Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed To Get Old

What if the years everyone warned you about turned out to be the exact years you finally felt most like yourself? In Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old, Brooke Shields (with Rachel Bertsche) argues that midlife isn’t the beginning of the end for women—it’s the long-delayed beginning of living on your own terms. She contends that the supposed decline narrative is both culturally manufactured and commercially convenient, and that women in their forties, fifties, and beyond can claim a distinctly potent mix of clarity, confidence, and agency—if they stop waiting for permission and start scripting their own next chapters.

The cultural script is familiar: beauty fades, children leave, work dries up, and women recede. Shields calls BS. She walks you through how to rewrite that script: how to speak up at work and at home, how to advocate for your health, how to reframe bodies and beauty, how to see menopause as a transition—not a verdict—and how to build richer friendships, renegotiate marriage, and even start a company at a time many expect you to slow down.

The problem we inherit

Shields names the air you breathe but rarely see: ageism and the “invisible woman” effect. The data is stark. The Geena Davis Institute found that women over 50 comprised only 5 percent of film characters and were coded “frumpy” or “senile”; fewer than 1 percent of ads feature women over 60, despite that cohort’s outsize purchasing power. Academia still defines women of reproductive interest through age 49, making women’s health research and training gaps predictable (and damaging). The result? A civilization-scale blind spot that makes many women feel like their best days are behind them just as they’re reaching their prime.

The reframe that frees you

Shields reframes midlife as an accelerator, not a handbrake: the period when your experience finally matches your aspirations, your voice grows steadier, and your tolerance for nonsense drops to mercifully low levels. She shows this reframe in action through vivid stories: saying yes to a terrifying one-woman show at New York’s Café Carlyle (and discovering what kind of performing actually lights her up), clapping back publicly at Tom Cruise’s 2005 attack on her postpartum depression treatment, and relentlessly advocating for her own medical care after a broken femur, a staph infection, and a seizure that landed her in an ambulance with Bradley Cooper holding her hand.

What you’ll learn in this summary

You’ll see how to turn fear into a compass (not a stop sign), how to build “bankable confidence” one hard thing at a time, and how to become your own chief medical advocate when you encounter bias or dismissal. You’ll explore body image and beauty choices without the shame—Spanx hacks, Fraxel, dye, or gray—while prioritizing strength over smallness. You’ll demystify menopause and hear why education and community radically improve the experience (Dr. Suzanne Gilberg-Lenz calls it “the puberty of midlife”), and you’ll meet the friendships and solitude practices that make this era sweeter. You’ll also look squarely at marriage and sex in middle age—the shifting power dynamics, the pressure to maintain the male gaze, and the small, unglamorous habits that actually reconnect two people.

Finally, you’ll step into a bigger concept of ambition: how midlife can be the moment to start—not stop—whether that’s pitching a sitcom, launching a business (Shields’s hair-and-scalp brand, Commence), or speaking on a SXSW stage with Meghan Markle and Katie Couric. You’ll see how to fundraise amid mansplaining, why the average successful founder is 45 (Harvard Business Review), and how to use “weak language” strategically (Adam Grant) without weakening your point.

Why this matters now

Women over 40 are one of the fastest-growing, most economically powerful demographics—and yet they’re still sidelined by outdated tropes. Shields’s core insistence—that you are allowed to get older and expand, not contract—challenges not just the beauty-industrial complex, but how workplaces, healthcare, and families treat women in their prime. The payoff is personal and collective: greater happiness (the midlife “U-curve” bottoms earlier for women than men), better health (self-advocacy changes outcomes), and a culture less likely to waste hard-won female wisdom.

Shields opens with a daring metaphor come to life: a two-week one-woman show at the Café Carlyle. She said no twice. Tommy Tune pushed; her husband nudged; fear remained. She finally said yes—not to prove greatness, but to find her voice outside of roles others wrote for her. The show’s title, Previously Owned by Brooke Shields, sprang from a literal sign on her first car—found decades later for sale with “Previously Owned by Brooke Shields” scribbled across the back window. That cheeky provenance became a thesis: much of her life had been owned by others—Hollywood, her mother, the media, husbands, fans. Midlife was about repossession.

Fear as a compass

Her impulse to say yes wasn’t “lean-in” hustle; it was a decision to stop letting fear be the project manager. She admits she was scared of critics (some had called her “no vocal powerhouse” after a 2011 cabaret), scared of failing, and scared she’d never locate a voice that wasn’t a Broadway character’s. She reframed fear as a directional: if it scared her and mattered, it was probably a growth edge. (Think Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, where fear can ride, but it doesn’t drive.)

Finding your sound vs. chasing perfection

She insisted on singing what fit her emotionally and vocally—Bob Dylan’s “Most of the Time,” Tina Dico’s “Count to Ten”—and telling stories only she could tell (Michael Jackson, George Michael, even Donald Trump vignettes). When bronchitis threatened opening week, she let go of perfection and chose presence, literally shaking her head “no” when old voices told her she wasn’t enough. Later, in Indianapolis, she swapped out two songs that fought her range, added “There Are Worse Things I Could Do” (her Grease debut) and Tanya Tucker’s “Delta Dawn,” and discovered a richer tone she didn’t know she had. The real win wasn’t loving cabaret—it was learning she doesn’t enjoy performing as herself. That honest self-knowledge is progress, not failure.

Tubular centering

A vocal coach’s cue—“be tubular”—became the life metaphor she didn’t know she needed. When sound travels cleanly up the “tube” (larynx to lips), you’re strongest. Shields, long a “pinball” bouncing off others’ demands, learned to stand centered and spring back when pushed. That resilience helps in hot lights and in rooms where people still want you to be 16 in Calvin Kleins.

The culture you’re rewriting against

You can’t reclaim your narrative without noticing the one you inherited. A Geena Davis Institute study labeled older women’s screen roles “Frail, Frumpy, and Forgotten.” Meanwhile, research shows happiness follows a U-curve—women’s “dip” is earlier than men’s; by the 50s, women’s confidence and contentment trend up (Monitor on Psychology; Tara Parker-Pope’s “midlife dip”). Ada Calhoun asks whether invisibility can be strategic. Shields answers yes—there’s power in being underestimated when you’re the one writing the show.

(Context: This “rewrite” stance echoes Joan Didion’s “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” It also rhymes with Michelle Obama’s Becoming: identity as a verb.)

Confidence, Shields shows, isn’t swagger or volume—it’s the bridge between your real abilities and taking action. In 2005, after publishing Down Came the Rain about postpartum depression, Tom Cruise derided her use of antidepressants on the Today show. Past-Brooke might have gone quiet. Forty-year-old Brooke wrote a New York Times op-ed—“War of Words”—and anchored it in data, not drama. The result: a public conversation, Congressional testimony, and a New Jersey law mandating PPD education and screening. She didn’t win because she shouted; she won because she knew herself, did her homework, and acted.

Redefining confidence

Katty Kay and Claire Shipman (authors of The Confidence Code) define confidence as “the stuff that turns thoughts into action.” It grows through doing hard things, not people praising you. Shields calls it a “brick wall”: every stretch, success or failure, lays another brick. The science backs her up—women’s confidence grows sharply in their 40s and 50s (Zenger/Folkman), and the healthiest confidence admits “I don’t know” because it trusts the ability to learn. Estrogen shifts may even reduce people-pleasing, Kay suggests, freeing space for clearer boundaries.

Practice reps: say no and say something

Shields used that confidence to do two hard things repeatedly. First, she said no when the project was wrong—even walking away from a 16-film Hallmark deal when the work lost its promised comedy. Second, she said something when others tried to steer her—kindly asking her husband to stop “guiding,” and telling producers when a script needed punch-ups. Neither move is earth-shattering; both are muscles you build through use.

Navigating the double standard

Women’s authority is still policed. A study found middle-aged women are judged as “less warm” when they display agentic traits, even as their expertise and confidence rise (Organizational Behavior & Human Decision Processes). Shields calls it out and continues anyway. She jokes she’s in her “fuck-it era,” but it’s not apathy—it’s calibrated care: choosing where your energy actually changes outcomes.

Build your bank

• Pick a rep you can win this week. Speak up once in a meeting. Decline one misfit ask. The point isn’t scale; it’s momentum.
• Audit your “volatile confidence.” If compliments (or likes) dictate your mood, replace external triggers with process goals you control.
• Use data. When you push back—at work, in policy, online—anchor your point in facts (as Shields did with PPD). Opinions trigger defensiveness; data invites correction or action.

(Compare: Tara Mohr’s Playing Big teaches similar “small wins” to grow voice; Brene Brown’s “clear is kind” echoes Shields’s boundary-setting with loved ones.)

If there’s one arena where midlife clarity must become courage, it’s healthcare. Shields details multiple episodes that would rattle anyone—and shows how self-advocacy changes outcomes. In her 30s, a cone biopsy removed nearly her entire cervix to stop precancer—but no one told her the scar tissue could complicate future conception. Later, after two years of “not-not-trying,” a fertility specialist discovered the problem and had to implant an embryo through her belly button. She miscarried at three months while backstage with Mr. Snuffleupagus at a charity event—anguish layered on top of medical omissions that should never have happened.

When the system fails—and blames

Years later, a male surgeon performed an aggressive labiaplasty she hadn’t consented to, then proudly announced he also “tightened” her, as if gifting her a younger vagina. It left sex more painful for years. Fast forward to 2021: she snapped her femur on a balance board, and an ankle surgeon on call operated—incorrectly. When excruciating pain followed, she had to insist on a second X-ray; it revealed a bone segment had popped loose. A new specialist repaired it properly. Then came a staph infection at an IV site (after staff ignored her “this is itchy” warnings), a blood clot, and an anesthesiologist who told her she was “lucky” in life—right before putting a needle in her neck.

Finally, days before her Carlyle show, she collapsed in a Manhattan restaurant with a grand mal seizure—triggered by dangerously low sodium after overhydration in a heat wave. In the ambulance, she woke to Bradley Cooper holding her hand, then endured ER doctors assuming she was crash-dieting salt to be skinny on stage. She wasn’t—“Salt is like Botox for me.” She was working, hydrating, sweating, and not eating much from nerves. The dismissiveness was as maddening as the misdiagnoses.

The bias is real (and measurable)

Studies show clinicians underrate women’s displayed pain compared to men’s, women with chest pain wait longer for evaluation and are more likely to be labeled “anxious,” and Black patients are 40 percent less likely to receive medication for acute pain. Shields’s stories are not celebrity outliers; they’re the gendered pattern many women know too well.

Scripts that work in the room

• Name what you’re doing. “I want to be sure I’m giving fully informed consent. Can you walk me through risks, alternatives, and expected recovery?”
• Ask for diagnostics, not debate. “This pain is not normal for me. I’d like another X-ray. I can pay if needed.” Shields’s calm insistence surfaced a surgical error.
• Document and escalate. If the IV site looks inflamed, ask to move it; if refused, ask the charge nurse. Keep your own notes on symptoms/timing.
• Use your ears as tools. Shields listened to hallway huddles, then asked pointed questions: “If you’re monitoring X, does that mean we’ll do Y?”

The mindset shift

Shields urges you to drop the “good girl” script at the clinic door. Being labeled “difficult” is often just code for effective. As she tells her daughters: loud, if necessary. Ask until you’re clear. And if a clinician is condescending, consider switching. You’re not being precious; you’re preserving your health.

(Compare: Maya Dusenbery’s Doing Harm chronicles systemic bias in women’s medicine and offers complementary advocacy tactics.)

Shields knows what it’s like to have your face become your currency. She was once “the face of the ’80s,” yet often felt her body didn’t belong—rejected as “not runway” and publicly measured by Barbara Walters at age 15 on national TV. That split—face adored, body policed—seeded decades of self-critique familiar to many women. Midlife has given her a better lens: appreciation for a body that danced, birthed babies (through hard-won IVF), healed from trauma, and can still carry her into the future.

See yourself with kinder eyes

She references Dove’s “Real Beauty Sketches,” where women described harsh, inaccurate self-portraits while strangers offered kinder—and more accurate—descriptions. Shields channels that energy in real time: when supermodel Helena Christensen gushes about her butt, she lets Helena’s voice drown out the inner critic. The science aligns: past 40, most adults feel about 20 percent younger than their age (“subjective age”), which correlates with better health and longevity, even if the mirror sometimes surprises you.

Aging choices without the shame

She’s refreshingly pragmatic. Spanx hacks? Yes—she literally tapes thigh skin for a knee lift. Fraxel to even skin tone? Yes. Roots dyed, for now? Yes. Surgical line-chasing to erase her history? No. Her aim is to look like her—a “more detailed painting,” not a newly minted avatar. And she rejects the damned-if-you-do trap: women are shamed for looking older and shamed for interventions. Her rule: choose what makes you feel more like yourself and own it.

Strength over smallness

Breaking her femur reframed exercise—from “what makes me smaller?” to “what keeps me moving?” She favors dance, long walks, Pilates, some weights: mobility and joy over punishment. She wants to get on the floor with grandkids one day and get back up without drama. That’s a goalpost you can actually train toward—regardless of your size.

Markets got it wrong (and you don’t have to)

The beauty and fashion industries still chase 18–34 while women 50+ control a gigantic share of spending. That mismatch helped spark Shields’s company, Commence, focused on scalp health and aging hair. It also clarifies your personal playbook: stop waiting for ads to see you; design your own protocol for feeling good in your skin.

(Context: Compare Nora Ephron’s wry acceptance in I Feel Bad About My Neck—laughing while still buying the scarf.)

Shields’s first hot flash hit while filming Daisy Winters in a hot car under lights: sweat like a faucet, scenes delayed, shame rising. She didn’t recognize it as perimenopause—proof that even savvy women can be underinformed. That’s not accidental: many physicians receive little formal training in menopause; two-thirds of women 40–64 never discuss it with providers. When the transition arrived in earnest—night sweats, sleep turbulence—Shields worked with her gynecologist on low-dose bioidentical estrogen and progesterone to smooth the cliff into a slope.

Name it, learn it

Perimenopause can last years, with fluctuating cycles, temperature dysregulation, mood changes, skin and hair shifts. Knowledge helps: women already in or past menopause tend to view it more neutrally than those anticipating it (the “it’s not as bad as you think” effect). Dr. Suzanne Gilberg-Lenz (author of Menopause Bootcamp) calls it “the puberty of midlife” and reports feeling steadier, more creative, and more herself afterward.

What helps in practice

• Medical options. Low-dose hormones (when appropriate), SSRIs/SNRIs for vasomotor symptoms, vaginal estrogen for dryness and pain, and thyroid assessment, all discussed with a clinician.
• Lifestyle levers. Sleep-protective routines, strength training, cooling layers (or good AC), and community—because social support improves mental health during the transition.
• Language upgrades. Shields jokes she won’t call it “dry shampoo” for Commence; she prefers “instant shampoo.” Words matter. So does refusing to reduce this era to flashes and jokes.

Beyond symptoms: identity

Menopause coincided with Shields’s daughters getting their first periods—the baton pass laid bare. She mourned the end of fertility (potential is a powerful drug), but she also saw what opened: more artistry, a louder voice, and fewer obligatory timelines. Meanwhile, culture is (slowly) catching up: Oprah’s masterclass, Naomi Watts’s Stripes (menopause solutions), Halle Berry’s policy push, and a bipartisan US bill proposing $275 million for menopause research and training.

(Compare: Ada Calhoun’s Why We Can’t Sleep ties midlife stress to stacked expectations—and suggests invisibility can be used as leverage.)

One of Shields’s most delightful surprises of midlife is making a best friend now. After a guest stint on Ali Wentworth’s sitcom Nightcap, the two clicked—hard. Their comedic chemistry (Brooke’s dorky looseness, Ali’s razor timing) became a real-world rhythm: co-panelists, co-conspirators, families interlacing (her husband Chris and George Stephanopoulos swap headlines and jokes). Research says older adults often have more close friendships and greater satisfaction with them; quality outranks quantity, and new friends carry less baggage.

Make new besties (you can)

Shields thought she was “set” socially; then Ali happened. New friends meet you where you are now. They don’t freeze-frame you in high school. That matters when you’re changing quickly.

Let them fly—and feel everything

Dropping her eldest, Rowan, at Wake Forest gutted Shields. She sobbed the “saddest drive away,” then faced the new emptiness again when Rowan studied abroad and again when Grier left. Dual truths coexisted: fierce pride and aching loss. She kept her tether light—encouraging Rowan to stay in Florence when homesickness hit, while still FaceTiming (and, for Rowan’s Type 1 diabetes, monitoring lows via phone, per agreed rules).

Rediscover yourself (alone is not lonely)

With the house quiet, Shields returned to dance classes—samba, West Coast swing, Lindy—and learned to love unstructured solitude. She took her first truly solo days abroad, wandering Florence with a beer by the Duomo, unrecognized under a cap and glasses. Solitude, used well, is associated with competence, self-growth, and autonomy—especially in midlife.

Adult-to-adult with your kids

The relationship changes shape. Sometimes your kids teach you. When Shields steamed about Grier “stealing” her Dior and Chanel, Grier’s tearful truth bomb landed: “You’re going to die one day—and your Hermès bags are gathering dust. Wear your things.” The lesson? Stop saving joy for later. Shields started carrying the bags.

(Compare: Kelly Corrigan’s Tell Me More models adult-to-adult parenting language—“I hear you,” “I don’t know,” “Tell me more.”)

Shields redefines ambition as alignment, not accolade-chasing. She once believed “serious actress” meant Oscar-bait roles she wasn’t landing (Uma Thurman got Dangerous Liaisons). Comedy on Suddenly Susan shifted everything: she discovered what she’s best at—timing, physicality, punch-ups—and stopped apologizing for loving it. Ambition became doing impactful work she enjoys and building a life that lasts.

Build the thing you don’t see

Commence was born from two forces: her audience of women over 40, hungry for community and straight talk, and a glaring product gap around aging hair and scalp health. She self-funded early with a legal settlement (a brand had named eyebrow pencils after celebrities—including a “Brooke S.”—without permission). Then came the hard part: fundraising.

Money and power dynamics

Celebrity opens doors; it doesn’t close deals. Shields and partner Karla De Bernardo (a consumer-goods operator) pitched through condescension and “advice” she didn’t ask for (down to font size). She kept it classy—and clear: “I’m asking for money, not your opinion.” She also learned to decline the wrong “yes”—not all money is good money. Statistically, her timing is on point: the average successful founder is 45; women still get a sliver of VC funding, but the opportunity to build for overlooked markets is real.

Meaning as a health metric

After a year of balance-board rehab, the ER seizure with Bradley Cooper by her side, and weeks alone in hospitals, mortality is no abstraction for Shields. She cites research showing “presence of meaning” peaks around 60 and correlates with physical and mental health. Her response: fewer “shoulds,” more “want to’s.” She even said no to a dreamy Sondheim concert with Cynthia Erivo and Susan Boyle—because her body told her she’d feel only panic and relief. Watching from the audience would bring more joy than performing.

Use strategic softness

At pitch tables, she deploys what Adam Grant calls “weak language” (hedges, questions) as tactics—not self-diminishment—to get men past their processing of “Brooke Shields” and into the merits. Once the first 15 minutes of celebrity static clears, business begins.

(Compare: Anne Lamott’s “No is a complete sentence” complements Shields’s joyful selectivity.)