The fine art of not 'being nice'

Monthly newsletter, May 2025

Read through for event/ conference news and reading/ Substack recommendations. This message is likely to be truncated in your inbox by your email provider (especially if it’s the dreaded Gmail …) so please click on the title to go through to Substack and read the Full Monty in your browser. And while you’re there, do join the conversation and leave a comment!

Dear friends

Here, down by the river in the Beauteous Vale, the cuckoo has arrived. Which is joyful, but we’re currently having August in April and May, which is not. I’m finding the constant sun and the heat and the weeks-long lack of rain very trying. (Having temperatures in the twenties in the far north of England in April – and for days on end – is so far beyond bonkers I can’t even think of a word to express it.) The ‘wider world’ isn’t helping, as I’m quite sure all of you will be experiencing too. And ever since I was dragged kicking and screaming over the threshold of my sixties, when I find things quite so very trying I get grumpy, and don’t feel obliged to ‘nice it over’ like I used to.

It’s such a strange thing, that loosening of inhibitions as women get older. Having always been far too careful throughout my life so far, I love it and find it immensely freeing, but it also terrifies me sometimes, because I’m just not always sure what I’m going to say or do. It’s not that I don’t have control: I do, and can be beautifully in control whenever I need to be. It’s that I don’t always feel that I need to be, any more. I don’t always want the control. I want to say what I really think and feel. I absolutely want to say it kindly and thoughtfully whenever that’s possible, but when I get petty pushback or served up a hefty dose of bullshit, I feel absolutely no obligation to tell myself ‘Oh, just be nice’. All this is quite different from menopausal rage, because I passed through and out of that stage a long time ago; it’s also very far from an actively stroppy ‘I’m old enough to say and do what I want’ foot-stomping kind of silliness. It’s neither a decision nor an affectation: it seems to stem from a genuine shift in my interior world. As I’ve grown older, I’ve found I’m just not quite the same person any more.

This is all an enormous revelation for me. When I was sixteen, a family friend took my best pal and me to one side and informed us that ‘the problem with us’ was that we were ‘too nice’ and we’d never get anywhere in life precisely because we were ‘too nice’. We needed to stop being too nice, and live a little. It was an odd but memorable moment, and I’m happy to advise that we both went on being too nice, which was undoubtedly a fine thing because it had already become quite clear to us both, even at sixteen, that there were going to be quite enough total assholes in the world without the need for us to add to the population. And I’m also happy to say that we both lived more than a little. A. ended up as a TV news anchor then retrained midlife as a barrister, and is still the nicest person I know. And me – well, you all know my story by now. We both achieved many of the things we might ever have wanted to achieve in our lives, and many things we never even dreamt of, and serially – in spite of once being labelled as too nice. (And in spite of us both growing up in circumstances that were, though in different ways, decidedly less than ideal.) But that family friend had one thing right: being ‘too nice’ for too long definitely and always comes at a cost. Maybe being unleashed in your sixties comes at a cost, too, but I haven’t crossed any major lines yet. Yet.

When I was researching and writing my last book, Wise Women, I spent, as you’ll all know by now, over five years poring through arcane books of European myth and folklore for stories about older women. (And I still can’t seem to stop!) What I found is that European myth and folklore is filled with older women who are kind, supportive, funny, generous and nurturing – but it’s also filled with older women who are really just tired of everyone’s shit.* I particularly adore the granny in ‘Little Golden Hood’, an old English version of Red Riding Hood, who is so very tired of the wolf’s shit that she sets fire to him, catches him in a sack as he runs shrieking out of the door, then throws him down a well and drowns him. Oh, there are days when I am that granny, and that granny is me.

There’s the ever-glorious Baba Yaga, of course: the fierce old Slavic woodswoman who’d roast you in her man-sized oven as soon as look at you. In a very excellent old tale from the lands of my birth in north-eastern England, there’s the shapeshifting witch-hare who, instead of being shot by the farmer who hides in his field to catch her in the act of sucking the milk from his cows – as the usual version of this story goes – turns the tables on him, frightens the bejaysus out of him, and sends him running out of the field screaming. Go, women of the North. And, in a story from the Nenets people of Siberia, there’s an unnamed old woman who I call Grandmother Snow, who tests three sisters to see whether they’re suitable wives for her son, Kotura, Lord of the Winds. Two of them do a particularly poor job of it, and she doesn’t hesitate for a moment: she slings them out of the nice warm tent to land deep in a snowdrift and perish. This is what I wrote in the commentary to that particular tale:

[I]n contrast to some of the kindlier mentors in the ‘Gifts for the Young’ section of this book, when Grandmother Snow finds her subjects lacking, there’s a ruthless inevitability to the trajectory of the fate which follows. Like winter itself, she’s uncompromising. She rewards kindness and courage handsomely when eventually she finds it, but she has no truck with laziness, lies, callousness or self-centredness. But those are exactly the qualities she finds in the first two daughters in this story: they disobey their father, slap away a tiny bird caught in a storm, throw food away rather than bother taking it to someone who might need it, and refuse to stop what they’re doing for a couple of minutes to help an old woman remove a painful mote from her eye. In the clear-cut, elemental world of the fairy tale, the unfortunate consequence for such behaviour is death.

After emerging from the purging fires of menopause, most women find themselves profoundly changed. From the beginning of our perimenopausal years, the hormones that are associated with what we think of as ‘feminine qualities’ – relationality, emotion, the drive to nurture and to avoid conflict – are in serious decline. And so, as we pass through menopause and grow into elderhood, we’re likely to have considerably less patience with those who are economical with the truth or who try to take advantage of us, and we suffer fools much less gladly. After decades of taking care of others or of deference towards them, we begin to realise that the maintenance of their happiness and self-esteem at the cost of our own is no longer our raison d’être. Being nice is no longer a life goal.

That doesn’t, of course, mean that kindness and compassion have entirely fallen away from us: rather, they’re more selectively bestowed on those who are deserving. It’s wise to forgive genuine mistakes and understandable failures of courage, and we would all, where we can, benefit from instructing rather than destroying. But it’s also important to reward the wide range of behaviours that serve life and not to reward the behaviour that doesn’t. In that way, older women become flagbearers for the positive moral qualities which have always enriched the world.

Yeah.

And it’s that ‘flagbearer for the positive moral qualities which have always enriched the world’ thing that’s showing up more strongly than anything else as I continue to delve deeply into European folklore for more stories with younger female heroines, for that book I’m finishing just now. It’s not so much that these younger heroines have, like many of their older counterparts, eschewed the idea of ‘being nice as a life goal’. It’s that the stories show them actively embodying those positive moral qualities that are so beloved of the Baba Yagas and Grandmother Snows: those qualities of spirit and character that have always made the world go round. Care for community, mutual respect, reciprocity – and very many more, but you’re going to have to wait for the book for all the rest :-)

Here’s the thing: almost all fairy tales are set in dangerous and volatile eras, just like the times we’re facing today. Such times are always going to be populated not only by unforeseen friends offering unanticipated alliances, but by an army of enemies, tricksters and other shady characters who don’t remotely have our best interests at heart. Nevertheless, our fairy-tale heroine always manages to find her way through the dark forest, and she achieves this not as a consequence of what she says, but of what she does, and of who she is shown in the end to be. Encoded within these strange and beautiful old stories, then, is information about the behaviours and qualities of character that will help us to forge a safe, solid and meaningful path through all manner of testing times. They insist that we do the work, that we challenge ourselves, and that we ask ourselves the toughest question of all: when we’re standing face-on to a ravaged and broken world, when we’re homeless and helpless and filled with anxiety about the future, how do we choose to live? The question isn’t just about how we survive, but, as I wrote in a recent article here, how we survive with integrity – and then, how we take our life into our hands and fashion from the wreckage something that’s both meaningful and beautiful. And that, it seems to me, is the Big Question each of us is facing as we stumble on, half-blind, through the ever-darkening woods of these especially Interesting Times.

Until next month, as always, I wish you all the blessings of whichever season – of your life and of the world – you find yourselves living through. And a nice strong sack in which to trap your wolf, and an even nicer dark, deep well to drown the bastard in.

Sharon

* A reminder, for those of you who might be new here, that paying subscribers have access to a booklet of five all-new exclusive stories about wise women, with commentaries, which complement those I included in the book. You can find the booklet here, entitled Old Wives’ Tales. And I’ll be expanding it with a handful of new ones to celebrate the launch of the Virago paperback edition of the book at the beginning of October. More of which, next month.

Illustration for Wise Women by Joe McLaren. Great granny boots!

Goddess-Makers in an Age of Autocrats: the power of the creative feminine to re-shape the world

Mark your calendars for this brilliant forthcoming event which will be hosted by Pacifica Graduate Institute, California, and for which I’m thrilled to bits to be giving one of the keynotes. It’s taking place from September 26–28, and you can either register live, at Pacifica’s beautiful Ladera Lane campus in Santa Barbara, or online for the livestream. (Sadly this time I can’t be there in person but they will be livestreaming my talk.)

‘In an era marked by the resurgence of authoritarianism, the creative feminine emerges as a force of transformation, resistance, and renewal. Goddess-Makers in an Age of Autocrats explores the depth psychological dimensions of the archetypal feminine—its capacity to shape culture, inspire justice, and reimagine collective futures in the face of oppressive systems. … Steeped in Jungian psychology, feminist theory, and mythology, the event features keynotes by Susan Rowland, Sharon Blackie, and Elizabeth Nelson, plus lively panels, workshops, and performances that span ancient deities to modern visionaries.’

Sign up for Pacifica’s email list to be kept informed when registration opens.

Other events

I’m planning on a lovely, quiet, event-free time this summer while I polish up the manuscript of that next book, but here are a couple of things that are happening in the next few months. Expect more to be added in the autumn.

This Sunday! May 5, 12 noon. Live at Wigtown Spring Book Festival, Main Hall, speaking about the trajectory of my work on women and the archetypal feminine in myth and fairy tales, from If Women Rose Rooted onwards. Book here.

May 10, 10.30–12.00 Central time. Online lecture: Minnesota Jung Association. ‘Hagitude: an archetypal analysis of older women in European myth and folklore’. Book here.

June 26, 17.00 – 19.00 (UK time). Online lecture: Ukrainian Psychotherapeutic League. ‘Why Women Need Fairy Tales Now.’

November 22, 14.00 – 16.00 (UK time). Online lecture: The Guild of Pastoral Psychology. ‘Older Women in European Myth and Fairy Tales: An Archetypal Analysis.’ Information here.

Reading recommendations

Here are the most recent arrivals to my reading pile right now:

Women Who Wear Only Themselves by Arundhathi Subramaniam came winging its way across the pond from the fine people at HarperOne, and is a fascinating book which brings together the voices of four women mystics – ‘women who choose to live in relative seclusion and shadow, and yet burn brightly’ – walking very different spiritual paths: Sri Annapurani Amma, Balarishi Vishwashirasini, Lata Mani and Maa Karpoori. Although I tend to focus my work and practice around traditions that derive from or are embedded in the West rather than looking to Eastern practices that aren’t my own, a quick dip inside nevertheless brought it right to the top of my pile. This beautiful paragraph, from the Preface, really struck me, because it’s so relevant to our discussions on women’s spirituality on the Temenos thread over at The Hearth:

‘[T]hese are exceptional women. Women who do not offer sops or greetings-card homilies, but a head-earned wisdom, as they navigate their lives of daily reinvention. Women of grit, women of imagination. Women who do not offer conclusion, but continuum – glimpses of life lived out in the present continuous. Women who know faith not by obedience to theory or scriptural scholarship, but through lived experience. Quiet, daily experience. Women who have cast aside costume. Women who refuse to wear borrowed plumes – of passively inherited faith or unexamined piety.’

Crooked Cross is the latest from the very wonderful English indie publisher Persephone Books. I hope they’ll be familiar to many of you, as they specialise in reprints of neglected fiction and non-fiction by women writers mostly dating from the mid-twentieth century. This novel describes, through the eyes of one ordinary family, the Nazis’ growth in power in Germany between December 1932 and August 1933. It was originally published in 1934, but none of you will be missing the shiver-inducing resonances for current times.

And finally: many of you will know my old friend Christine Valters Paintner, of the Abbey of the Arts; we’ve recorded a few conversations together over the years. Christine has just written and published a teaching story, ‘Journey to Joy: A Fairy Tale for Thresholds and Transitions’. It’s a small hardback, beautifully illustrated by Domenique Serfontein, and you can find out more about it here.

Great stuff on Substack

A couple of things to share with you that have stayed in my heart for a while recently:

This searing, gorgeous, heartfelt piece by

elizabeth grey

inspired by Virginia Giuffre made me cry a bit and rage a whole lot, but more than that, it made me remember how very brave and beautiful women can be. Find it here and do take the time; it’s very much worth the read.

This piece from

Elissa Altman

about navigating expectations, dealing with disappointment and just doing the work is very wise.

And finally, I just want to draw your attention to my very favourite Substack: Going Solo at the End of the World, by Marya Hornbacher. If you’re in this place to be surprised by fine writing, try this. She conjures atmosphere like no one else and, as well as the fact that she always makes me nostalgic for the six years I spent in America, every piece is very full of surprising, fine writing.