Agony Aunt Confessions, PMDD and Life Off the Timeline with Vicki Notaro #183

Vicki Notaro is back! Her new novel, Anywhere but Here, follows three friends all hovering around 40 and living completely different lives. As Vicki puts it, you can be 40 and you can be a granny, or trying to conceive, or single, or divorced. She and Laura talk about the pressure women feel to have everything sorted by a certain age, and why marriage or a mortgage was never meant to be a finish line.

Vicki also gives an honest update on her women's health journey: years of very painful periods, a suspected endometriosis that turned out to be ovarian cysts, a PMDD diagnosis and cyclical depression alongside lifelong anxiety, a coil, surgery, a recurrence, and the oral progesterone that cleared her brain fog within two days.

From there the conversation turns to what young people lost when magazines disappeared. Vicki spent four years at Kiss from the age of 22, acting as a "big sis" to teenage readers, and she makes a warm case for edited, expert-checked advice over the "wild wild west of TikTok" — before Laura hands her a pile of anonymous listener confessions to answer.

🔑 Key Points

Women the same age are living completely different lives

"You can be 40 and you can be a granny" — Vicki's novel follows three friends around 40 at entirely different stages, something she sees as new in Irish life.

Milestones are a beginning, not a finish line

Vicki talks about the pressure to have the house, the relationship and possibly a baby sorted by a certain age, and why she has never seen those moments as the end of the story.

Writing about being child-free by choice once brought hate mail

She first wrote about not wanting children at 22, when it was still taboo, and was told again and again that she just hadn't met the right man.

Years of pain, and a diagnosis that came later

Suspected endometriosis turned out to be ovarian cysts, and a PMDD diagnosis explained the low, cyclical days sitting on top of lifelong anxiety.