I’m only interested in the mid-life

midway down the midway

There’s a big pile of proofs I said I wanted to read but I can’t get into any of them. It’s not necessarily that there are faults with them. It’s that I’ve realised too late that right now I’m only interested in the mid-life and the big pile of books are about people in their 20s.

Last year I read loads of Anita Brookner novels from the 80s and 90s. Her writing has a kind of upper middle-class crispness to it that I occasionally find grating, but Brookner’s interest in the melancholy, alienation, failures and opportunities of middle age made me feel so invigorated. In her novels she creates a space of intimacy with people contemplating their lives and keening towards something more than they’d settled for. As marriages, friendships and bodies fail, the protagonists have to confront their crushing discontent, and this drives them to behave recklessly. They invite damage, they willingly destabilise their lives so that something else might have to be built in its place.

I turned 46 in early June and since then when I turn off my bedside lamp so I can attempt sleep I find myself thinking, loudly, 14 YEARS UNTIL I’M 60! 14! The fact of it outrages me, offends me! Mentally I feel myself scrambling to rectify the situation, surely there can be something I can do? I’m in mid-life and I want to create an interval before the next half of it begins, I’m not ready to start yet.

I think what’s happened to my reading is that I want to be a researcher of mid-life experience and get my act together before I go on. Brookner helped me because she made all her subjects’ pettiness, disappointments, insecurities and pleasures feel so important and enlivening. Then in May I read Miranda July’s All Fours. That book has probably done for me what Charli XCX’s Brat is doing for women in their late 20s and early 30s. She’s giving them songs about her desires and fears and confusing female friendships. She’s making the anxious contemplation of motherhood something you can dance to. I adore Brat, have been listening to it endlessly, but I’m aware she’s not talking to me, and there is a sense of nostalgia I feel when listening to the songs, a mild pain that I think about it all the time wasn’t there for me when I could have used it. A piece of art finding you when you need it most is one of the best feelings in the world. All Fours isn’t the first piece of great perimenopausal literature, but it is one of the first I’ve read so it immediately joins Mary Ruefle’s astonishing lyric essay Pause in my personal canon of the midlife. The reason for that isn’t because I feel ‘seen’ by it, it’s because July makes the narrator’s experience of confronting perimenopause so fucking thrilling. I needed it so profoundly. I wanted to read a woman in mid-life who is overwhelmed with desire, who has the courage to risk comfort and stability in order to see how her life might open up, be challenged, disrupted, so that it remains worth living for. I’m now reading Dana Spiotta’s Wayward (which I ordered after listening to The New Yorker’s Critics at Large episode on July). In this book the 52-year-old narrator – insomniac with ‘the Mids’ – leaves her husband and child to live alone in a decrepit Arts and Crafts house that she’s fallen in love with. I’m finding solace in this book too and would love to hear other recommendations of books that fuck with women’s experience of mid-life. And I’d particularly love a story where a woman in mid-life hasn’t had kids. So much of the self-help stuff around menopause encourages a kind of self-congratulatory crossing over from fertility to a sense of the job being done. If you’ve not had kids, where does that leave you?

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Since NYC in May I’ve become a nails person. To fund this I’ve told myself I have to sell things for cash on Facebook marketplace. A couple of weeks ago I had BIAB nails done for the first time, and it was absolute torture. I had no idea. The UV light was like sticking my fingers in burning embers. I’m not sure I’ll stick to be this kind of nails person. Might be back to gel for me. On the plus side, my nails look great. I chose a chrome finish that makes them look glazed in liquid opal. Several times a day and hold up my hand and admire them.

On Thursday I’m in Margate for an event with my dear pal Eli Goldstone, tickets are free so come along if you can!

Last week I went to the launch of Gboyega Odubanjo’s Adam, published by Faber. I felt dread in the days leading up to it, the profound wrongness of this collection of poems coming into the world without its author there. But as I suspected, the event itself was very beautiful and showed Gboyega’s work in its singular brilliance. His friends and family made it all happen and I’m deeply grateful to them for the chance to celebrate Adam’s arrival in the world. Everyone who knew and loved Gboyega wants it to travel far, so please order the book, request it from the library, share it with friends and loved ones.