Ditch the lies, get on with it
Fifty shades to being 50 — and all of them grey, if you would believe writer Allison Pearson. Life seems more than a little unrelenting for Kate Reddy who, as 50 looms, has to deal with teens ensnared by social media, a Lycra-clad, mid-life-crisis-suffering husband finding himself through counselling and cycling, a money pit of a do-it-upper old house and the need to go back to work.
Fifteen years before, Kate was at the top of her powers in the competitive world of finance. Now she has to convince the young tyros in that world — and herself — that she is ready to return. Her confidence has taken a dent; perimenopausal doubt has seeped into her mind. She is no longer the resilient Kate of Pearson’s first book, I Don’t Know How She Does It?
She worries that she is too old — her answer is to lie about her age — and that she is too fat — that’s dealt with by a suffocating shape suit. She worries that her poor children are being cheated of their mother’s love so she overindulges them enormously and expensively.
While it’s easy to empathise with Kate in her menopausal-woman-against-the-world phase there is also an urge to take her firmly by the shoulders, shake her, and tell her to stop spoiling her children into brats, get her husband to start looking for a job and to stop bending to the stereotypes — no more diet, spandex pants or lunchtime liposuction.
Pearson writes with a self-deprecating humour — a stock genre of the chick-lit, midlife crisis writer — but with acid and a daunting determination to tell it like it is. Every hot flush and “Crime Scene period” painted vividly, but mostly amusing and striking a chord with pre and post 50-year-old women readers.
Women’s rights campaigner Helen Reddy sang “I am woman, hear me roar in numbers too big to ignore. And I know too much to go back and pretend . . .” Middle-aged Kate Reddy has a point to make but in the end, I just wanted her to stop pretending and get on with it. Eventually she does and things work out just as they were meant to.