Nell Frizzell on her 'panic years', writing as a trade not an art and opening up conversations about fertility

The Sunday Salon with Alice-Azania Jarvis

We have a term for our teenage years - ‘adolescence’ - and we are all familiar with the ‘menopause’ - but there’s no word for the decade or so in which, arguably, women navigate more life-altering decisions than any other - their late 20s and 30s. Or at least there wasn’t, until Nell Frizzell came along and coined one: ‘the flux’, aka The Panic Years, the title of her new book. For her, these began when she was 28 and called time on the relationship that had dominated her adult life thus far. It came just as her friends started settling down and having children - something she was pretty sure she wanted too. What follows is a rollicking and smart account of her ‘panic’ years from hare-brained camping trips with dates to soul searching over the ethics of procreation in a time of global warming - to the gnarly conundrum of falling in love with a man who says he doesn’t want children yet. It’s honest and fun and thought-provoking, as was Nell herself - I hope you enjoy listening to her as much as I did.

Buy the book: https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-panic-years/nell-frizzell/9781787632837

Edited by Chelsey Moore