'Your life completely changes': Sheffield former boxer Johnny Nelson joins forces with Susannah Schofield for book on midlife divorce
Just like her friend Johnny Nelson had said would happen, it was a small moment months after Susannah Schofield’s divorce that brought home to the entrepreneur the scale of the change and how emotionally exhausting it had all been.
“My mum had just passed away and I got a new passport and had to put my next of kin on my passport,” the boxing promoter says. “I opened it up and thought my daughters aren’t 18 yet, how have I got to 50 and I don’t have a next of kin? And I just burst into tears.”
She spoke to Johnny about how she was feeling and from there the foundations grew for their newly-released book Encore: The best is yet to come. Like Susannah, Sheffield former boxer Johnny, the longest-reigning cruiserweight champion of the world and Sky Sports pundit, had also come out of a long marriage in midlife and found himself starting again.
“Divorce makes a massive difference to life moving forward,” says Johnny. “If you’ve been in a relationship for many years, you’ve built a home, you've built a family, you’ve built a social circle around that relationship, and once you’re out of it, that all changes, your life completely changes.”
"It is traumatic,” adds Susannah, whose divorce finalised in 2023. “Losing a partner, losing your identity and the life you thought you were going to have is incredibly impactful and we can’t just gloss over that.”
In Encore, they explore the divorce process and what comes after, answering the same questions from a man's and a woman's perspective, covering topics including grief, guilty and dating later in life.
"Sometimes Johnny and I really agree and other times we vehemently disagree,” says Susannah, who now also runs Noir, a platform for people navigating midlife transitions. “But we both definitely have very strong points to make.”
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With the help of case studies woven throughout the book, the pair hope to show that people in similar positions that what they are feeling is not unusual and that life after divorce is not something anyone needs to figure out alone.
"A lot of guys, we don’t talk, we don’t communicate, we bottle it in and I hope I represent a lot of guys who have gone through (divorce),” says Johnny.
“You’re going through something that other men have gone through but we don’t speak about it so we don't feel like there’s power in numbers to open up and expose ourselves emotionally,” he continues.
"It was cathartic doing this at times, almost cleansing, to put it down on paper,” adds Susannah. “Then actually quite emotional…But I think if you’re going to do this, you have to be true to yourself and really put out the highs, the lows, the way it made you feel. Otherwise it’s not a proper journal that can help other people on their journey.”
- Encore: The best is yet to come, by Susannah Schofield OBE and Johnny Nelson MBE, published by Perkins Press, is out now.