San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Quirky insights from midlife
If you are, like Annabelle Gurwitch, “just another ordinary cisgender heterosexual” woman of a certain age, reading her new collection of personal essays, “You’re Leaving When?” will most likely feel like a long, intimate chat with your funniest friend. Gurwitch is a bestselling author and one of those actors who’s made her living in Hollywood for decades without becoming a household name. She’s also a good hang.
When the book opens with “Homeward Bound” (one of the best in the book), Gurwitch’s only child has just left for college, her husband of 20 years has decided he wants a new life (without her), she has “aged out” of acting, and both her parents have recently died — her mother passing suddenly the day of her father’s funeral. As she writes in the introduction, “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.”
The book chronicles her “adventures in downward mobility” as she picks up the pieces, sometimes literally, as when she has to go through her parents’ lifetime of stuff, including her father’s “authentic Rolex,” and sometimes figuratively as when, in an effort to offset the cost of staying in her predivorce home, she decides to take in roommates, boarders and then, in a fit of guilty dogooderism, a homeless couple (the best of the lot).
Collections of funny essays are everywhere these days, often penned by celebrities and comedians. But unlike some of the stars who manage to get away with meandering “observa
By Annabelle Gurwitch (Counterpoint; 213 pages; $26)
tions,” Gurwitch connects deeply with both a life stage — middle age — and our current cultural moment.
The last piece in the book, “In a Muted Zoom No One Can Hear You Scream,” is about starting the online writing group Writers Writing Alone Together to combat the loneliness of sheltering in place during COVID19. In “Free to Be ... They and Them,” she critiques her own handling of the moment her grown child Eza told her they were nonbinary and asked to be called by the pronouns they and them.
Like most collections, “You’re Leaving When?” is uneven. Gurwitch is a very entertaining writer, and she is best when she’s telling her own story in her own funny voice. In “They’ve Got the Alias That We’ve Been Living Under,” she critiques how the Hollywood Industrial Complex portrays women in midlife from “Sunset Boulevard” to “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” to Laurie Metcalf’s character in “Lady Bird.” As a critique, it’s thoughtprovoking, but it has the effect of breaking up Gurwitch’s own story, which is why we’re reading in the first place. In “Dear Girlfriends,” an epistemological sendup of the fantasy of living out one’s golden years in a tiny house commune surrounded by our aging best buds, she does it again. It’s a funny enough concept, but it’s not part of the story we signed up for.
Any minor missteps in the book can be forgiven, however, because in the end, Annabelle Gurwitch — writer, mother, actor — is also the person who coined the term “chore porn” to describe a set of rubbergloveheavy boudoir photos her ex once talked her into. And for that, she should get some sort of prize.