Kyle Kellams: Allison Aubrey is thinking about her midlife. And yours too. Aubrey, health and science reporter for NPR and a correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning, is the author of the brand new book "Your Turn: How to Create a Midlife You Love." She examines what it means to shift as we passed the age of 50, and she introduces us to people who've made a change by choice or by necessity.
Allison Aubrey also writes about what it means for her personally to consider a third turn. She says including herself in the book meant doing something different for her.
Allison Aubrey: It's difficult. It's difficult. Yes, putting myself in the middle of the story was certainly new terrain for me. Absolutely. But in many ways, this book is using the very formula that I have used in my science and health reporting for 25 years.
Right. I had a question. I wanted to know, what is life beyond parenting in the paycheck? I took my journalist notebook. It went out into the world. That was my sabbatical or curiosity tour. I went in search of people making marvelous midlife pivots with questions of "How did you get here? And what was the process?" So really, the book is sort of a coming together of evidence based tools and these marvelous stories of finding meaning in midlife.
Kellams: As you mentioned, evidence based, this leans into science, some of it relatively new. Why was that important for you?
Aubrey: Really important to me because I'm a science reporter. It's a process that I revere. And I wanted to find a way to fuse evidence based journalism. So to sort of get away from the kind of ideas of simply just manifesting or sort of woo woo takes of people who had no evidence to show that that could be actually helpful.
So when I put tools forward to say, if you take this assessment, if you take this survey, for instance, the VA Values and Strengths survey. If you take that survey, it will tell you how your values and your strengths collide. This is an evidence based tool that to me is very useful to the reader.
At the same time, I wanted to leave space for evidence and wisdom to collide, right? I wanted to bring forth the stories of women and the wisdom that they can share. And so the book is really an amalgam of sort of evidence based tools and these wonderful, heartfelt stories.
Kellams: I want to get to a couple of stories in a moment, but I'd like to also point out your personal history plays a part in this, in the very fact that you call the third turn, that that's based in your Louisville growing up.
Aubrey: Yeah, that's exactly right. I grew up in Kentucky. I had been to Churchill Downs a number of times, and when I was a teenager, I went to the Derby, and one of the horses that was in the back of the pack made this sort of beautiful surging ahead in the third turn.
And later my grandfather said to me, "Always watch the third turn. This is where something unexpected happens." And I said, "Well, why? Why here?" And he said, "Well, when you can see around the home stretch to the finish line, a sense of urgency arises." It's this, if not now, when moment.
And as a teenager, of course, that did not settle as a midlife metaphor. But decades later, I thought, aha, he was talking about a horse race, but he was also talking about life. When you can start to see those home stretch decades, right? I mean, hopefully we all have decades to go. It is possible to live to 100 or beyond. But when you can see that home stretch, when you can see that there's a finish line in the distance, that creates an urgency. And that urgency can be exciting or that urgency can be frightening.
Kellams: I loved the part about your friend MB and optimism.
Aubrey: Ah yes. Yes. Love, love, love her story. And I think the main point, just to bring all the listeners up to speed quickly, my friend Mary Beth was diagnosed with cancer in her early 40s, had two young children and chemotherapy did not work. So she needed a stem cell treatment replacement.
And so she went to meet with the oncologist and she said, "What are my odds, doctor?" And this was 20 years ago. And he said, "Well, if you really want a number, I'll be honest, your odds are about 30%." And she kind of shook her hand in the air and she was like, "Yes, yes, I can live with that." And everyone kind of looked at her like, wow, okay. I mean, this is a steep battle. This is steep hill to climb.
Fast forward, she's in her 60s now. She's wonderfully healthy. She bikes. She's amazing. The stem cell transplant went beautifully. But I also write in the book that she sort of uses the tool of optimism to the nth degree.
Now, people think that optimism is like a set point, that if you're born kind of like Eeyore and you're always grumpy that you can't become an optimist. But the truth is, you can practice optimism. It's just like anything else. If you lift weights, you get more muscle, right? If you practice optimism, you become more optimistic. And how do you do that? You do that by surrounding yourself with other people who can see a problem and want to solve it.
And I really think that optimism kind of is underrated. It is not toxic positivity. Mary Beth never believed that it wasn't a chance that she could die. Of course, she knew that was a chance, but she decided to use optimism like a tool.
One of the things I weave into that chapter is the science of social contagion, that when you become happy, the person closest to you in social space becomes more positive. And not just that, but there's a knock on effect up to six degrees of separation. That sort of happiness spreads through social networks. Negativity also spreads through social networks. And so it's a reminder to think about who you're surrounding yourself with.
Kellams: I think reading "Your Turn" is so good, but it's worth it just to read about Genevieve, and I hope I pronounce her last name correctly. Villamora.
Aubrey: Villamora.
Kellams: Villamora. All right. Had opened this wonderfully successful restaurant, Bad Saint. It was getting great reviews from The New York Times, The Washington Post. She's putting everything into this. She's doing everything, lines around the corner.
Then, of course, COVID comes. She gets to spend more time with her family. But there is this sort of what do I do now question. And it's just a few pages, but it's well worth the read.
Aubrey: Oh, you're wonderful. I think the main point of Genevieve's story is we can all feel ourselves in that, where we wonder, oh, are the best days behind us. And really, Genevieve in very quick order had to sort of excavate what was it that she liked about running the restaurant that she could bring to a new chapter of life.
And she went through a period of thinking like, "Oh, maybe I don't deserve an exciting another chapter," or "Maybe there'll never be anything as good as running the restaurant." And she had a lot of self-doubt. And the cross fade over to this wonderful new chapter of helping people tell their stories through food was really the culmination of the many, many, many, many things that she'd done earlier in her life.
It's a quieter sense of purpose. It's not the kind of thing that's going to get a review in The New York Times, but it's so meaningful to her. And that's why it's such a great third turn story, because this is the legacy chapter. This is not the accolade chapter. This is not about pleasing the cheering fans in the stand. This is about listening to your heart because your heart knows the way.
Kellams: Do you feel better after writing this book and sharing it?
Aubrey: Yes. Yes. Yes. Wow. And yes, I think writing this book changed my idea about what midlife can be and what is possible. It is, without fail, the most satisfying thing I have ever done.
And it's not even out yet. The pub date is soon, but before I put it out into the world, I reread it myself and I thought, "Wow, Allison, you set out to do something. You had a question, you answered it." And it's a very satisfying feeling.
Kellams: Allison, thanks so much for the book. Thanks for your time.
Aubrey: Wonderful to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Kellams: Allison Aubrey is a health and science reporter for NPR and a correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning. Her new book, "Your Turn: How to Create a Midlife You Love," is out today. Our conversation took place last month.
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