Jody Day

1. Please tell us a bit about yourself and your work.
In 2011, when I was 46, I was so fed up with trying to explain how I felt about not becoming a mother (after 15 years of hoping, trying and dreaming) that I gave up talking about it. Whether it was doctors, therapists, friends, family or strangers, I kept hearing the same things: “Oh, children aren’t all they’re cracked up to be!” or “Why don’t you just adopt?”, or any of the many other gobsmacking expressions that I later learned from the childfree community are called ‘bingos’. So I took to the page, and started a new personal blog called ‘Gateway Women’, and wrote frankly about what it was like to be a middle-aged, divorced, single, childless-not-by-choice woman in a world that seemed to have gone batshit motherhood-crazy. I thought maybe three people would read it, so I enjoyed myself designing the look of it, and used my real name and photo; I had no idea I was breaking a huge taboo not only in being open about my experience of childlessness, but not hiding my identity either. At that time, apart from a couple of blogs written by married heterosexual women coming to terms with childlessness after failed fertility treatments, mine was the first to talk about being single and ‘childless by circumstance’. Much to my surprise, my words went a bit viral as I, and my readers, discovered that we were not the only childless women in the world; it just felt like that to us.
 

That was 13 years ago now, and since then I’ve written three editions of my best-selling book Living the Life Unexpected, given two TEDx talks, been interviewed on TV, radio, podcasts and in print around the world, started the private Gateway Women online community (now hosted by Katy Seppi’s Childless Collective), led year-long mentorship programs and pioneered a healing and transformational weekend for childless women called the Reignite Weekend - and more. Having seen so many blogs go silent once the writers had healed sufficiently from their grief, I was determined not to do the same, and to make sure that I left behind something that’d be there for the next generation of childless women to find when they needed it - those women who could have been my daughters, in another life. And now I’m focusing on the next part of my, and hopefully all of our life-long journeys of childlessness, with my Gateway Elderwomen project. Many younger childless women have said to me how grateful they are that I’m now focusing on this so that by the time they’re older, I will have laid the groundwork for them. In recent years, I’ve often been referred to as the ‘founder of the childless movement’ and I guess that’s got a lot to do with my long service to the cause!

2. Has writing always been a focus for you or was it a Plan B?
It was always my dream to be a writer when I grew up, a novelist in fact. (Although I did also have a fantasy of being the Editor of Cosmopolitan, the magazine that my young mother read, and driving a whizzy little MGB sports car!) And although writing was a big part of every job I did in my career in the design and communications fields, it wasn’t until I started blogging about my experience of childlessness that my passion and ability came together to create what I can now identify as my ‘voice’ on the page. I’m still hoping to be a novelist too though, and I’ve been working on one featuring a childless heroine for several years now. So, in a way, my Plan B brought me back to my Plan A all along. Sometimes I slightly regret the ‘Plan B’ subtitle of the first two editions of my book (the 3rd edition has a different one) as it can make the idea of recovery from childlessness sound quite binary. However, I often say that if I’m on my Plan B, it’s only because I’m on my second trip through the alphabet!

3. How do you explore ideas or find inspiration for your work?
Before I began my recovery from childlessness, and whilst still in deep grief and despair about my life, I felt that I was a failed human project and no longer had any trust in my intuition or abilities. So why would anybody want to read anything I might possibly have to say? Starting my Gateway Women blog in 2011, as opposed to writing endlessly in my journal, was the beginning of rebuilding faith in myself, and learning to trust and nurture my creativity once more. As my healing deepened, so did my creativity, and these days, I’m saturated in inspiration. In fact, I now feel I probably have more ideas for books (both fiction and non-fiction) inside me than I have life left to write them.
 

In terms of exploring and developing those ideas, I still find that publishing authentic and vulnerable essays, just as I began on the Gateway Women blog, and then engaging with those who comment is a powerful way to expand and refine my thinking and writing. Currently on Substack, many of the readers are writers themselves, and thus the commenting culture is thoughtful and constructive; it’s like having an online writer’s group to workshop my ideas, and it’s helping me to bring into focus the outline for my next non-fiction book.

Writing isn’t something I do; it’s who I am. Without it, I feel disconnected from my source of meaning and, having fought so hard to find meaning in my life again as a childless woman, I treasure it with all my heart.

4. What does the process of writing involve for you?
The biggest hurdle is finding the time as I’m asked to do a lot of things to continue the conversation that my work started - what many people now call the ‘childless movement’ - appearing on podcasts, talking to journalists, helping emerging voices, building connections, speaking at conferences, being a World Childless Week Ambassador, writing pieces like this, etc. - most of which is unpaid. But once I do manage to carve out the time, the key for me is in allowing myself to write, as Anne Lamott brilliantly advised in Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, ‘Shitty First Drafts’. A profound part of my healing from childlessness has been to develop a loving ‘inner mother’ voice through the practice of self-compassion, aided by the teachings of Kristin Neff, and as outlined in Chapter 9 of my book. One of the unexpected side-effects of this is that I am much kinder to myself as a writer, and don’t allow my inner critic (or inner editor) to shame and judge me into silence before I’ve even finished the first draft. As Anne Lamott explains, unlike a sculptor, who starts with clay or stone, a writer has to first create their raw material - their ‘shitty first draft’ and only once that’s done is it helpful to allow ourselves to critique and improve it.

5. And what does writing then also give you in return?
This might sound melodramatic, but I don’t think I could survive being me without my writing; it helps give shape to my inner world, and to untangle my response to the outer one. People often call my work ‘brave’ in that I often dive head first into what turn out to be social taboos; what they don’t realise is that when I’m not writing, I feel like I’ve got my shoes on the wrong feet all day. I write to survive this crazy-making world we live in, and hopefully to help others make some sense of it all too.

6. Has seeing your work in print changed how you view yourself, and also how you view your NoMo status?
Seeing my blog picked up by readers and press all over the world, and the massive response to The Guardian article about me in 2012 was amazing. Finally, I no longer felt alone. When I held the first self-published version of my book (called Rocking the Life Unexpected) in my hands in 2013, I felt a deep sense of accomplishment and inner peace because I knew that I’d said in print what no-one had allowed me to say before - I mean, I barely used to be able to finish a sentence without being bingoed! And when it was picked up and republished by Bluebird/PanMacmillan in 2016 and then in a second edition in 2020, it reaffirmed to me that our stories matter. My work was never just about me it was always about us and I felt, and feel, deeply proud of making us more visible - both to each other and the over-culture. Thrillingly, there are now so many childless writers and offerings that it’s hard to keep up with them, and I’m always deeply touched when someone reaches out to me to share with me what my book, and the wider work of Gateway Women, has meant to them. I regularly review and write forewords for other childless people’s books too; my motto is ‘we rise together’ and so I do my best to champion emerging voices.

7. Tell us about the wider reception that you’ve had to sharing your story - has it changed how others have viewed you and your identity
as a non-parent?
In the early days of my writing and advocacy work, I did hope that sharing my story might change the way friends and family viewed me, and even help them to understand me better. I didn’t yet realise how powerful the forces of status quo pronatalism are and how naive I was; most of those people were personally invested in me not changing and remaining exactly who they thought I was! Sadly, rather than bringing friends closer, in my case, being open in print about my story led to the final stages of what I’ve termed the #FriendshipApocalypse of childlessness, in that many of my friends got rather defensive, and thus moved even further away to the very far reaches of my friendship galaxy, where they’ve happily spent the last 20 years hanging out with each other as families. It was crushingly hard at the time not to take this personally, and accepting those losses led to a few intensely lonely years, which also fed into me pouring my heart out on my blog, where I discovered that friendship losses are a near-universal experience for childless women; before that, I just presumed I’d failed at friendship too.

These days I have a much smaller circle of female friends (a few old friends who survived that time, and a few new ones too - some mothers, some not) and, although I am a naturally warm person, these days I’m more cautious about trusting people’s intentions, willingness and abilities to invest in friendships in a mutually satisfying way. Considering how many friendships my work has facilitated for others, I’m sad to say that hasn’t been the case for me, as it’s proved quite challenging to make friends with childless women who know me through my work. It seems that consciously or unconsciously, they can’t really ‘see’ me as anything other than the public persona I call ‘Red Jacket Jody’ but she’s just part of me, not all of me! (For example, I’m an introvert, which is not what those who know me from my ‘public’ work expect). Before Gateway Women, I’d never experienced any kind of role as a minor public figure, so I didn’t realise how isolating they can be.
 

Where I live now, deep in rural Ireland, very few people know about my work, and I’m enjoying meeting new people without that coming between us. And, as much as online friendships saved me and sustained me through my healing years, I’m now focusing on developing local, in-person, intergenerational connections; it’s also a crucial part of my plan for old age - you’ll be reading a lot about that in the years to come!

8. How do you feel about the current representation of childless and/or childfree people in literature?
I’ve definitely begun to see more NoMo characters in literature, and not as just as lazy ciphers for deviant women, but as complex human characters who just happen not to be mothers. Recently, I’ve been exploring fiction featuring older protagonists, and I’ve really enjoyed Alice Elliot Dark’s portrait of a lifelong friendship between a mother of three and her single, childless best friend in Fellowship Point (2024), the complex and ambiguous relationships between three women in their 70s (one of whom is childless) in Charlotte Wood’s The Weekend (2020) and a brilliant historical novel about the life of the 19th-century Anglo-Irish author Edith Somerville in Martina Devlin’s Edith: A Novel (2022). But, as I wrote in my essay for World Childless Week, ‘The Symbolic Annihilation of Childless Women in Films and Media’, unconscious and lazy pronatalist stereotyping is still the acceptable norm.

9. What would you like the publishing world to know about non-parents, both as writers and readers, and our stories?
In the UK, 16% (1 in 7) of women born in 1977 and turning 46 have reached midlife without children, some by choice, the majority by chance. However, the same ONS data also shows that 56% of women born in 1993, had not (yet) had children by the age of 30, which is much higher than ever before, and would suggest that the number of non-parents is likely to increase significantly over the next 15 years, and the UK may well reach the 1 in 4 already seen in Spain and Italy, and the 1 in 3 in Japan and some other advanced industrialised countries. Being a non-parent in a pronatalist culture has never been easy, but set against a backdrop of post-baby-boom population decline, and with limits to growth being reached in all areas of human society, non-parents today and in the future may well experience a significant cultural backlash, whether they chose childlessness or childlessness chose them. For this reason, I think we’ll see a huge increase in interest in novels and non-fiction by, for and about NoMos, and publishers would do well to seek out and nurture those voices.

10. What future plans do you have, especially for your writing?
Currently, I’m working on the third draft of my novel featuring a single, childless, mid-life, menopausal heroine; it’s a subversive romantic comedy and I’ve been working on it for eight years now and am keen to get it finished and out into the world so that Jennifer Anniston’s film production company will snap up the film rights… (Hey, a writer can dream!)

When I wrote Living the Life Unexpected over a decade ago, I wanted it to be the book I needed that would help me understand social, cultural and personal aspects of dealing with involuntary childlessness; now that I’m sixty, and dealing with the unholy trinity of ageism, sexism and pronatalism, I’m hoping that my emerging ‘Gateway Elderwomen’ project will seed the ideas and structure for my next non-fiction book. As with the early days of my blogging in 2011, the essays I’m publishing on this topic have been going viral on Substack, so I know there’s a real hunger for older NoMo voices and experiences too. I’d love to see more of those voices in print because so far, almost every non-fiction work I’ve read about female ageing presumes that the reader has children and has (or will have) grandchildren and that she has (or has had) a male partner; once again, we are invisible to the mainstream - and with an estimated projection that by 2030 there will be 2 million people in the UK aged 65 and over without children, that’s an awful lot of people to write out of the narrative.