Alice Vincent: On How Women Listen Season 2, Episode 1
Artwork for Episode 1 with Alice Vincent
In this episode of the How You Find Your Voice podcast, I speak with writer and journalist Alice Vincent about her book Hark: How Women Listen.
Alice spent more than a decade working as a music journalist, immersed in sound, culture and the rhythms of the industry. But over time, that relationship began to shift. She found herself burnt out, and eventually unable to listen to music at all.
What began as an attempt to reconnect with music became something much deeper.
This conversation traces that shift and asks, what happens when something that once defined you no longer fits, and how you begin to understand who you are without it.
We talk about motherhood and matrescence, and how becoming a parent can change your sensory world in ways that are difficult to articulate. Alice reflects on the experience of her son becoming seriously ill, and the lasting impact of trauma and PTSD on how she hears and processes the world.
Sound, in this context, becomes both a trigger and a lifeline.
There is also a wider thread running through this conversation about how women are taught to listen. The expectation that we should be receptive, attentive, accommodating, while our own voices and experiences are often overlooked.
Alice draws a distinction between that kind of listening and something more intuitive, more embodied. It’s a way of listening to the less celebrated or noticed parts of life.
We talk about the soundscapes of women’s lives. Baby groups, hospital wards, domestic spaces. The kinds of environments that rarely get treated as meaningful, but which shape us profoundly.
A particularly striking idea in this conversation is the way identity shifts across different stages of life. Adolescence, motherhood, periods of stress or trauma, and the approach to menopause all bring changes that affect how we feel, think and listen.
And yet there is still an expectation that we should remain consistent.
Topics Covered
• Losing connection to music and identity
• Burnout and stepping away from the music industry
• Listening as a way of understanding the self
• Motherhood and matrescence
• The sensory and emotional impact of becoming a parent
• Trauma, PTSD and auditory triggers
• The role of sound in processing difficult experiences
• Writing as a way of making sense of trauma
• The pressure to move on after difficult experiences
• Liminal states and identity shifts
• Adolescence, motherhood and other transitional phases
• Misophonia and heightened sensitivity to sound
• Patriarchal listening versus intuitive listening
• Why women are taught to be good listeners
• The invisible soundscapes of women’s lives
• Community and shared listening experiences
• Silence, quiet and the search for stillness
• Cyclical identity and changing inner worlds
• Finding your voice through listening
About Alice Vincent
Alice Vincent is a writer, broadcaster and multi-platform storyteller whose work explores the often overlooked parts of life.
She is the author of Hark: How Women Listen and the bestselling Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival. Her work sits at the intersection of personal experience, cultural observation and the natural world.
A former journalist and editor at The Telegraph, she now writes for publications including The Guardian, Vogue, The Financial Times, The Sunday Times and The Observer.
She is also the host of the Why Women Grow podcast and In Haste, a platform exploring how books are written.