Anne Kreamer has been in a lot of the right places at the right times. In the late '70s she was part of the team that distributed and co-produced "Sesame Street" around the world.
A decade later she helped launch SPY magazine, about which has been said, "It's pretty safe to say that SPY was the most influential magazine of the 1980s." In the 1990s when her children were young, she had the perfect job - Worldwide Creative Director for Nickelodeon and Nick at Nite.
She switched careers in the late '90s, becoming a columnist for the cutting-edge business magazine Fast Company. Kreamer also created the American Treasures monthly column for Martha Stewart Living.
With her new book, "Going Gray, What I Learned About Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood, Authenticity And Everything Else That Matters," which is due out in September 2007, Kreamer is once again in the vanguard, good-naturedly encouraging baby-boomer women to rediscover their generation's youthful embrace of honesty and realness and to swim against the tide.
Kreamer considered herself a youthful 49 until a photo of her with her teenage daughter stopped her in her tracks. In one unguarded moment she saw herself for what she really was - a middle-aged woman with her hair dyed much too harshly. In that moment Kreamer realized that she wasn't fooling anyone about her age and decided it was time to get real and embrace a more authentic life.
She set out for herself a program to let her hair become its true color, and to discover her true self. Going Gray is Kreamer's exploration of that experience, and a frank, warm and funny investigation of aging as a modern female obsession. Through interviews, field experiments, and her own everywoman's chronicle, Kreamer probes the issues behind two of the biggest fears mature women face: "Can I be sexually attractive as a gray-haired, middle-aged woman?" and, "Will I be discriminated against in the work world?" Her answers are surprising and provocative.
In searching for the balance between attractiveness and authenticity, Kreamer's journey of middle-aging illuminates in a friendly, useful, entertaining way the politics and the personal costs of this generation's definition of "aging gracefully."
Kreamer graduated from Harvard College and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the writer Kurt Andersen, and her two children, Kate and Lucy.
