Note: Text has been lightly edited and does not match audio exactly.
Tricia Ford: Hello listeners, this is Tricia Ford, an editor at Audible, and I'm here with Brooke Shields, a woman who can be described as the face of a generation. Perhaps she's best known as an actress and a model, but Brooke is also an entrepreneur and an author. Today we're here to talk about her new book, Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old: Thoughts on Aging as a Woman. Welcome, Brooke. Thanks so much for being here.
Brooke Shields: Thank you. I appreciate it.
TF: Now, your previous books, Down Came the Rain and There Was a Little Girl, came out in 2005, 2014, respectively. How did you know now is the time for a new Brooke Shields book? What inspired you to write something new?
BS: I had started my own company called Commence, which started off as a community for women to really just talk about where we all feel like we are, and do we feel represented once you hit 40? It was this community that started during COVID. And as the company itself was evolving into an actual company, my agent said, "Why don't you write a book about being an entrepreneur and being a CEO in your 50s?" Because it was evidently such a shocking concept [laughs]. And I thought, "First of all, that's not enough for a book. And second of all, I'm sort of angry that you think it's so shocking that a woman could do something new and different in her 50s."
That's what got me starting to think about, wouldn't it be interesting to really do research on women in this era of their lives, and under the guise of starting a company or doing whatever, but really looking at it. If I could include a lot of research to see if it supports what all these women in this community—we've been talking, we have these Zooms, we’re all over the world, actually. And we're all feeling very much the same things. I said, “If I can do that, if I can make it research throughout and then it could be my story about what I've experienced as a woman in this era, if that could be the book, I would do it.”
So, it felt like just the right time. I think we're starting to have conversations around aging that are different than we used to. This idea that, in my opinion, we're not just menopause. All of a sudden everybody's like, "Oh, my God. It's so amazing, we're talking about menopause." It's like, "Yeah, it's great, but that's not all we are." We don't get to just be pigeonholed yet again into "Oh, over 40? Menopause. You got one foot in the grave, you're heading out.” It just felt like the more I talked to women about all of this, the more of a conversation I felt like a book like this might be able to ignite.
TF: Right. Now, you did a lot of research for this, and you mentioned several studies and journalistic pieces that you reference. Do you have a favorite?
BS: I love the stats about women's confidence, when it peaks. To me, that's very interesting as to the stats of where men's confidence peaks, and how we're kind of not doing this together. I think that that's important because it causes strife. I think if you start knowing these stats, and knowing what happens to a woman, not just biologically but in their lives, and sort of the spending power of women, what happens when the kids leave the nest, and what women in this era of their lives represent—all those stats, to me, were so affirming because it just made me realize, "Oh, this is what's happening." And if we know this, we either don't have to be so mad at our male counterparts, if there are male counterparts. I love that kind of material that helped support what I've been hearing from women. Those are the kind of things that I liked to read.
One-fourth of all Americans are women over 40. There's power in that. We've lived a lot of life. We need to start patting ourselves on the back more for that. And, yeah, I joke, "I wish my knees were higher [laughs], wish they weren't touching my ankles." But I'm okay. I'm going to do whatever I can to look my best and feel my best, and I'm not going to be ashamed of it, but I'm also going to be like, "This has been a life that's been really lived and this body gave babies life. It's pretty cool." I think that we're so hung up on looking the way we used to look, our youth, and I have two beautiful daughters and I marvel at them. I marvel at their beauty and their tautness [laughs]. But I'm okay being 59, you know?
TF: Another study that kind of goes hand-in-hand with that is the one where you reference a point where the noise of self-criticism and how that starts so young, around age 12 for girls. How has getting older helped you to turn down the volume of your inner critic?
BS: You just get tired, because it's the same tape, it's just the same thing. And you kind of go, "It's been 40 years of doing this” or however long, probably more. You just think, "Well, this is a waste of time because it's not changing anything. Like, it didn't make my ass smaller" [laughs]. Criticizing myself in a bathing suit, I'm probably going to put the bathing suit on again and I'll probably look pretty similar. And it's like, “Why beat yourself up?” It's hard enough once you walk outside, and social media and people's opinions and critics and it's just all so consuming that you start going, "Well, maybe charity starts at home. Maybe I should stop beating myself up and see how that feels and do a test-run on that."
"One-fourth of all Americans are women over 40. There's power in that. We've lived a lot of life."
It's like, "What would happen if I assumed I was good enough?" Or what would happen if I went, "Let me ask myself good questions, like why do I have really good friends in my life? Why do my children want to hang out with me?" And then you start building yourself back up because you start counting all the positives instead of focusing on the negative. And you walk through life a little bit differently. I mean, it's exhausting, too, to have to do that. You've got to keep reminding yourself. It's like eating, you have to keep feeding yourself. You have to keep doing it, you don't just arrive there and be like, "I'm fabulous." You have to keep reminding yourself, "Why don't we not waste time on all the shit that we don't love about ourselves and let's just kind of see how we feel if we focused on the good stuff?"
TF: Right. Right. I know the focus of this book is mostly for women in their 40s, 50s, and beyond. But being a mom especially, how do you think we can help young people avoid or minimize that noise to begin with?
BS: I think it's probably a rite of passage that they have to go through. I say stuff to my kids all the time that I try to be life-affirming for them or whatever. A lot of it they just have to live through, but I notice that if I keep saying it, little, teeny bits of it come into their psyche. I didn't know my kids were spoken to from this journalist. I know they consented, I just didn't know that they had been asked questions. Anyway, I read some of what they said and it was stuff that I've tried to teach them, about critics and about people. They know even better than I do, they'll tell me, "Don't read the comments, Mom." Because they see the vitriol that gets put on their mom, and they're trying to protect me. So, I think it's starting to set in a little bit, but I do think if you're 18 or 21, you have to live through this stuff and you have to live through self-doubt. I can't expect my 59-year-old self to just radically fix their insecurities.
I try, but hopefully you just keep it up. They were little and people would say, "Oh, my God. She's so beautiful, your baby." And I'd say, "She's very smart and she's really funny." That would make my daughter sit up, and then we’d talk about it later and I'd say, "We are only as beautiful as we are strong and smart and confident." I go, "That makes us really special." You just keep ad nauseum, they're two years old, they're three years old and people are coming up to them and labeling them immediately in the stroller, and you're just like, "Ah, people are so stupid." And then you have to take it away and I'll do it in front of them and I'll say, "Oh, and you should see how she kicks a ball or plays with her blocks," or whatever the thing is, you know? I'm like, "She's such a good friend." You just keep trying to redirect the dialogue.
TF: That's great. What else have you learned from your daughters?
BS: Oh, my God. So much. It's crazy how they just see things so clearly. I have old insecurities that I don't even realize crop up. My younger daughter is notorious for taking all my stuff. She just takes all my stuff, and especially if it's a designer brand, she wears it before I do. And it really bothered me. I was like, "Why is this bothering me so much?" I brought it up to her and I was like, "I don't understand how you can just take my stuff. First of all, you need to ask. That's fine. I'm going to say yes." And she's like, "Ma, your stuff has dust on it." She goes, "You have nice things, you work really hard for your nice things, and you don't use them. You're so busy trying to be normal and relatable instead of famous you look like a homeless person." She's like, "I don't understand. And you're going to die and I'm going to get all your stuff."
I was like, "God. Wha-uh. Jesus." She goes, "What? I don't want you to die soon. But if you don't use this stuff, I'm going to use it." I just started laughing, and she goes, "Why do you think it's funny? It's not funny. I'm not a label whore." I said, "You know, you're right. I'm so ashamed to have nice things. Why? Why am I not allowed a fancy bag? Like, what is my issue with that?" And it goes back to crazy young kid stuff. Every now and then now I'm starting to wear my stuff, and I feel like it doesn't mean I'm arrogant, it means I work really hard and I bought myself something nice. Like, it's okay. It doesn't make me not relatable or whatever I do to myself with all that stuff. She's just got this very healthy approach to things. And she has really good taste [laughs].
TF: I do think that's something generational because even my mom, she had, like, her good sweatsuits.
BS: [Laughs] Of course.
TF: That she would never wear because they were the good sweatsuits. It's like, "Mom, it's a sweatsuit."
BS: So, my mom, we are not a family that has silverware that's passed down. Like, my mom is from Newark, but my mom collected silverware from every flea market. And so she had a whole set, and more than one, actually. She made a big deal out of it. I think she always wanted to be a family that had stuff passed down, like fancy people. So, one day I was like, "Why is this stuff in the cupboard when we don't even have that in our culture really anymore where you give the dowry or whatever you give to your daughters." I was like, "It's so pretty," and I'm like, "Oh, you can't put it in the dishwasher." Took it all out, put it all in my drawers, use it absolutely every day, wash it in the dishwasher. The world hasn't fallen apart, nothing's been tarnished and it's just fine. And my daughter even brought that up to me, she was like, "Mom, you do it with your silverware and your china." I was like, "You know what? You're right. And why not? I'm 59. Really, I'm waiting?"
TF: That's amazing. I totally agree with you that this is feeling like a new era for women entering their 50s at this time. And being children of the '80s, what's the biggest baggage you feel like you had to drop in order to approach this era in a new way?
BS: Oh, just self-criticism, self-doubt. I had to drop all of my self-deprecating humor, which made me easy to be around for women who might've been threatened by me or whatever, thought I was after their man. That was probably the biggest thing, was just stop negating yourself in this bizarre attempt to make other people feel better. Because the more I did it the more I started to believe it, you know? I'm the big girl. That's been my M.O. I have man-hands. I'm the big girl. All my life, I never did runway because I was considered athletic, which just in my world means fat or big or whatever. All that stuff that we start doing in our early teens, I really had to exorcize that behavior because I started living that smaller person. I mean, humor is one thing and self-deprecation in humor—like, my klutziness got me a television show. That's fine because that's a comedic trope. But the other deeper stuff that you start really believing, I really had to practice not doing it to myself.
TF: I know we touched on your new company, Commence, earlier in the conversation, but I'd love to hear more about it and why you decided to start a company now?
BS: I honestly did not even know I was doing it. I was sort of shocked. I think everybody during COVID had time to think about things differently, and I was just shocked that I was at this place in my life that I just started feeling so much better about myself and I felt accomplished, my kids were good and safe and they're going to be okay. I just started feeling ironically that I liked who I was more and I couldn't believe that the world wasn't jumping on that bandwagon with me. They weren't going, "Yeah. Look what you did. Look how far you've come." They were kind of going, "Okay. You're good. You had a good run," you know? I was like, "Wait a minute, I'm fabulous now. I wasn't fabulous before. Maybe you said I was, but I really wasn't. I'm fabulous now [laughs]."
I started doing research about marketing and how only one-fourth of all ads have women over 60 in them. And all the women I knew and know who are over 40, and I'm talking 50s and 60s too, are just formidable in the best possible way. They're doing new things. I met this woman who her whole life changed at 59, I think. Her husband suddenly died. Her whole world just collapsed, and she had run companies, she just sold some huge company and she was devastated and her friends said, "Let's go take a dance class because you gotta get out of your house." And she got out of her house, she took a dance class and now at 64 she's the champion ballroom dancer in her age bracket. She just bought seven strip clubs in Montana and is converting them to dance halls. She met a cowboy who's younger and hot. This whole story was so fabulous to me.
"I was like, 'Wait a minute, I'm fabulous now. I wasn't fabulous before. Maybe you said I was, but I really wasn't. I'm fabulous now.'"
I was like, "Who are these women? We need to start talking to these women." I started this community online and women just came to it from all over the world. And out of that community they wanted their needs met. If you look at marketing, everything's like 20s or menopause or wrinkles. There's no kind of let's address the 40-plus woman, what's happening to her biologically, how is her scalp health? How is her elasticity of skin, how [are her] hormones? All this stuff. And they were like, "Please make products for our hair." I was like, "I didn't really think I was a hair-care brand, but okay." We're in our bridge round of funding. We just keep growing and I keep having to learn what it means to be a CEO and what it means to ask for money and what it means to be on Shopify versus whatever.
It felt like it just has evolved. Commence was born out of this community. We decided that we were a care brand. We weren't lifestyle, we weren't beauty. And that's what I feel women are, we are not one thing. We started with hair care, we will be moving into other areas depending on what the community is really asking for. It's a unique type of an endeavor. There's nothing out there really. There's no hair care in the market, there's so much white space. And when you really start doing the research we realized there was no hair care that really catered to the 40-plus woman. It’s gray hair, roots, or whatever. Biologically, our pores are smaller in our scalp, so therefore it can't take in hyaluronic acid. So, we found a way to quaternize it, make it teeny, and put it in a product so that when you put it on your scalp, your scalp can absorb it. All of these sorts of things that we discovered in the lab with our unbelievable formulators. And it's making a huge difference. I got my roots done yesterday and the woman who does my color was like, "Your hair just feels so good. It feels so healthy and shiny." I was like, "It's actually my company and my product." So, it's been great.
TF: Now, because you're Brooke Shields, because your writing is so personal, I'm sure there was no question that you would narrate, as you did your previous books. What was that experience like for you?
BS: This one was fun, for the first time. All my other books are about depression and death and trauma. And they're real things that I went through. But this was such a celebratory book that I got just a kick out of, because I don't read my writing. I write it, I send it to my editor, I make changes based on the column that she'll say, "Expand on this" or "What about this?" I adjust and I add in, but I do not, until the very end, read through the whole book. I do that in particular because I have a tendency to want to sound more literary or educated or use fancy words. I didn't want to do that to any of my books because it's not the way I really speak. It was great for college, but it's not what I am, I'm not that person.
So, I don't read it. Reading it in the audiobook really is often the first time I get a whole glimpse of it. I laughed during this book. I got a bit teary at times. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed and I felt proud of myself because I didn't censor myself in writing it and definitely not in reading it. I was proud that I didn't try to be something because of insecurity and try to be something that I'm not. So, it was a lot of fun. This one was fun to do.
TF: Yeah, it's a fun listen as well. And the topic is not un-heavy, but that lightness that you're feeling now in your life I think is infectious to the listener as well.
BS: Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I think we owe it to ourselves. Like, puberty was hard, right? We're not saying it's easy, we're not saying it's a walk in the park, we're not saying it doesn't have its challenges, but it's like, "What are we going to do about that?" We can just wallow in it and feel like we suck until we die, or we can go, "Okay. What is fabulous about this?" Like, meeting new people over 50. Who knew I could meet a really close friend in my 50s? I didn't think you were allotted that in life. And then I felt like, "Oh, it's not valid because you haven't known her for 20 years." It's like, "No, you can meet a new friend." There's a plethora of positive options, you don't have to take them, but it's nice to know that life doesn't end once you have some gray hair or your ovaries don't work [laughs].
TF: That's amazing [laughs]. Thanks so much for taking time to talk today, Brooke.
BS: Thank you, Tricia. Appreciate your time.
TF: And listeners, you can find Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old, written and narrated by Brooke Shields, on Audible now.
BS: In case you didn't have enough of me, it's just you get more of me.
