclaimed memo...

I am thrilled to kick off season four - season bloody four! - of The Shift with today’s guest, Mel Giedroyc (and yes I did practice saying that 935 times). Mel is (she reckons) the more punctual half of beloved comedy duo, Mel and Sue, an actress, writer and, drum roll, NATIONAL TREASURE thanks to the best part of seven years spent eating cake. (Nice gig if you can get it) And now - bloody over-ac...

You know when people say you’re “brave” because you’ve got a few grey hairs?! Well, my guest this week is the living proof - as if it were needed - that that is a right old load of BS. Channel 4 International Editor Lindsey Hilsum is an acclaimed foreign correspondent who has reported from all over the world including Iraq, Syria, Gaza, Kosovo and Rwanda. She also won the James Tait Black Award fo...

My guests this week have both lived fascinating lives. Both have experienced ups and downs. Both are now 55 and have found themselves in this place in life that has brought them a surprising new power. Actress, producer, businesswoman and compulsive learner Sadie Frost and award winning actress and singer/songwriter Frances Ruffelle first met at school in 1976 (when they were the scruffy, noisy, n...

My guest today is the Ghanaian American writer Nana-Ama Danquah. Nana-Ama found herself in the public eye when, in the late 90s, she published her memoir Willow Weep For Me about suffering from clinical depression - one of the first books to openly discuss black women’s mental health experience. Critically acclaimed by the likes of the late, great Maya Angelou, its description of the shame, dismis...

The main word I can think of to describe this week’s guest is wise. (Well there are other words - fabulous and no-bull for starters - but wise is the biggie.) Bestselling author Isabel Allende has written 25 books including her debut, the global smash hit The House of the Spirits, published when she was 39, and two memoirs, one about the death of her daughter Paula, at the age of 29. In her latest...

This week is a bit of a “how to cope when your life spirals out of control and goes tits up!” Special! And my guest, journalist Rosie Green, is an unwilling expert on midlife chaos. She was 44 (there’s that age again…) when her contented, settled, literally roses-round-the-door family life was pulled out from under her when her husband and partner of 26 years told her he didn’t love her any more -...

Like many women, my guest this week has lived a lot of lives in one. Married and divorced in her 20s, Sarah Pinborough left a career in teaching, became a horror writer and taught herself to script write, but it was when she turned her hand to psychological thrillers, when she was 44 (remember that age, it’s definitely significant!), that things went ‘a little nuts’. That book, Behind Her Eyes, we...

Where to start with the last decade of this week's guest's life? After struggling to get pregnant, Alexandra Heminsley finally conceived at 40 after unsuccessful rounds of IVF. You might hope that was the end of the stress. But no. First came the DNA test that questioned whether the embryo was really hers and then, as she tried to adapt to life as the mother of a much longed-for newborn, her husba...

You’d be hard pushed to think of anyone who has done more for women writers than this week’s guest. Twenty five years ago, Kate Mosse was working in publishing when she looked around and realised that everyone on all the awards shortlists looked familiar - pale, male and stale. The result - the Women’s Prize for Fiction - has just celebrated its 25th anniversary, and given a much-needed voice to w...

This week's guest is acclaimed poet, author and activist, Salena Godden. Now in her late 40s, Salena has been writing and performing since 1994 when she moved to London seeking the bright lights and never looked back. In her evocative debut novel, Mrs Death Misses Death, the self-confessed “dreamer” brings death to life as a middle-aged black woman and combines prose, poetry and non-fiction to tel...

How's 2021 for you so far?! I know, right? Well, who better to grab us by the scruff of the neck at just the point our meagre enthusiasm is starting to wear off than Philippa Perry? Philippa has been a psychotherapist for 20 years. She’s also an agony aunt, presenter and author of the bestseller, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and your children will be glad you did) - a clever, funny - a...