Show Notes
My guest today is the fashion designer and entrepreneur turned novelist Tabitha Webb.
What can I tell you about Tabitha - other than her life makes mine look extremely dull?
She ran away from university, chased a hot surfer to America, was a roller blading extra in the movie Birdcage and got held up at gunpoint.
Then, despairing of finding the bag she wanted, she decided to design her own and a fashion career was born. Tabitha Webb became a go to for celebrities in the noughties. And when I say celebrities I mean the Princess of Wales (then Kate Middleton), not just any old reality TV starr. But fashion is a tough old world and at the end of last year, her label went into liquidation.
But like the heroines of her novels, Tabitha is not easily defeated, and in her late 40s she turned her hand to fiction. She wrote her first romance novel, the Jilly Cooper esque No Regrets in 2020 and has now followed it up with the extremely fun sex-filled romp, Playing The Field.
Tabitha joined me to talk about her blind faith that anything is possible, being an older mum and the menopause puberty collision, and why she can’t stand the way her husband breathes! We also discussed her fantastic mum who ‘doesn’t want an old man breathing down her neck!’, (there’s that breathing again!) being resolutely uncool, how it felt to turn her back on the fashion label she put so much into and the joy of ‘climbing your second mountain.’
* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Playing The Field by Tabitha Webb, as well as the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by Sam Baker.
* If you enjoyed this episode and you fancy buying me a coffee, pop over to my page on buymeacoffee.com.
• And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including exclusive transcripts of the podcast, why not join The Shift community, come and have a look around at www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com
• The Shift is created, hosted and produced by Sam Baker and edited by Juliette Nicholls at Pineapple Audio Productions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
More from The Shift with Sam Baker
My guest today is the former model turned leading nutritionist Rose Ferguson.
Hello and welcome to season 23 (!) of The Shift podcast, and this first episode is very close to my heart. Domestic abuse is something I have spent a lot of my adult life campaigning about, so I could not be more honoured that today’s guest is Denise Brown, older sister of Nicole Brown Simpson who was killed by her husband, American footballer OJ Simpson, on 13 June 1994, at the age of 35.
My guest today has blazed a trail through the British poetry scene ever since her work was first published in 1991. Born in Edinburgh, Jackie Kay MBE was brought up in Glasgow by her adoptive parents, Helen and John Kay, of whom much more later.
I first encountered today’s guest, Marina Benjamin, when I was researching The Shift book and stumbled across her memoir, The Middlepause. An insightful look at what middle age means today, it was prompted by Marina’s own sudden menopause after a hysterectomy. The sense of dislocation she described was the first time I’d ever seen the way I felt put down in black and white.
I can’t be cool about today’s guest, so I’m not even going to try. Ever since I started The Shift I have had a Wishlist and high up on it from day one was Dame Zandra Rhodes.