Beach Book Club: Forty Favours the Brave
For this month’s Beach Book Club, we’re excited to feature Forty Favours the Brave by Lise Carlaw and Sarah Wills. Lise and Sarah, a.k.a Those Two Girls, are long time muses of ours here at UNE PIECE. To celebrate the launch of their brand new book, we interviewed them to learn a little bit more about how they forged their careers in the entertainment and media industry, their life mantras, and just what readers can expect from Forty Favours the Brave!
In a few short sentences, tell us a little bit about yourselves and how ‘Those Two Girls’ came to be.
At thirty-three, when our youngest children were four months old, we met in the flesh after being introduced online. It became a marathon five hours of non-stop talking and we often say we ‘fell in friendship love’ that night. In fact, it changed the course of our entire lives. After comparing notes on professional backgrounds and identifying a gap in the market for two female friends in the media and entertainment space, we formed as an emcee duo and also began producing our own sold-out events. About one year later, we were unexpectedly tapped on the shoulder by the head of Southern Cross Austereo’s HIT network who offered us our own radio show. Four years of local and national breakfast shows, two podcasts and a book later, here we are.
Who or what inspires you in your life and your work?
Our goal has always been to tell stories, create content, produce events we would want to consume, so our audiences (and soon to be readers) are a great sounding board for what hits and what doesn’t. We’ve always been one another’s true north when it comes to work, and reach higher when we’re together, plain and simple.
What is your Life Mantra?
We have many!
The ‘three second rule’: ask yourself a question and within three seconds, choose a yes or no. Your gut instincts are usually correct.
Decide, don’t just slide. Sometimes it’s so easy to just ride in the slipstream of life, but you do have to actively decide whether you’re on the right road.
You have permission to dream new dreams. Take UNE PIECE founder Carly – she was a senior marketing exec who decided to design, self-fund, and launch one sexy rashie a few years ago. That new dream turned out quite well, didn’t it?!
What can readers expect from your new book ‘Forty Favours the Brave’?
This book is for all the women between youth and old age who begin to wonder. It’s a collection of musings, advice, and real-life stories where we, along with women from all walks of life, share insightful tales about entering this decade: the lessons learned, heartbreaks survived, things we wish we’d known, relationship changes, confidence gained … and the surprising, wondrous joy of life in its second act. The dream is that Forty Favours the Brave becomes a go-to coming-of-age, milestone gift for women approaching or in their forties.
‘Forty Favours the Brave’ highlights the experiences of a range of women, from all walks of life. Was there, if any, common threads in their stories that you found insightful?
Yes! Women in their middle years are a force to be reckoned with. Let’s be honest: they’re sick of playing games and towing the lines of their youth. And the lack-lustre, matronly trope we’ve been sucked into just doesn’t apply to our generation. Our forties are so vastly different to that of our mothers’ and grandmothers’, so this second act is full of epiphanies and discovery.
How has the way that you approach milestone birthdays changed over the years?
Any birthday with a zero at the end tends to be a jolly good reason to check-in with yourself, but turning forty did feel different to twenty and thirty. We can both recall our own mothers’ fortieth birthday – and thought they were ancient! We have loved and lost people, some of whom were young. It’s why it felt extra special to celebrate hitting forty, with a heavy dollop of gratitude.
With a new book under your belt as well as your hit podcast ‘FORTY’, you seem to be going from strength to strength. What can we expect next and what are you excited for in the future?
We have no idea. If you turned back the clock a decade, while we were elbow deep in nappies and bleary-eyed from sleep deprivation and told us this is what we would be doing, we’d probably have asked what drugs you were on.
‘What? I’m going to meet a stranger on the internet, start a company with this random, quit my day job, host radio shows with no experience, interview Sarah Jessica Parker and Julie Bishop and Leigh Sales to crowds of thousands, and write a book from a podcast (what even is that?) about being forty… sure, mate.’
Isn’t that the exciting and terrifying thing about getting older? You just don’t know what’s around the corner.