One of the fun things about doing a podcast is that it gives me an excuse to catch up with people I haven't seen in 20 years. This week I get to reminisce with Kristen van Ogtrop, the former editor in chief of Real Simple and the author of the insightful and funny new memoir Did I Say That Out Loud?: Midlife Indignities and How to Survive Them.
Kristen and I first met in the halls of Conde Nasty, back when we were both editors at Glamour. She was intelligent, talented, and funny, and I would hang out in her office to tell her stories of my abysmal dating life. At the time, she was a young successful mom, and I remember thinking how grown up she was.
Cut to 20 years later. I still think Kristen's a lot more grown-up. During her 13-year reign at Real Simple, she created the #1 American women's lifestyle magazine brand with a print and digital reach of 25 million. The magazine received 15 National Magazine Awards nominations.
But in 2013, Kristen abruptly left Real Simple after being treated horribly by upper management. "They called me the blueberry muffin lady," she says in our interview. "Because the CEO would complain to me about how Real Simple spent as much money developing blueberry muffins recipes as Time magazine did in sending reporters to Iraq."
With the magazine business in shambles and her lofty position as editor in chief of a print magazine a dying profession, Kristen had to reinvent her career. But not before surviving some other midlife challenges, including accidentally swallowing part of a plastic fork and the tragic deaths of a good friend and a beloved dog.
She is now an author of two memoirs and a literary agent for Inkwell Management, representing memoirs, commercial women's fiction, humor, lifestyle, and big idea books driven by counterintuitive thinking.
Towards the end of our interview, I asked what advice the Kristen of yore, who patiently listened to my dating disaster stories back in the early 2000s, would give the modern-day Kristen.
She paused reflectively and said, "There's never going to be the perfect job, the perfect relationship, the perfect marriage, the perfect child, the perfect house, but I think for me, as I get older, good enough is good enough. You see enough shitty things as you get older that you're just grateful that you can put two feet on the floor every morning."
That sounds real simple.