Jo Wood: ‘It’s not a good idea for midlife women to use weight loss jabs’

Jo Wood, the model and former wife of Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood, is taking on a new challenge: becoming a best-selling author. She tells Eleanor Mills why her generation was freer to be themselves, and why we all need to ‘get over’ being defined by our age

‘Wood is a picture of later life contentment – in her prime, fully in her power’ (Getty)

I used to fall out of here with Ronnie at god knows what time of night!” Jo Wood chuckles as we sit on the terrace of what used to be The Harrington Club in South Kensington. “I remember Mick Hucknall break dancing just over there – I was so surprised, he was really good!” She continues reminiscing: “Oh and I remember having an argument with my ex-husband on those stairs – I wanted to go home, he wanted to stay… the usual!

“But the great thing for our generation was that there were no phones then,” she continues, reminiscing. “We were free as birds. We’d be up all night and Keith Richards would say ‘let’s go for a walk’ and people would look at us and go ‘is that the Rolling Stones?’ but there were no phones to take pictures so we got away with it.”

She breaks off to hug a few of her many children and grandchildren; the Wood clan is gathering tonight to celebrate the launch of Jo’s first novel. Now 70, Jo Wood – organic entrepreneur, ex-Rolling Stone wife, model, mother-of-three and grandmother of 10 – is holding court in black silk Indian pyjamas as her book party comes together downstairs.

Is Ronnie coming? “Nah, I didn’t invite him, he’s too busy rehearsing with Rod [Stewart]. They’re doing a bit of a Two Faces reunion at Glastonbury on Sunday,” she grins. The rosé is already flowing, but Wood isn’t drinking. “I am so lucky I don’t have an addictive personality, I would always just say ‘enough’ of all the joint smoking, or the drink, or all the other stuff. I could just put it down. Except for cigarettes – they were the hardest to give up! I stopped 10 years ago. I won’t drink because I’ll be driving back home to the countryside later tonight.”

She moved there in 2019 and is, true to form, effusive about it all. “I love it, the birds, the stillness, the green,” Wood says. “I live completely off grid, no power, water from a borehole. I just love waking up in the countryside, it’s so good for me.”

Wood is a picture of later life contentment – in her prime, fully in her power. Confident, warm and witty, she is passionate that women in their fifties, sixties, seventies and beyond “are not done yet. I want them to understand that there is so much good life still to come. To tell a different story about what they can do, what their lives can be. We never know what is around the corner,” she adds.

Her new book, written largely on her phone on the notes app, is titled The Resurrection of Flo. It is the story of a faithful wife and mother who discovers, aged 54, that her husband has been having an affair for three years with a 23-year-old (readers may recall that Rolling Stone Ronnie left Jo, then 52, for a 19-year-old). But she knows she’s far from alone in that experience.

“This happens to so many women,” says Wood. “I know so many who have come to me going ‘my husband’s left, my life is over’... But it’s not. I was 52 when I became single again, I didn’t know what to do. But then I was offered Strictly Come Dancing and that was so empowering, and good for my confidence, it got me out there again.”

Ronnie Wood and Jo arriving for a premiere in Leicester Square, London, in 2000 (PA)

She explains she wanted to write something helpful and uplifting, building on her own experience of getting back on her feet. The book is an hilarious, racy fairy tale for the midlife divorcée; the heroine Flo gets her acting career back on track – “there are lots of parts these days for women of a certain age” – stars in numerous lucrative TV commercials, has sex with a string of handsome younger men, indulges in cocaine nights, ketamine with a hippie lover in Ibiza, gets drunk with her new gay pals, explores dating apps (including a hilarious incident with a man with a prosthetic leg and another with a porn star who has a permanent erection).

After a series of dating disasters, the heroine ends up with a convenient childhood sweetheart. Does Wood want another husband? “No,” she says. “I love living on my own, I’m the happiest I’ve ever been”. Later, she says, “I wouldn’t mind getting married again, finding someone who gets me. But he’d have to live in a tent in the garden… I like my space and my house just so.”

I wouldn’t mind getting married again, finding someone who gets me. But he’d have to live in a tent in the garden… I like my space and my house just so

Is this book a thinly veiled autobiography? I say I am particularly intrigued by the ex-husband who gets circumcised (he’d always “had foreskin issues”, she writes) and leaves to try out his member on someone else. Jo grins broadly but insists that “this is fiction… an amalgamation of all the great stories about dating in your fifties and sixties I’ve been told by my girlfriends – I would chuckle to myself as I wrote it,” she adds.

“But of course you can only write about what you understand; the emotions are mine. Forgiveness – of the one who left, and of ourselves for our stupidities – is key,” she says. Wood displays no bitterness: “I had it easier than [the other Rolling Stone wives]. Jerry [Hall] had it a lot worse… and then she was married to Rupert [Murdoch]… now that was mad. And he left her, what about that?” Her laugh is one of concern, not malice.

These days Wood, who was born and raised in Essex, is an evangelist for nutritious eating, particularly organic fresh vegetables. Her heroine is anti-botox and anti-plastic surgery, preaching exercise and self-acceptance not absurdly hanging on to youth. I wonder what she makes of the current vogue for midlife female celebrities to hit the Ozempic and other weight loss drugs.

“Personally, I wouldn’t take it because we don’t know the side effects and it can’t possibly be good for you. There is evidence that it really damages the pancreas and that it eats away at muscle. You can see that in people’s faces... We need muscle, especially as we get older, because otherwise you can't stand up. These jabs eat away at your muscle, so you become fragile. For older women, it’s not a good idea unless you really need it because you are clinically obese. It’s not good to be frail and thin as we age.”

The former couple pictured in Paris in 1979 (Getty)

Wood herself is trim but rounded. “Our hormones are produced in our fat cells,” she explains. “We don’t do ourselves any favours by being too thin as we age – you become less sexy if you have no hormones going on in your body.”

Wood is particularly happy to have been a baby boomer: as the matriarch of a mighty clan, she is an expert on the differences between generations. She shakes her head: “The biggest difference is the phone addiction. The problem with being on their phones all the time is that I think they all want to look alike. They’re not as individual as we were when I was young. Especially the young girls – they all have these mighty eyelashes and heavy makeup. They all put filters on and then want to look like themselves, filtered.

“My granddaughter Maggie did one of my pictures on Instagram, she made me look fabulous with filters and photoshopped all the rolls of fat and stuff but then I put it on my Instagram and I thought: Oh, I feel like such a liar.”

(Matthew James Publishing)

We chat about prom season as her granddaughter is going to hers this week: “She’s got a prom and a prom afterparty – I’m interested to see how and if they can interact in real life because they are always on their phones. That’s a big difference: their communication skills aren’t as good, and Gen Z’s concentration skills aren’t as good. Take my grandson Kobe downstairs; he doesn’t like to watch movies because he’s used to short clips on his phone so the movie’s too long. Phones are making their attention spans much shorter.”

She smiles affectionately, her eyes twinkling. “We all need to get over being defined by our age. I love being 70. I feel the same in my mind, inside me, as I did when I was 16, I am the same person except for some crabby bits on my arms. It makes me realise I didn’t appreciate myself or my body when I was younger. I say to my grandchildren all the time how beautiful they are. I am so proud of them.”

As the party starts and she is mobbed by her loving family, it is clear the feeling is entirely mutual.

The Resurrection of Flo (Matthew James Publishing, £9.99) is out 3 July

Eleanor Mills is the Founder of www. noon.org.uk, a community for women in midlife and author of ‘Much More to Come’, published by HarperCollins