Soup. Family. Ancestors. The ocean.
Some conversations are too rich to be captured by a single theme. This is one of them.
A journey through grief, identity, ancestry, motherhood, legacy and ageing. This conversation explores the stories we inherit, the losses that shape us, and the person we continue to become.
Joanne Fedler is an internationally bestselling author of 17 books. A former lawyer and women’s rights advocate, she now leads international writing retreats and explores the power of storytelling to transform lives. Her latest memoir, Bring Us Home From Sorrow, is a moving reflection on love, loss, and finding a way through grief after the death of her mother.
We explore why midlife and beyond is often a beginning rather than a destination, and what it means to grow into elderhood, a stage of life defined not by years, but by wisdom, contribution and connection.
In this episode, we discuss:
• Why the second half of life asks us to keep becoming.
• The difference between the choices we make and the moments that choose us.
• What Joanne’s memoir Bring Us Home From Sorrow reveals about love, grief and the enduring bonds we carry.
• The extraordinary rediscovery of her grandfather’s memoir; one of the few surviving firsthand accounts of Jewish life in a Baltic village before the Holocaust.
• How the ocean has shaped Joanne’s life, and how witnessing a shark attack challenged her relationship with the place she has always called home.
• Why vulnerability creates connection, and how we learn to live alongside uncertainty rather than overcome it.
This is a conversation about the stories we inherit, the losses we carry, the experiences that transform us, and the meaning we create through life’s inevitable ruptures.
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The Gift of Age Podcast is streaming on Apple and Spotify
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