FORTY CANDLES Taffy Brodesser-akner shares her feelings about hitting the big four-o

Taffy Brodesser-akner, American writer and author of hit novel Fleishman Is In Trouble, reflects on birthdays, time and turning 40

Here’s a short physics lecture before we get down to it: you have to look at time not like an emotional mess, but like a scientist. Both emotional messes and scientists have valid points on time – and on age, which is the specific thing that time leads to – and both are people whose days are numbered, so they have a real stake in the thinking. It’s just that it doesn’t help to look at all this if you’re too emotional, because the emotion – the panic, wistfulness – is not going to help you. It might cloud the other things that happen with time; it might cloud the way good things happen when you age. So please be a scientist so that by the end of this conversation, you have a shot at understanding that all of this is good news.

18 Years

The second half of life will go by a million times faster and harder than the first, not just because every moment is precious, but for a practical reason: physics. When you’re in grade school, and it feels like social studies is taking for ever, even though it’s only 45 minutes long, that’s because it is taking for ever in terms of relative minutes you’ve been alive: if your only state of comparison is 12 years, then 45 minutes is not really a small chunk of that.

I spent my 18th birthday in Israel, on a gap year. I’d become the local drinking age that night, so my friends and I went to dinner and a disco. There was this one club where there was a DJ, but he played the same set list every night. We stayed out past when the buses were stopped, and we were aware of this. I had the feeling that night, as Smells Like Teen Spirit played, that my life could be a special thing. The night had lasted all night. I had a million of these ahead of me.

27 Years

At 27, time is now moving at a completely reasonable rate. It is perhaps the only time in your life this will be true, but again, you don’t know about the nature of time. You think time isn’t quite so slow any more because you have a reasonable amount of autonomy. There’s not social studies class any more.

Work lasts how long work should. The weekend lasts just in time for you to conduct yourself as a 27-year-old should, recover from that conduct, go back to work.

I didn’t notice that the nights were no longer lasting as long as they used to. My life was no longer about the future, but about the very, very micro-present. There was a guy at work, and I fell in love with him in a way that made me finally understand why poets wrote and singers sang. Every feeling I had about him infused every red blood cell I had until he was the machine that propelled me through a day. He broke my heart a thousand ways.

Finally, I met another guy – a wonderful guy – and I forced myself into a very comfortable relationship with him.

On my 28th birthday, he threw me a party at my own behest. But my birthday is problematic. It comes on a day that is also usually a very important baseball day. Because of this, my boyfriend threw my party at a sports bar. When I walked in, it was a pivotal moment of the game, and nobody at my party was allowed to greet me or say hello or happy birthday.

The next morning, I told him that this was over. I had spent two years with him. I was 28. Time had been so generous, but 28 had come a little

quicker than I expected. It led to 29, which was the official age my mother always pretended to be. Time’s generosity was running out.

35 Years

Your 30s are where you pick up the most speed. I was married to a wonderful man by 30. I had a son at 32 and another at 34. I had worked out the time very well: I had both kids before doctors would need to recommend high-risk testing, and I did this on purpose. I had a career now, writing, and when I dropped the children off with their babysitter, I couldn’t fathom how little time I actually had alone. When I would pick them up, time slowed down again. Babies do that, not necessarily in a good way.

40 Years

On the day I turned 40, I woke up to a flurry of Facebook messages that said things like, ‘Happy 29th birthday!’ and, ‘Age is just a number!’

Fuck this, I thought, and I shut off my phone.

We went to Chipotle and ate tacos. We went home. My younger son threw a tantrum. My older son asked for screens. Ah, so 40 would be exactly the same as 39 and 38 and 37.

I still hadn’t written a book. I will now officially never be young and hot. I tried to summon a sense of accomplishment and relief. I had lived to 40! I had made it. I didn’t want to pretend I was 29. I didn’t even wish

I was 35. I could account for every day. I was proud of it. I had collected all those moments inside my body and I was here and in relatively good shape over all for it. I was happy to be here.

I was alleviated of all the choices I made that I was still ambivalent about: how much to work, how many kids to have, whether or not I should get married in the first place. Those choices were made. Here I was. I looked at my youth as a thing that existed inside of a book with a beginning and a middle and an end, a thing with a leather cover that could close.

I’d gotten married. I’d stayed married. I was a good sister and a good daughter. I was an okay wife and mother. I had children, two of them, and they were clean and healthy and on their way, enduring 45-minute social studies classes that felt like 10 years. I had a career I was proud of. And yet, what was it all for? Who cared, now that I was 40?

40 years, one day

But. But. But on the day after my 40th birthday, something shifted. That day was a regular day for me. I finished a story.

That night, I sent my children to bed. I sat outside. I had a house now, and a place to sit, and nothing contented me more than knowing they were asleep and I was still awake. I was stealing some time, always, even as I was being told that my time was up. Those two or three hours that I was awake after them went by like you couldn’t believe.

At 40, the two hours my children are in bed while I’m still awake are a blip. Two hours is nothing. It’s a sigh; it’s a yawn. A movie feels like a flash, and a year feels like a month. A weekday is about the time it takes to figure out dinner and look up an exercise schedule and decide not to go. A weekday is the amount of time it takes to go to a make-up counter and have a saleswoman try to say as nicely and delicately as she can (which is not nicely and delicately at all) that the area beneath your eyes is as dry and desolate as a sponge, and with similar topography. Forty-five minutes is one phone call to the orthopaedist to look into your knee problem. A weekend vanishes while you’re planning it.

But here’s the thing: time was moving quickly whether or not I consented to it. I had somehow thought I could game the system if I noticed it, if I could call out time and yell at it for not behaving. But I couldn’t. Time was going quickly because it was supposed to now. Time was going quickly because I wasn’t meandering any more. I knew how to use it.

I decided to stop thinking of these things. It wasn’t helping. Age doesn’t exist until we look directly at it. You can remind yourself of this when you’re hopeless about time passing, but then you’re looking directly at it again and you’re back to square one.

So take a minute. Forty is a rest stop in which you can pause to hold something in your hand and examine it from all sides, but just as quickly, because it’s all suddenly moving so fast, you let it go. Which is a good thing, because the modern woman is faced with a conundrum at 40: how can you be this dissatisfied when you have so much?

That night after my 40th birthday, I sat outside, and the New Jersey sky began to reveal itself in a glow that you could mistake for the dawn. It’s the dusk. Man, I have fallen in love with the dusk. That’s the thing. If you allow yourself to stop living in the gloaming of your childhood, you will stop hating yourself for all the ways you no longer love the dawn. You will now celebrate every dusk you have. You will not believe how beautiful the dusk can be.

‘The second half of life will go by a million times faster and harder than the first’