Middle-Aged Women Get Sh*t Done

I’ll admit, I side-eyed the title at first—another book about women ‘juggling it all’? But *Middle-Aged Women Get Sh*t Done* surprised me by being neither a victim narrative nor a toxic positivity pep talk. Lucy Porter’s voice (and the narrator’s spot-on delivery) feels like a cross between Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s biting humor and Rebecca Solnit’s intellectual fury. The book’s structure smartly oscillates between anecdotal gold (the chapter on ‘mental load bingo’ had me pausing to text friends mid-listen) and hard data, making its arguments stick without feeling like a lecture. That said, the pacing stumbles slightly in the second act, where Porter’s deep dives into workplace discrimination and caregiving economics—while vital—risk losing the momentum of her earlier, punchier sections. The narration handles this shift unevenly: the performer nails the sarcastic asides but occasionally rushes through denser passages, leaving some of Porter’s sharper insights underemphasized. Still, the audiobook’s production shines in its use of tone—like when the narrator drops into a deadpan ‘well, *obviously*’ after listing another absurd expectation placed on women, mirroring the collective eyeroll of every listener who’s been there. My biggest critique? At 10 hours, it could’ve been tighter, but the payoff—especially the final chapter’s manifesto for ‘weaponized competence’—makes it worth the time. If you’ve ever been called ‘intimidating’ for knowing how a printer works, this is your battle cry.