Three Questions About…Embracing Your Crone Era

It’s a thing, says Nina Bargiel.

BY BRIJANA PROOKER

In the age of Ozempic and deep plane facelifts, in which every outward sign of aging is reversible as long as you have the luxury of money, author Nina Bargiel has a revolutionary idea: Embrace your crone era. It’s a spooky concept, particularly post-2020, when staring at our faces over Zoom prompted a plastic surgery boom, pushing us past body positivity and even body neutrality, all the way into mainstream body hate. But it’s Halloween, the perfect time to honor our wisdom and warts. 

In THE CRONE ZONE: How To Get Older With Style, Nerve and a Little Bit of Magic, children’s TV writer Bargiel, 53 (who famously wrote the bra episode of Lizzie McGuire), uses the triple goddess concept to answer a key question: what’s a crone (AKA any woman over 35, according to my Instagram feed) to do? “Fuck it,” Bargiel writes.

You’re a self-declared crone in your 50s. How would you describe “crone” for the modern era?

So Baba Yaga has always been my bitch. Baba Yaga is the [Slavic] crone who has self-selected herself into the woods. She lives in a hut atop chicken legs. She has a terrifying fence made of human bones. When a traveler gets lost and knocks on her door, sometimes Baba Yaga eats them. And my thought is, this woman has given every indication she does not want to be bothered. So if you’re knocking on her door, and she ends up frying up your liver, you kind of deserve it, because she has made it very clear: leave her alone.

For me, a crone is a woman who is sick and tired of making herself small to make other people feel comfortable. I refer to it as when your inner “fuck you” becomes your outer “fuck you.”

In your book, you say, “Whether gracious grandmother or wicked witch, the crone is always cast as a woman whose best days are behind her.” What are we getting wrong about how we understand crones?

The crone is overlooked and looked down upon, yet the crone is filled with magic. It’s funny because society [says] you’re invisible and you’re useless. But [crones also] have wisdom and power. If you think about Shakespeare and Macbeth and the three witches, I mean, they’re terrifying. Like, they are hags, but they will mess you up. And I will say, [the definition of] “older women” keeps getting younger by the day. I was talking to a woman at one of my [book] signings…about my crone book, and she was like, “I need this because people are treating me this way.” She’s 28 years old.

I love your crone touchstones: “Wisdom, to know who we are, Knowledge, to understand what we want, and Fuck It, to do what we please.” What does “Fuck It” mean to you?

[As a woman in a male-dominated writer’s room], you’ve got to be nice, you’ve got to get along. I played that [role] for a long time, and I discovered that it didn’t get me any further. I would bite my tongue, and then these men wouldn’t hire me again anyway. So why was I biting my tongue? I might as well just be 100% who I am.

When COVID hit, and I had a divorce, and the entertainment industry was taking a bad hit, I just got sick of pretending everything was fine all the time. I sold my house [in Los Angeles] and moved in with my parents [in Illinois] and got a job working in the cheese department at Whole Foods. And there are people who are like, “You shouldn’t say that because people won’t take you seriously as a writer.” If people don’t take me seriously as a writer, after 25 years, after two Emmy nominations, after two Kids’ Choice Awards and a Gracie Allen Award, they were never going to take me seriously. So my Fuck It is, if you look at me as lesser because I’m part of the labor force, then I feel sorry for you, because life’s gonna hit you hard.

Another part of Fuck It is I am 53, and my boyfriend just turned 35, so he is 18 years younger than I am, and fuck it, I don’t care. There are a lot of people that have said a lot of things, and by the way, they’re mostly men. Almost every woman, when they find out, are like, “Oh, good for you, sister.” If someone’s gonna try to shame me for that, fuck it.

Women cannot build a hut atop chicken legs or have a fence made of human bones [like Baba Yaga]. But we can wear headphones. We can have all of these things that say, “Do not bother me,” and yet the travelers, who are usually men, still come knocking at our doors. Unfortunately, we cannot fry up their livers, but we do not have to entertain whatever it is they have to say.

Brijana Prooker is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist and essayist covering health, gender, and culture. She’s a proud pit bull mama whose work has appeared in ELLE, Washington Post, Good Housekeeping, and Newsday.