Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination.

Brooke Shields is well equipped to critique how media, including advertisement and film, shape our perceptions of women’s aging. Data show that advertising caters to younger women, even though older women wield more spending power. Ads rarely depict women over the age of 50. The film industry is also guilty of erasing older women. Shields notes that roles for women in middle age are limited and minor. Middle-aged women rarely play leading roles; when they play supporting roles, they are stereotyped as frumpy, shrewish, or unappealing. This erasure is known as “invisible woman syndrome”: “[W]hen we are no longer deemed sexy or able to contribute to society by birthing and raising young children, our value diminishes. We are overlooked, ignored, or worse, not seen at all” (4-5).

The media’s erasure of middle-aged women has a broader impact because it informs how society treats women over 50 while also acting as a mirror for social perceptions. Shields’s social interactions with men illustrate this point. In the opening chapter of her book, she describes walking along a New York City street with her daughters; she noticed that men were looking at her young daughters but not at her. She also had an enraging social interaction with a man who seemed disappointed to learn that the model he admired in his youth was growing older. Women’s social value is linked to their youth and fertility; youth is elevated as beautiful, while aging women are not to be seen, and if they are, society suggests, they should try to look younger. Nevertheless, women who seek to preserve their youthful looks face backlash for doing so. Women are criticized no matter what.

Shields asks, “Where can we watch depictions of the complex, layered lives that women actually live? Where are the on-screen narratives for women in their prime?” (21). She is disappointed by the lack of substance in many of the roles she is offered today. One study shows that in 2019, no women over 50 appeared in any leading roles that year, and when they appeared as supporting characters, they were cast as “frumpy,” “feeble,” or “senile” (21). Shields has recently challenged the media’s unfair and inaccurate stereotype of middle age as a period of decline by taking on the romantic lead in films like A Castle for Christmas, released by Netflix in 2021. Novelist Jenny Colgan, writing for The Guardian, praised the film for depicting midlife characters falling in love: “It is also lovely to see two great-looking actors who aren’t in the full flush of youth falling for one another” (Colgan, Jenny. “Tartan and Tinsel: A Scottish Castle-Dwelling Novelist on Brooke Shields’s New Romcom.” The Guardian, 26 Nov. 2021).

Shields’s memoir is another attempt to challenge a false narrative about women in midlife. Shields contends that her life is not over, as the media would have one believe. Instead, she has entered a new and empowering phase of life in which opportunities are open to her, like starting a business, that would not have been possible in her younger years.