the broken glass: “I have to find a good therapist . . . right now.”
Since turning forty a couple of years ago, I’ve been obsessed with women my age and their—our—struggles with money, relationships, work, and existential despair.
Looking for more women to talk to for this book, I called my friend Tara, a successful reporter a few years older than me who grew up in Kansas City. Divorced about a decade ago, she has three mostly grown children and lives on a quiet, leafy street in Washington, DC, with her boyfriend. They recently adopted a rescue dog.
“Hey,” I said, happy to have caught her on a rare break from her demanding job. “Do you know anyone having a midlife crisis I could talk to?”
The phone was silent.
Finally, she said, “I’m trying to think of any woman I know who’s not.”
Generation X (born 1965 to 1980) make up the bulk of the midlife demographic, though those born at the earlier end of the Millennial birth years (1981-96) and younger members of the Baby Boom (1946-64) are also among the middle-aged.1 The name—or anti-name—Generation X was popularized by Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. Prior to that, it was the name of an excellent 1970s British punk band featuring Billy Idol. The band itself was named after a 1964 book containing interviews with British teenagers—on the cover: “What’s behind the rebellious anger of Britain’s untamed youth? Here—in their own words— is how they really feel about Drugs, Drink, God, Sex, Class, Color and Kicks.”
Over time, the term “Generation X” came to signify a hazy, as-yet-to-be-determined identity. No one knew quite what was up with us, and so we were deemed unknowable. For a while, some experts tried dubbing us “13th Gen,” because we were the thirteenth generation post–founding fathers.2 But after some “Who Is Generation X?” cover stories in the 1990s, the culture more or less shrugged and turned away.
In the words of the Pew Research Center, Generation X is “America’s neglected ‘middle child’ . . . a low-slung, straightline bridge between two noisy behemoths.”3 We are the Jan Brady of generations—overshadowed by Boomers (our parents, aunts, uncles) and Millennials (the kids we babysat). By one count, at 55 million, we’re a smaller group than Boomers (76 million) or Millennials (62 million),4 and we will never be the largest cohort in the country. Any day now, when Millennials surpass Boomers, Gen X will still be millions smaller than either.5 A CBSN report on the generations in January 2019 left out Gen X entirely. That same week, a Saturday Night Live game-show skit pitting Millennials against Boomers gave Keenan Thompson this line: “I’m Gen X. I just sit on the sidelines and watch the world burn.”6
Gen X has arrived in middle age to almost no notice, largely unaware, itself, of being a uniquely star-crossed cohort. “Gen Xers are in ‘the prime of their lives’ at a particularly divisive and dangerous moment,” Boomer marketing expert Faith Popcorn told me.7 “They have been hit hard financially and dismissed culturally. They have tons of debt. They’re squeezed on both sides by children and aging parents. The grim state of adulthood is hitting them hard. If they’re exhausted and bewildered, they have every reason to feel that way.”
A full-fledged Gen Xer, I was born in 1976. I learned to type on an IBM Selectric. When video games came around, I played Moon Patrol on my Atari and Where in the World Is Carmen San diego? on my school’s PC. As a teenager, I worked as a printer in a photo lab and wrote hyper-sincere op-eds for the school paper while wearing overalls and Revlon Blackberry lipstick. I had an ur-’90s job, too: I interned at SPIN magazine, back when Nirvana was on the cover. (Fact-checking a writer’s story on a new singer, one “Mary J. Bilge,” I was told by her publicist, “It’s Blige, honey.”)
Whether to identify as Gen X is a decision every woman must make for herself, but I believe that if, like me, you were a kid in the Reagan years, had a Koosh ball, or know what sound a dial-up modem makes, you count.
Generation X women tend to marry in our late twenties, thirties, forties, or not at all; to have our first children in our thirties or forties, or never. We’re the first women raised from birth hearing the tired cliché “having it all”8—then discovering as adults that it is very hard to have even some of it. That holds true regardless of whether a Generation X woman has a family or not.9
Since the 1990s, when the older members of Gen X began having families, we’ve been pitted against one another by a tedious propaganda campaign about the “mommy wars.” This fake debate conceals the truth: that our choices are only part of the story. Context is the other piece, and the context for Gen X women is this: we were an experiment in crafting a higher-achieving, more fulfilled, more well-rounded version of the American woman. In midlife many of us find that the experiment is largely a failure.
We thought we could have both thriving careers and rich home lives and make more and achieve more than our parents, but most of us have gained little if any advantage. Economist Isabel V. Sawhill, of the Brookings Institution, told me that a typical forty-year-old woman in America now makes $36,000 a year working full-time. After child care, rent, food, and taxes, that leaves only about $1,000 for everything else.10 Even women who make much more may feel uneasy about their financial future, stunned by how hard it is just getting through the week, or disappointed by how few opportunities seem to come their way.
We diminish our whole generation when we dismiss these women’s complaints as unreasonable griping. Societal, historical, and economic trends have conspired to make many women’s passage into middle age a crucible of anxieties—and to make us envy one another rather than realize we are all in the same leaky boat. I hope this book will help us hear women’s concerns not as whining but as a corrective to the misleading rhetoric extolling an American dream that has not come within reach for us—and likely will not for our children.
Some might argue that American Generation X women have it easy compared with women in other countries or of other generations. Boomers and Millennials may claim their own, perhaps even worse, cases.
“No, my generation was the first who were told they could have it all!” one Boomer woman said when presented with this book’s premise.
The concept did emerge in the Boomers’ generation, but it wasn’t until Gen X arrived that it was a mainstream expectation. Boomers deserve full credit for blazing trails while facing unchecked sexism and macroaggression and for trying to raise children without giving up their own dreams. But Gen Xers entered life with “having it all” not as a bright new option but as a mandatory social condition.
“I’m supposed to have it all, too!” a Millennial woman said. “We have it just as bad!”
Millennials, certainly, have reached adulthood with crushing student loan debt, unprecedented social and economic inequality, poisonous political polarization, and a rapidly changing world with many industries in flux. But, by the time Millennials were entering the workforce, the illusion of infinite possibility had finally come under broad attack, giving way to more realistic expectations.
With all due respect to our elders and juniors, when it came to the “having it all” virus we all caught, Gen X was infected with a particularly virulent strain.
That said, Boomers and Millennials, sadly, are likely to find a lot to relate to in this book. I hope that younger Millennials and Generation Z and those to follow will find our cautionary tales useful and that Boomers will not be too dismayed by how far we have not come.
Put simply: having more options has not necessarily led to greater happiness or satisfaction. “By many objective measures, the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past thirty-five years,” wrote the authors of an analysis of General Social Survey data a decade ago, as Generation X entered middle age.
