Sarah Payne Stuart and Priscilla Warner met in the bathroom of an advertising agency in Boston, where they both worked a million years ago.
It was actually 1978.
Priscilla remembers Sarah as a stylish, confident young career woman dressed in a burgundy ultra-suede dress (which, Sarah recalls, had a tiny burn hole from a cigarette on the front). Priscilla, hair still wet from the shower, was sporting stretched-out corduroy jeans stained with a few drops of the ice cream drink and sworn hangover cure she bought every morning before work.
I walked into the bathroom at 10 am, saw Priscilla at the sink, cupping her hand under the faucet and tossing a Valium in her mouth,” recalls Sarah, “and I thought, I must have this woman as my best friend.”
“In fairness,” says Priscilla, “my boyfriend of four years had just broken up with me.”
“True,” answers Sarah, “but I also seem to remember you taking a Valium on the beach years later, after you were happily married.”
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Soon after their instant connection in the Ladies Room, the two women began pairing up, first at the agency, working on ad campaigns together – with Sarah as the copywriter and Priscilla as the art director. And then, a few months later, as surprise roommates in the dilapidated house (with a lot of potential!) that Sarah and her husband, Charlie, had recently bought, which had promptly broken up their one-year marriage. To share the misery (and the rent) Priscilla moved into the second bedroom of the kitchen-less house, and a nurturing but hilarious friendship was cemented.
Weekday mornings before work, Sarah would gently push Priscilla - who back then carried an airplane bottle of vodka in her purse in case she had a panic attack - out the door to jog a therapeutic four miles. Saturday mornings, a less-than-enthusiastic Priscilla would follow Sarah around as they cleaned the house (“Eww!” said Priscilla, “You stick your hand in the toilet?”).
After a wild year of mishaps and doomed romances, Sarah’s husband came back “to fix up the house” (and the marriage–– which is still going strong after 48 years). Priscilla happily moved out into a gloomy basement studio, of which she was very proud. Almost immediately, she was spotted by Jimmy at a nearby bar, and before long married him–– their marriage is now 44 years old and counting. The couples became lifelong friends as well.
In the winter of 2024, when Sarah was supposed to be resting and recuperating from knee replacement surgery, the two women got together every day and found they couldn’t stop trading funny stories about their life-long relationship with each other. It seemed like the only answer to the onslaught of aging was to laugh about it. Sarah and Priscilla had begun calling their husbands their “Lifers” because of their long marriages—which sometimes felt like sentences. When they suddenly realized that they were Lifers too, Priscilla pulled out her phone and started recording a video.
And lifers was born.
With Priscilla and Sarah as accidental influencers.
Priscilla and Sarah are NYT best-selling and Notable Book authors who’ve written tragic-comically about love, family, and relationships for decades.
“Every time I post a sweet picture of me and my husband and our wrinkly old faces, I get so much positive feedback on social media,” Priscilla told Sarah. And once she started surreptitiously recording Jimmy around the house (with irreverent commentary), a reluctant star was born.
In a world where people routinely ghost each other online, where relationships fade and rupture at any age, Priscilla and Sarah suddenly realized how much they and their friends and extended social networks value the concept of relationships built over time.
It turns out that everyone has at least one LIFER whom they treasure (in spite of everything), including one’s mother—everybody’s first LIFER.
SO, WHAT IS LIFERS?
It’s a fresh take on an advice book from two women who’ve spent years in therapy, been abandoned by a mother and separated from a spouse, fallen messily (and happily) in love, given each other child-rearing advice both useless and life altering, buried their parents, and loved being friends for half a century.
We hope LIFERS everywhere will want to share our book with their LIFERS and even be inspired to submit their own LIFER content to us - videos, photos, and anecdotes both funny and serious – so we can share them with our online community.
We look forward to becoming a platform where others can share LIFERS’ tips, tales and memorable accounts of lives lived poignantly and hilariously.
Because there is nothing better or more fun or more gratifying than being in a lifelong relationship. Because being a LIFER can feel like a sentence at times, but it is always a place you are most comfortable and grateful for being loved for exactly who you are, in spite of everything.
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