Listen, I don’t care how uncool this sounds: I am super pumped to watch the new Matlock series starring Kathy Bates. I fully understand that just the word “Matlock” fires up every ageist instinct all of us have ever had.
But! An older woman who takes advantage of the invisibility foisted upon her so that justice can prevail? That older woman being portrayed by the formidable Kathy Bates? Sign! Me! Up!
One of my whole things about aging is how poor the representations of this time in life really are. That’s why part of this blog is to collect and collate the ones that do this well. One excellent effort countering this is Sari Botton’s Oldster, her Substack newsletter that comes out a few times a week. Featuring interviews and reflections from Botton and other writers, it’s a dynamic peek into the questions and answers Gen X and other generations are contemplating as we age. Thank goodness for that.
That’s what the New York Times wrote this spring about Miranda July’s book All Fours, and boy, did they nail it. I’m only halfway through, but I’ve been reading it compulsively since last night. Not even knowing the ending, I want to declare: anyone going through perimenopause HAS to read this book.
The novel begins with the protagonist (an artist who sounds not dissimilar from July herself) preparing to drive solo from her home in LA to New York. She doesn’t get far, though, when she stops in a small town and spends two and a half weeks creating a numinous, and entirely separate space for her life. When she returns to her regular life back at home with her husband and child, she struggles to figure out an impossible question: how can she have everything she wants?
I think the book is resonating so deeply with readers is partly because July does such a fantastic job of entwining the main story with the protagonist’s unfolding perimenopause. The perimenopausal symptoms and questions are in the background in the same way they are in so many of our lives: as a side character who may or may not be fucking up our main quest.
On the surface, the central character (who is not dissimilar from July herself) is not particularly relatable to readers. Her wealth, profession, sexuality and marital dynamics separate her from many of us. But the subtleties of her experiences caused me to gasp and grin several times throughout the book. There is both a nuanced and vibrant sensibility that I could not help but identify with throughout. For example:
“Maybe it all began now, my life as a wife comfortable in her own home, a real wife. I tried to remember how Pinocchio had become a real boy. It had something to do with being in a whale, maybe saving his father’s life; I had done anything like that. But surely a woman was more complex than a puppet boy and she might become herself not once-and-for-all but cyclically: waxing, waning, sometimes disappearing altogether.” [Me bolding for emphasis]
I never would have expected the reflections on this stage of life to come through so powerfully and beautifully from a novel, only from personal essays or other non-fiction. I’m terrifically grateful to July for creating this book. I will report back later this weekend when, no doubt, I’ll have finished devouring it.
This Netflix animated series did not get the flowers it deserved. It’s weird, it’s touching, it’s prescient. And the titular Carol is a middle-aged woman who is lost amongst a very specific form of chaos. I loved it. 10/10 would recommend.
Call it the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, but I am seeing so many great quotes from middle-aged broads these days. I feel like a magpie, plucking them out from here and there. I am going to start posting them on this blog so I can keep proper track of them. Here is the one I stumbled across today: Jodie Foster letting us mid-life women know that it really does get better.
It used to be that when I got together with friends, discussions of work would form a central part of the conversation.
But because of two things, work rarely is a main topic of conversation with friends these days, which I absolutely love.
I think this has come about for three reasons:
middle age
self-employment
de-centering work from my identity
What I mean is:
So let’s talk about work, you and I, but let’s also not pretend that it is the end-all be-all.
It’s a constellation of variables that have brought me to existing in fall 2024 as a person who feels pretty contented most of the time. It’s the anti-depressant, the bike riding and swimming, the good health of my little family, the financial security, and the flowering of possibilities here in my second adolescence, my midlife.
It’s the feeling of admitting to myself and the world who I am. It’s the jettisoning of outdated ideas from my life. (Whose idea was it to try to become the Executive Director of such and such or the Policy Director of Blah Blah, anyway?) I know what I’m good at and what I like to do. I know now I’ll never be Oprah, and I also know that in order to have a positive impact on people, I don’t have to be Oprah.
And still, all around, on a daily basis, there is the stomach churning acknowledgement of the cruelties and devastation of the outside world. In Toronto, homelessness is always right there, especially since the height of the pandemic. Every morning, I make a point of reading the news of what’s happening in Gaza, Israel, the West Bank, and Lebanon. (I will write about this soon.) Almost every day, the climate emergency makes itself obvious to us.
I know my happiness in this phase of my life is also about the complete accident of having been born white and middle-class in Canada. The foundation of my financial security is my marriage. My health and non-disabled status can be taken away from me in an instant.
There is so much goodness to be grateful for and so much badness that needs to be addressed. I’ve started praying at bedtime in the past few weeks, as an acknowledgement of both.
I am happy and I am also still so goddamn sad for the world.
I sense I’ll be returning to my covid cave again this winter. I’ve started masking on the subway again, and hand sanitizer has returned to my purse. I’m going to make a declaration to friends, acquaintances and colleagues about regular outdoor meetings. Like a standing date to go on a hike every other Sunday or something. But I also want to have a monthly standing date to make a vat of chili and invite people over. I still feel like my friendships have never fully recovered since 2020. I want to be more intentional about that as I age.
In the past couple of months, I have been filled with the sense that I am completely okay with my life as it is. If I were to be given a prognosis of having only 3 or 12 or 18 months to live, I feel very much like I would not have feel any any despair about
the work I have not done
the books I haven’t published
the potential I have not fulfilled
I would feel despair, of course! But I imagine it would be about my loved ones, plus just the weird gnarliness of, like, mortality.
But after having a real shit 18 months before this summer, feeling contentment is most welcome.
I am convinced it has everything to do with the blessings of middle age. It’s this thing that I wrote about yesterday, that Bowie said, about aging being a moment when you can become more of yourself.
That’s what it is–I feel more myself than I have felt, like, ever, or perhaps since I was 12.
“Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been.”
—David Bowie
2024 has been a year whe I have re-connected with the person I used to be. It feels very much like this is the person I always should have been. Herewith are five things I loved as a kid that I have resumed doing as an adult:
It has been absolutely wonderful to return to five four things I loved as a kid: making pretty things with paper, drama, learning a language, swimming and biking.
David Bowie was really on to something about this whole aging thing.