MID-LIFE CRISIS
A crop of memoirs about middle age forces us to reckon with how we think about women’s lives
In novels and memoirs, women wrestle with a new set of existential questions,
The night before Glynnis MacNicol turned 40, she sat alone at her desk in a Manhattan office tower, at a loss. She had no idea what to do with herself. No clue how to mark the milestone — or even, really, how to think about it.
“By age 40, I was supposed to have a certain kind of life, one that, whatever else it might involve, included a partner and babies,” the Toronto native writes in her compelling new memoir, No One Tells You This. “Having acquired neither of these, it was nearly impossible, no matter how smart, educated or lucky I was, not to conclude that I had officially become the wrong answer to the question of what made a woman’s life worth leading. If this story wasn’t going to end with a marriage or a child, what then? Could it even be called a story?”
MacNicol had no blueprint to look to for guidance, no road map. She existed outside narrative.
I might always be alone, she thought. Then: I’m done feeling bad. And finally: I can do whatever I want. On a whim, she booked herself into a hotel by the beach in Queens, took the subway out and woke up on her birthday to the sound of waves, feeling victorious.
In this case, the absence of ritual — the necessity to pull one out of thin air — was neatly solved. But it’s a problem MacNicol returns to again and again in the book. In doing so, she highlights a profound sense of confusion that many middle-aged women are grappling with.
From Toronto author Sheila Heti’s poignant novel Motherhood, about a writer in her late 30s deciding not to have children, to New Yorker writer Ariel Levy’s magnificent memoir The Rules Do Not Apply, about losing a baby, a wife and a home at 38, Gen X women everywhere are asking themselves the same questions. What do you do when life veers so far off established scripts? When what you envisioned for your life — what you were taught to think about adult women’s lives, period — has little bearing on how you’re actually living. How do you invent a new story for yourself? How do you invent a life?
The consensus seems to be: you make it up from scratch. But that answer inevitably leads to more questions.
“There’s very narrow narratives around women’s experiences,” MacNicol says, reached in Brooklyn. “There’s the Joan Didion quote, ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live.’ What is a narrative? It’s a blueprint for life. When you have no narrative, it’s very overwhelming.”
She adds: “I’m not sure we take seriously enough how much work it is to build a framework around your life when you are outside the two (marriage and children) that are normally attributed to women.”
No One Tells You This explores this existential crisis in depth, interrogating issues unique to single, childless women’s lives — including the dearth of milestones and the experience of perpetually celebrating other people’s, be it on social media or at weddings or baby showers.
And then there’s this: when you don’t have the responsibilities of partnership and children, you lack built-in boundaries. You’re frequently expected to jump in and help family and friends, which, MacNicol points out, can result in caregiver burnout.
Plus, there’s the problem of what to do with the freedom you do have. A lack of schedule, routine and structure can be surprisingly difficult to navigate. “Children, in the most basic way, determine your schedule for two decades,” MacNicol explains. “You’ve got a map, you’ve got places to be, you have boxes to check off.” (“This is why people have babies,” she observes wryly in the book, “because it’s exhausting not to know what you’re supposed to do next.”)
“I think one of the reasons we’re seeing more and more women travel is that travel is a marker,” MacNicol reflects. “On the most literal level, it gives you a destination.”
Indeed, in No One Tells You This, Mac- Nicol frequently hops planes to exotic locales, from Iceland, where she enjoys a flirtation with a rugged mountain man guide, to a ranch in Wyoming, where she spends time with a cowboy.
These action-packed journeys — full of wonder for the world — illustrate that for all the overwhelm associated with the new middle age, there’s also euphoria. “There is a sense of newness and adventure,” MacNicol says. “You do feel, to some degree, a sense of being a pioneer.”
“I’m sort of making it up as I go along,” she adds, riding waves of exhilaration and exhaustion.
Interestingly, Gen X women whose lives have followed a traditional trajectory don’t seem to feel any less at sea. Take the bestselling American author Pamela Druckerman, of Bringing Up Bébé fame, who’s just published an engaging, forthright memoir about her 40s, There Are No Grown-ups: A Midlife Coming-of-Age Story. She says having a husband and children hasn’t stopped her from feeling like she’s living without a road map.
“It’s a different world now, especially for women, with different choices and different struggles,” she says, reached on the line in Paris.
“In my mom’s generation, if you weren’t married by your late 20s, something had gone terribly wrong in your life,” she says. But nowadays, half the couples in her circle don’t marry at all. And a single mother she knows just had a second child at 48, with a donated egg and sperm.
In There Are No Grown-ups, Druckerman wrestles with the myriad forces shaping modern middle age.
From the franticness of the digital age, to the pressures of 21st-century marriage, in which romantic partnership is seen as a vehicle for self-actualization, to massive shifts in sexual norms (which, in fact, led her to experiment with her husband, trying a threesome), so very much has changed.
“I definitely feel like I’m in uncharted territory,” Druckerman says. And she’s not alone.