Barbara Ballinger - Not Dead Yet: Rebooting Your Life After 50

Barbara Ballinger (Hudson River Valley, New York) is an award-winning freelance journalist, author, and reporter who has interviewed a variety of celebrities and experts from Tipper Gore to Martha Stewart, Danny Meyer, Rosalynn Carter, Lorraine Bracco, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Ruth Reichl. She has covered diverse topics from business to design, real estate, entertaining, food, law, and personal finance. Her work has appeared in publications such as the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Crains Chicago Business, HGTV, American Bar Association Journal, House Beautiful, Multifamily Executive, Developer, Realtor, Robb Report, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Travel & Leisure, Triple AAA magazine, Midwest Living, Units, and more. Of the 19 books she has authored, 10 have been with Margaret Crane. The first was Corporate Bloodlines: The Future of the Family Firm, and the most recent were Suddenly Single after 50 and The Kitchen Bible. She and Crane blog weekly at www.lifelessonsat50plus.com. Barbara has appeared on TV and radio, including a segment about remodeling disasters on The Oprah Winfrey Show, about the rise in multifamily living on Multifamily Matters, and with Crane on NPR about their last book. She formerly worked on staff at House & Garden Guides, part of Conde Nast, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper, and the National Association of Realtors magazine. She earned a BA in art history from Barnard College, Columbia University, an MA in art from Hunter College, City University of New York, and started work on her MBA.

Margaret Crane (New York, New York) is a nationally known freelance writer focusing on business, food, wine, fashion, home furnishings, and real estate. She has interviewed such luminaries as Jack Buck, Virginia Johnson, Sally Quinn, Moshe Dayan, Shimon Peres, Dr. Benjamin Spock, David Ben Gurion, Tippi Hedren, and many others. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Beverage Journals, Crains Chicago Business, Family Business Magazine, Inc. Magazine, Midwest Living, The New York Times, Newsweek, Realtor, St. Louis Business Journal, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, St. Louis Magazine, St. Louis Town & Style, The Wine Spectator, and Your Company. A proven author with 10 titles to her credit, Margarets latest books with Barbara are Suddenly Single After 50 and The Kitchen Bible. She formerly worked as a senior writer and researcher at a religious nonprofit, where she helped launch and maintain an award-winning website. Crane blogs weekly with Ballinger at www.lifelessonsat50plus.com. She has also appeared on TV and radio and with Ballinger, and has spoken around the country on becoming single, including on NPR and at Barnard College. She also writes website content and does editing for nonprofit organizations and for for-profit companies. In addition, Crane tutors public school children and works with kids in foster care in New York City. She holds a bachelors degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and started work on her masters degree in education to teach journalism, which she now uses in her work with children.

As life throws us curveballs when least expected, its up to us to hit them out of the park.

During the last few years, we have become better prepared to catch what comes our way whether it impacted our lives, our family and friends, or the planet, as the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 did. Isolated, we each worked alone on this book during that horrific period, fortunate to have the technology to send ideas and chapters back and forth and talk daily.

There are so many we wish to thank for help in navigating our journeys of the last few years. We start with our literary agent, Kelli Christiansen of Bibliobibuli. She has listened and laughed as we talked, sometimes ad nauseum, about how we had changed since we worked with her on our last book. She always shared her honest input, tweaked or even rewrote our copy, and was at the head of the line cheerleading for us when we finished a chapter or the manuscript. We are now a seasoned three-person team.

We thank our editor Suzanne Staszak-Silva at our publisher, Rowman & Littlefield, and her colleagues Melissa McClellan and Barbara Jarrett. We couldnt have done it without your comments, suggestions, patience, and compliments to keep us going. We also thank our many friends, work colleagues, tech gurus, acquaintances, and experts from so many different professions. You shared your stories and advice to provide us with greater depth and lessons that anyone alone and older might learn from. You read what we wrote to check quotes and attribution. Accuracy has always been very important to us. There are too many to list each of you, but we wish to thank all.

We thank friends who read early versions sometimes repeatedly or looked at cover and website designs. To Fixup, Lucy Leibowitz, Marilyn Liss, Carol Lundgren, Tracy Maurice, Susan Van Raalte, Judy Rubin, and Sue White, we appreciate your time and candor.

We thank our families for letting us tell our stories honestly and authentically. We believe we have remembered personal stories, places, and dates well, and if we didnt quite capture every nuance perfectly, forgive us. After all, we are now officially old, as the pandemic of 2020 and our grown children informed us repeatedly. Thank you also for putting up with us when we were going through some of our greatest challenges, repeated ourselves, rambled, and cried. You calmed us down, listened, let us be abrupt at times, laughed along with us, and applauded us when we finished writing this book.

Of course, we continue to think of Nolan. You were with us every step of the waywhen we wrote about parenting, barbecuing, gardening, consuming wine, entertaining, music, being an enthusiastic partner and friend, enduring pain, and losing out on life too early. How much you would have marveled at how well Margaret has done finding her way alone, though she isnt alone, as this book attests. We know you would have handled the old-age stage and changes gracefully.

We also think of Estelle, and how well she navigated old age. Sadly, she died as we were finishing the manuscript. Barbara wanted to read it to her for her input. We both consider her passing to be a huge loss.

If we have one final lesson to share thats been echoed by many, its this: Grab on to happiness whenever you can. Buy the leopard shoes you crave. Take the trip youve dreamed about. Spend a year in Paris. Drink the wine (before it becomes vinegar). Gobble up the expensive chocolate before it melts. Make the move. Hug the friends and family. Shed the toxic people who stop you from relishing joyful moments. Tell those you care about how much you love them, say it often, and say it out loud now. And most important, live in the present and be grateful for every single day.

Barbara Ballinger and Margaret Crane November 2020

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Ballinger, Barbara, and Margaret Crane. Suddenly Single after 50: The Girlfriends Guide to Navigating Loss, Restoring Hope, and Rebuilding Your Life. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.