or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
First Grove Atlantic edition: January 2020
First Grove Atlantic paperback edition: January 2021
This book is set in 12-point Dante MT by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title
ISBN 978-0-8021-4857-5
eISBN 978-0-8021-4786-8
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
For the middle-aged women of America.
You’re not imagining it, and it’s not just you.
Contents
1: Possibilities Create Pressure
2: The Doldrums
3: The Caregiving Rack
4: Job Instability
5: Money Panic
6: Decision Fatigue
7: Single, Childless
8: After the Divorce
9: Perimenopause
10: The Very Filtered Profile Picture
11: New Narratives
Author’s Note
Appendix: A Midlife Crisis Mixtape
Book Club Discussion Questions
A Q&A with the Author
You come to this place, midlife. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led. All your houses are haunted by the person you might have been.
—Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost
One woman I know had everything she’d ever wanted—a loving partner, two children, a career she cared about, even the freedom to make her own schedule—but she still couldn’t shake a feeling of profound despair. She spent months getting a babysitter for her toddler daughter in the middle of the day, using the time to go alone to noon movies, where she sat in the dark and cried.
A former coworker told me that her impressive LinkedIn profile was misleading. In truth, she was underemployed and for years since her last layoff had been taking one low-paying gig after another. She’s unmarried, never had kids, and while that part is okay with her, she has started dreading her upcoming fiftieth birthday, having realized that she will probably never own her own home and has saved nowhere near enough for retirement.
A neighbor with a small army of adorable young children was doing part-time work she enjoyed. Her kids’ father was a friendly, hardworking man. She was baffled by the rage she had come to feel toward him. She’d begun to imagine that divorced she might have a better shot at happiness. “I’d leave,” she said to me one day when I asked how things were going, “if I had more money.”
Another woman told me she had started to fear that she would die alone. Just like her married friends, she’d gotten a good education and had a good job, had made a nice home and was staying in shape. But somehow she’d never found a partner or had children. She woke up in the middle of the night wondering if she should have married her college boyfriend, if she should freeze her eggs, if she should have a baby alone, if she should do more or less online dating, and just how much more she could take of her friends’ sons and daughters smiling on social media before she threw her laptop out the window.
An acquaintance told me she’d been having a rough time, working at three jobs as a single mother since her husband left her. Determined to cheer up her family, she planned a weekend trip. After a long week, she started packing at 10:00 p.m., figuring she could catch a few hours of sleep before their 5:00 a.m. departure. She asked her eleven-year-old son to start gathering his stuff. He didn’t move. She asked again. Nothing.
“If you don’t help,” she told him, “I’m going to smash your iPad.”
He still didn’t move.
As if possessed, she grabbed a hammer and whacked the iPad to pieces.
When she told me this, I thought of how many parents I know who have fantasized or threatened this very thing, and here she had actually done it. I laughed.
“Yeah,
