The Accidental Influencer

An Unlikely Pair Shares Wisdom on Healing Relationships

By Anthea Gerrie | Photography courtesy of Gayle Kirschenbaum

She may have made her mother a social media star, attracting millions of impressions and a slew of brand partnerships along the way, but Gayle Kirschenbaum considers herself an accidental influencer. “I really only opened an Instagram account to promote my art photography before turning it over to Mildred,” says the Emmy-winning filmmaker whose Boca Raton-based mother has become, under her daughter’s expert direction, the world’s most famous centenarian.

Celebrated for her remarkable achievements by major media outlets across the US and throughout the world, Mildred is an astonishingly fit hundred-year-old who lives independently, drives herself to errands, pays her bills and trades stocks online, flies solo to join her daughter for transatlantic travel, and puts her longevity down to a positive attitude, a willingness to learn new skills—like how to film videos of herself—and milking the social benefits of happy hour to the max.

Since being introduced to the world by Gayle less than two years ago on Instagram and TikTok, Mildred has attracted famous fans, including Maria Shriver, Jenna Bush, Real Housewives of New York star Ramona Singer, and singer-songwriter Jax, who sang “Happy Birthday” to Mildred the week of her centenary in front of twenty thousand fans at Orlando’s Amway Stadium. Mildred has also been welcomed as a brand partner by Oceania Cruises, on whose Vista vessel she celebrated her landmark birthday last summer. “We take an annual cruise together, and it was the previous year when I asked her to say on video how she felt about turning ninety-nine that I realized she had something to say the world might be waiting to hear,” says Gayle, who calls her mother “the queen of the one-liners.”

Mildred’s magic words? “I can’t believe I’m ninety-nine and still have my marbles. I’m the luckiest woman in the world that I have a family I think adores me,” she told the camera. “Even if they don’t, they call, they check on me, and there are so many people who don’t hear from their family.”

Now, the enterprising daughter has parlayed her mother’s wit and wisdom into a new book, Mildred’s Mindset, to be published on March 8, 2024—International Women’s Day. “She is such a force at one hundred years old. It seemed the appropriate date to celebrate a wonderful example of a powerful woman,” says Gayle.

Certainly, an amazing level of positivity floods through Mildred’s soundbites. “You’ve got to enjoy life—you’re only walking through it once,” is her mission statement, which attracted more than two million views when she expounded it in a video posted in May last year. In daily doses, she advises other seniors how to mitigate the negatives of life with commands like, “If the food isn’t quite right, have an extra dessert” and “Don’t say you don’t know how to retrieve emails—there’s no such thing as ‘I don’t know.’” The woman who uses an iPad, an iPhone, and a desktop computer to stay in touch, play Wordle, and film herself dispensing advice adds, “We live in a tech world; either you go with the flow or you fall off the train.”

Now, Gayle is planning to monetize Mildred’s snippets of wit and wisdom by creating extra content for subscribers, a decision she admits has provoked opprobrium she never expected. “It came as a shock how quickly people can go from loving you to hating you. The subscription is only $4.99 a month and is not intended to replace the free stuff I’ll still be pushing out to all Mildred’s fans. But some do want more, and I’m working every hour of the day, rising at 4:30 a.m. to edit Mildred’s videos and fulfill an overwhelming demand for content.”

None of this entrepreneurial activity could have been foreseen by Gayle two decades ago when she was in the throes of recovery from an abusive childhood in which Mildred was the chief tormentor. The youngest of three siblings, she fled home in her teens, blocked out her past, and only started addressing her issues in the 2007 film My Nose, named for the facial feature that had been the lifelong subject of maternal criticism. The film’s release saw her featured in The Washington Post beneath the caption: “If you have a mother like Gayle Kirschenbaum, you better get yourself into psychoanalysis.”

The response of Mildred, the ultimate narcissist? “Wow, great. Bad press is better than no press. I’m on the cover of The Washington Post.”

Nearly a decade later, Gayle released “the hardest and most important film I ever made” after persuading her mother to accompany her to the shrink’s office and face up to the years of abuse, explore events from her own life which led up to it, and eventually offer the apology Gayle thought she would never hear.

You’ve got to enjoy life—you’re only walking through it once.

The way the director-daughter of Look At Us Now, Mother! parlayed the success of that film, which toured the global festival circuit, into a second career she had never anticipated shows that the entrepreneur was always lurking unsuspected within her.

“To paraphrase that sentence about life being what happens when you are making other plans, I never expected to make films about myself or become a forgiveness coach,” says the New Yorker, who was overwhelmed by audience members who related to her story and inspired the forgiveness workshops she has been running for several years.

Following Mildred’s Mindset will be the more sobering volume, Bullied to Besties, which tells the whole story of the mother-daughter trauma and reconciliation, and Gayle’s new “No More Drama with Mama” online forgiveness course. “My target market is daughters of difficult mothers,” she explains, pointing out how women from backgrounds as diverse as Jewish, Indian, and African American have identified with her experience. “They come up to me after screenings to tell me I told their own story.”

When she gets back to her own personal projects and life goals—“Since Mildred became a full-time job, I have put my creative pursuits on hold and don’t have the bandwidth for a relationship”—Gayle plans to publish her memoir and return to her passion for fine art photography. She now has plans for showing and selling her work through gallery links, realizing she has acquired monetizing skills she never dreamed of before becoming an accidental online entrepreneur. Finding the bandwidth may be another subject. “I don’t know what my emotional state will be like after my mother is gone,” she admits. “I’m doing all I can to give her things to look forward to and stay strong. But the way she’s going, I may well die before her!”

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To buy Mildred’s Mindset or register to attend the March 6 virtual book launch or March 12 in-person author reading, visit GayleKirschenbaum.com. For more, follow the pair on Instagram (@glkirschenbaum) or TikTok (@gaylekirschenbaum).