Photo by Valari Jack
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Online Extra…
Q&A With Sara Davidson
Interview by Diane Brown, January 2007
An interview with the author of Leap! What Will We Do with the Rest of Our Lives?
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Q: There are lots of books on recareering and retirement, but yours is one of the first to explore the emotional side of looking for purpose after 50. What started you on this journey?
A: My life fell apart. Everything I thought I was—my identity—was stripped away. I lost my ability to work in television, my main support for 25 years; because of my age nobody even wanted to have a meeting with me. At the same time the man I'd hoped to spend the rest of my life with abruptly left. And my youngest child was going off to college. I was in my 50s, and I thought, why am I here? What am I supposed to do? It was out of this personal crisis that I decided to reach out to other people of my generation to see if any of them were going through something similar and how they were handling it.
Q: How did you choose the people you interviewed?
A: I started asking people I knew, friends, friends of friends, people I admired. I put out an e-mail bulletin. I ended up interviewing almost 200 people. I think Freud said you don't have to look at thousands; you just have to look at a small number but look deeply.
Q: And did you find most were experiencing similar confusion?
A: They tend to fall into three groups: The first group were either being edged out of their jobs or fired or not finding themselves relevant anymore and were being forced to do something else. The second group were striking out on their own to do something different, but again there was the question—if I'm not going to do that, what am I going to do? And the third group were just riding full steam ahead. But at some point, no matter which group you fall into, I found that everybody has to go through what I call the narrows, which is the passage to the next part of life. And in going through the narrows you can feel like your identity is being stripped away; everything you're good at is suddenly not valued.
Q: Why the title Leap?
A: It's about making it through the narrows. At some point you have to let go of your old life and take a leap, not knowing what you're jumping into. Everybody I talked to found their own way out, and they were all different. There's no one guide to how you get through it. Either you say, okay, things are going to be different and how can I make them rewarding and exciting—or the world or your body is going to force you to do it. But you're going to shift gears and you won't come out unchanged.
Q: You interviewed several boomer icons (Carly Simon, Tom Hayden, among them) who have been dealing with their own life crises. Were their stories helpful to you?
A: It was so helpful. It was consoling because I saw that nobody escapes this process, no matter how much money or achievement you have. Carly Simon, for example, was diagnosed with breast cancer in her 50s; she had a mastectomy and had to go through chemotherapy and radiation. At the same time her record company in effect dropped her, she and her husband were beginning to separate, and her children were leaving home. Talk about all the blows coming at once.
Another person who went through something similar was Tom Hayden, who held office in California and was part of the state legislature for 25 years. Then term limits forced him to quit, so he decided to run for City Council in Los Angeles, the same district where he'd already won eight elections. And he was beaten by a man half his age; shortly afterward he had heart failure. On 9/11, when the planes were crashing into the Twin Towers, he was sitting in the hospital after a quintuple bypass, trying to regain his zest for life. As he put it, "I put everything I had into that campaign and when it was over, my heart gave out." Literally.
So they both went through this barrage of events, and they were fighting for their actual physical lives as well as their emotional lives. What I wanted to see was, how did they get out and start another life?
Carly was living at Martha's Vineyard, and her kids weren't around anymore, so she made a recording studio out of her daughter's old bedroom. She loved to make music at night, so every night she'd play music until dawn. She learned how to record tracks by herself. Nobody was looking over her shoulder; no producer was saying that won't sell. She was just doing something that would please her. That was the only star she could follow. So there alone, fighting breast cancer, she started writing music and recording songs. An album came out of it called The Bedroom Tapes and then another album, Moonlight Serenade, which, lo and behold, made it back onto the Billboard Top 10. She said what she wants to do is learn how to walk down the ladder gracefully. There aren't a lot of examples of the graceful walking down. But I thought if Carly can do that, maybe I can find a way to do that too.
Q: You found some great examples of people who are more creative and productive in their 50s and 60s than ever before. Who were the most inspiring?
A: For me it was a woman named Marcia Seligson. She used to be a journalist, but she was a writer who hated writing. She hated sitting in a room alone with papers day after day. In her 40s she started thinking, I can't write another book. So she spent 10 years floundering. Then she went to a career coach who asked her, "Can you remember a time when you couldn't wait to get up in the morning and go out and do what you were doing?" And she realized it was when she'd been producing an event for world hunger. And she came up with the idea of starting a musical-theater company in Los Angeles that would put on revivals of great musicals of the past like Oklahoma and The King and I and Pal Joey. She knew nothing about it, absolutely nothing, so she started having lunch with people and asking advice. After about four years, she opened Reprise, a repertory company that puts on four musical comedies a year. Now it's a very successful theater company in Los Angeles. It opened when she was 57.
Q: Didn't your own losses push you toward creative solutions too?
A: Yes, because it's when you're in that black pit—during those periods when we're down—that you become willing to try anything. If you're going along happily, you're not willing to take radical steps and make changes. It's these times when we just can't see any way of getting out of this situation that light enters—and grace. You're ready for a real breakthrough.
Q: A take-away message from the book seems to be that one's life is never fixed and the search for "what's next" never ends.
A: Exactly. I thought my writing career had come to an end in 2000. So I started trying various things. And when I'd try them, I'd feel this isn't me. Teaching, for example. I was a visiting writer at the University of Colorado for a semester. I liked it, but it didn't feel like it was my vocation. So I tried other things, but none of them were giving me that sense I was absolutely doing what I was supposed to be doing. Sometimes it's as important to learn what doesn't work for you as well as what does. What I ultimately found, unlike Marcia Seligson, was that I love being alone in my room with my papers. I've spent my happiest hours when I'm roaming in my imagination and doing creative work. That's the fire at the center of my life—what makes me feel most alive. So I realized I had to make a shift—from focusing on the outcome to focusing on the process itself. Even if nobody was going to hire me, I could still write.
Q: A lot of people probably don't have any idea how to reinvent their life. Any suggestions for those without the resources to explore as you did?
A: There are a lot of resources. I have a workbook called Leap that's going to be available on my website; it has directions, guidance, exercises. And there are other books and groups—in your church, your temple, your community groups—where you'll find other people dealing with this. We're in this together. You don't have to have tons of money; you just have to have the desire to not fade gently but to live every moment and suck the most juice out of every possible situation that lies ahead.
Q: One of your goals was to learn to stop worrying about how the external world views you—a hard task for achievement-oriented people like yourself.
A: It's an ongoing process. You never flip a switch and you're changed. It's a constant thing I work on. If somebody tells me they like something I wrote, I get a little charge. If they didn't like it, it doesn't feel so good. But you work on it every day and you get a little bit of detachment from it. The most important thing is to learn to follow your own star, as Carly Simon said. For example, writing this book. I had no certainty when I began that I could pull it off, that it would sell or even see the light of day. But I loved the process so much that I decided if nothing happened other than my getting to interview 200 fabulous people, that was the reward.
Q: You also talk about striving for a balance between serenity and intensity. How's that going?
A: I tend to be a high and low person—that's my nature. I try to moderate it and to watch it—oh, you're having an up now, or down. But if you just sit there and breathe, it will change. If I asked you, "What's so sure you'd stake your life on it?" what would you say? When a monk was asked that, he said, "Only one thing: that everything's going to change." And how you relate to change determines whether you're going to be joyful or sad, whether you're going to kick and scream or ride the wave. It's all about how you deal with change.
I was telling [my friend Sally Kempton] that when I finished this book maybe I'd be back in that dark hole I was in, maybe the book was just a temporary fix. And she said, "It's all a temporary fix." And, in fact, I'm not at the same place I was when I began the book. I've learned to be happy with change, the unknown. It takes maturity and practice, practice, practice. That's the wonderful thing I found in talking to everybody. They really have learned something. Everybody's getting a little wiser, and also there's this kind of creeping happiness. Sometimes I'll find myself really happy and I have no reason to be. There's nothing external that should make me happy, but I feel joyful. I think that happens in a way it doesn't when you're much younger.
To contact Sara Davidson and learn more about Leap!, visit her website.
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