Book Review: Eleanor Mills 'Much More to Come'

Emotionally intelligent and well-written guide to midlife realities for women.

Welcome to the fifth in my series of six midlife and menopause book reviews. This really is a burgeoning market! And rightly so because it has been heinously neglected in the past.

As with ‘Just Getting Started’ and ‘A Better Second Half’ I think I was sold more than anything by the title of this one. Promising that 40 and 50 is really the beginning of a blossoming and an optimistic new phase in our lives. I hope and pray this is the case for all of you my readers.

The writer in this case isn’t a celebrity but a veteran journalist - Eleanor Mills. She worked at the Sunday Times at the same time as me; in fact for 25 years in total. But I never knew her - she was far too powerbroking as Editorial Director to pass the time of day with someone as lowly as me - Beauty Director of Style magazine. Testament to her journalistic skill this is a very well written book, very moving and beautiful, skilful use of words. Undoubtedly some of the best writing I’ve read on this topic. It is part memoir and exposition of Eleanor’s own experience - being made redundant from the aforementioned Sunday Times - and the emotional devastation that followed. And then rebuilding her life, like a phoenix from the ashes, to found Noon the digital platform for midlife women and coin the popular term ‘Queenager’ to describe the cohort of 40-70 year olds around now - women so full of promise and wisdom. According to Eleanor we are most definitely not on the scrap heap and in our prime.

However this phase of life presents challenges - as Eleanor found out being made redundant herself. According to Eleanor half of all Queenagers have experienced at least five big life events including: divorce, bereavement of a partner, redundancy, bankruptcy, mental health issues, physical health challenges, elderly parents (caring for/them dying), teenagers (and all their associated problems!) empty nest and menopause. And this book provides something of a toolkit for coping with what life throws at us whether its having a same sex relationship in mid life or going through cancer.

You won’t find any lifestyle advice here about medication, supplements, exercise or nutrition as with previous books. Instead there’s plenty of good solid advice about coping with life events, especially for those who have experienced redundancy. But Eleanor is a big advocate for meditation and exercise (in her case cold water swimming) to get through these potentially rocky decades.

I don’t think so many women will be able to afford to go on the string of expensive retreats that salved her soul (everything from magic-mushroom-taking to silent retreats and yoga) so its perhaps a book that’s more pertinent to high flyers in her situation. However she does have some very salient things to say about bringing up teenagers and prevalence of/addiction to porn - a subject on which she has been campaigning for over a decade. We are so lucky that we grew up at a time when this airbrushed and performative fantasy version of sex, now ubiquitous for young people, was not commonplace and only in top shelf magazines.

I do beg to differ with her on the subject of plastic surgery and tweakments. Admittedly I was once of the frame of mind that these things, the province of rich women and celebrities who want to preserve eternal youth, were pernicious. For decades I didn’t cover them as a beauty journalist - too expensive, too elitist and ultimately misogynist (why should women have to spend all this money and have all this pain to look young when men don’t?). And part of me agrees with her that beauty standards have got so high and so unattainable for older women thanks to cosmetic surgery and tweakments.

However I now feel differently about this topic and I think that whilst its important that we have at least some women in the public eye who are ageing naturally and not conforming to the surgery and tweakments norm, all women should be celebrated for ageing how they want to. What changed my mind was doing a piece for British Vogue initially, later I-D magazine about how punk women were ageing hitting their 50s, 60s and 70s. I always felt these were my older siblings, women I looked up to in my alternative mindset. And examining the diverse ways they chose to age - from Debbie Harry (Blondie) and Viv Albertine (The Slits) looking flawless and ageless to Zillah Minx of Rubella Ballet who is militantly pro natural ageing and natural beauty products. So it was liberating to see that various different modes of ageing were acceptable to these women, my heroines and they all did it with panache.

So that’s my take. But otherwise this is an empowering and optimistic book and as I say the writing is excellent. Thus a very good addition to the mid life toolkit.