- The book kind of came about
from a little bit of a negative, weird place
- Yeah
- Interviews changed for you when you turned what?
39 - [Cameron] 39, yeah.
When I was 39 I started getting all these questions
for the journalists when I would do press
for a film, they'd go,
Are you scared?
And I'd be like what?
Of what?
And they're like,
Are you scared you're gonna turn 40?
And I was like
Why would I be, what do you mean?
What are you talking about?
I'm like I'm excited about 40, should I be scared?
And I realized that really what they were saying was
now that you're 40 and you're an actress in Hollywood
the death of your career is eminent.
They weren't saying like, are you feeling ok?
Is your health declining?
How's your bones?
They were not asking about that.
- They were not asking about your health
or mental well-being.
They were like are you scared you won't have a job.
- Exactly, because I don't look 25 anymore.
And I was like that's ridiculous that
that's a concern, I should be concerned with that.
And it made me want to change
the conversation about aging.
I want us, all of us women to take it
into our own hands and instead of being ashamed
of aging, we should go forward empowered with it.
And once you do that,
- And finding beauty in every age.
[Audience applause]
Especially women you think 40,
you think 50, you think oh my God death.
Women are so afraid of wrinkles,
of this, of that, of this drooping or shifting.
It was really empowering, it's a page turner
and honestly I laughed
I didn't cry, it wasn't scary.
- No this is very optimistic, it's a hopeful book.
- Super optimistic and it ends just by example
with an amazing poem by a woman
who didn't write poetry until she was 90.
- Yeah, Peggy Friedman.
- I was just blown away and it made me enthusiastic.
When I put the book down I'm like
man, I'm gonna be awesome at 50!
[laughter]
- That is exactly what you should be doing
because we do think about aging,
when I was a child 60 looked like 80.
Now 60 looks like 45, 50.
There are women out there who,
we have different information then we did
20 years ago.
And the fact as you said that we should be,
I say that we should be celebrating our midlife.
- She says midlife crisis, it's blacked out
it says midlife celebration.
You don't understand it's a privilege.
[Audience applause]
- Because just 150 years ago
women only lived to be 40, so 40 was not midlife
40 was end of life.
So I think its's a privilege to get to grow older.
I know so many people who didn't get to grow older
because if you're not aging there's only one
other thing that's happened to you.
And it's not such, none of us want that right now.
- That's not the solution!
- That's not the solution.
It is really about embracing it,
it isn't anti-aging, it's about it's pro aging
in the way of the best that you can possibly do.
And you can't do that without the information
so we talk from everything about,
because for me it's really about the cells.
Your whole body's made up of trillion of cells
and specialized cells so your heart are all heart cells.
This is one of the things I thought
was really very interesting.
Female cells are different then men cells, male cells.
So female cells are all female and men's are all male.
Does that make sense?
So your heart is different than a man's,
because of the cells are different.
We're smaller, we have more fine arteries
which makes it more difficult to look
for heart disease in a woman
so that's something you would have to know
as you get older
is how to take the signs of heart disease
which are different than men.
And because research is different
research is done mostly on men
and not on women,
we get prescribed medication to women
in dosages that were tested on men
not on women so there's alot
of overdosing because of it.
- So the whole medical profession is changing
it's the end of the bikini medicine right?
- The bikini medicine, yes.
- Because for decades they thought that
the male and the female were only different in
the bikini area - [Cameron] Because of our organs
- of their sex organs, right.
And now science has come to this point
where it's just fascinating.
We're growing by leaps and bounds.
- We can see deeper inside ourselves than ever before
- It's really cool.
Honestly I never thought science
would be a page turner.
It was so fantastic.