I first met Tova Leigh at the launch of her first book, Fucked at 40, which as the title suggests is a rather no holds barred look at some of the things Tova had experienced in her then 40 years.

I liked how forthright, fun, and funny she was, and put her on my wish list of guests to come on the podcast. The pandemic slightly thwarted our efforts to have a chat, so in the end, we recorded this episode over zoom.

In it, Tova explains how she went from a studious married woman living in Jerusalem to a divorcee in London, before meeting her husband Mike and going on to have three children. Does that sound like a neat and rounded off happy ending after which our heroine rides off into the sunset? Probably, but Tova, being the boldly honest woman she is, adds nuance, talking about the mental and physical trauma of having children, the need to travel away from them sometimes to reconnect with herself, and the desire that, despite loving them, they’d on occasion, in Tova’s words, ‘just fuck off.’

We also talk about enjoying rather than performing sex, how she navigates representing her relationship online, and how Tova has used the very same face cream since she was 20.

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