MID-LIFE IS MUR DER
Two writers, like their protagonist, solve the mystery of reinvention
WHAT DOES IT mean to blow up your life midway through? Especially if you’re not interested in sports cars, affairs with pretty young things, or any of the other behaviour we associate with men who are losing their hair while gathering anxiety about their mortality?
I blew things up, in life and in fiction, too. The two are definitely related, as
I’ll explain. But first, real life. I left my job – my very good job – as a columnist and feature writer at the Globe and Mail in June 2022. Mainly my decision was greeted with shock, and some variation of the question, “Did someone drop you on your head?”
How to explain that I’d been feeling a vague creative itch for years, and it got worse during the pandemic? I’d been doing the same thing for decades, and, like gum on the bedpost, it had lost its flavour. I had lost my flavour. I was inspired by Nell Painter’s brilliant memoir
Old in Art School, about switching from academia to painting in her 60s. All around me, my mid-life girlfriends were in full blossom: leaving their jobs, going back to university, retraining, learning to weave, to bake, to run a marathon. Nothing could stop us, except that fretful little internal voice that always advised shrinking, and never blossoming.
Change is growth. I’d always known this on a theoretical level, but was too afraid to take the advice myself. When you write fiction, it’s one of the first things you learn. Your protagonist has to change in some way over the course of your book, otherwise your story will have all the vibrancy of a dead slug.
It’s no coincidence the upheaval in my professional life was mirrored in Bury the Lead, the new mystery novel I co-wrote with my friend, Toronto author Kate Hilton. The protagonist, Cat Conway, is a journalist (like me), and a middle-aged mother (like both Kate and me). When we meet Cat, she’s working at a small-town newspaper, because she’s been fired from her hotshot job in Toronto and has to flee town in disgrace (not like me, thank God).
At the age of 45, Cat is in the midst of a major life transition that I think a lot of women will find familiar. Okay, most of us don’t end up investigating the murder of a famous actor, but otherwise Cat’s dilemmas are ours as well: Who am I in this next phase of life? Is it too late to start over? Why does my teenager hate me but still ask for money?
Kate and I decided to write a mystery in the doldrums of the pandemic. Both of us were struggling, our hearts in our shoes. We wanted to work on a fun project together, a humorous mystery that would also tackle serious issues. We both loved reading mysteries, but neither of us had written one. I’d published a novel, Based on a True Story, and a collection of essays,
Shrewed, but I’d never collaborated with another author. We had so much fun batting ideas back and forth that I wondered how anyone could take on the writing slog without a partner. There’s something else you learn in mid-life – never be afraid to ask for help.
Kate was a bestselling novelist with a gift for transformation: She had started as a lawyer, worked as a fundraiser, and in the past few years she’d retrained to become a psychotherapist. Now, in addition to writing novels like Better
Luck Next Time and The Hole in the Middle, she’s launched a therapy practice and a life-coaching program to help women through mid-life journeys.
She understood, more than I did, that transitions require effort. But if you put in the work, you could reap the rewards.
In our first draft of Bury the Lead,
Cat was in her 20s. It seemed like an interesting challenge to explore a millennial’s mindset, but it just didn’t work. Kate and I tried valiantly to bring her to life on the page, but she lay flat. It was only when we had an “aha!” moment, and gave Cat some wrinkles and some years on her odometer, that she sprang to life. Now we recognized her. Now she had critical choices to make, and relationships to reflect on – with her mother, her son, her exhusband and the fling that got away. Most importantly, she had a new life to build, new colleagues to grow with and a new place to call home, rich territory that we’ll explore in the second Cat Conway mystery, Widows and Orphans, which comes out in 2025. She was starting over, just like Kate and I had. She had mysteries to solve, although she’d already figured out the most important one: Life can indeed begin again, halfway through.
To read an excerpt from please go to