Lindsey Mead, ed., On Being 40(ish) (2019): I bumped into the first essay (Meghan Daum’s) on the web. That is, contemporary marketing works; I placed a hold via a local library. 40(ish) is an essay collection plus one art sequence by women mostly in their forties, as it says, from age thirty-eight to early fifties at time of writing. For some reason, the cover is millennial pink.
Mead is a Phillips Exeter and Princeton alum that completed a Harvard MBA, then had children in her twenties and proceeded to become a high-powered recruiter/headhunter and freelance writer. The writers’ subject positions overlap hers substantially. Nearly everything has a New York City lens; except for two pieces (placed toward the back of the bus book), everything sounds upper middle class white. Nearly everything turns upon the presence or absence of a man. Anyway, the pieces are at minimum interesting sociologically—that’s a good thing. They’re also quick to skim, which I’d wanted most.
I’d sort of expected to see commonalities in unexpected moments. It’s a contradiction that comes with middle age: you learn the edges of what you don’t know and of what’s possible in the world, and then you aren’t really surprised by the things you didn’t expect because you’ve been not-surprised so many times before by the impossibility of full anticipation. I knew there would be [fuck cancer], late-onset career momentum, the perception/cosmetics thing (cast here as wrinkles, not grey hair), and some tradeoffs of stay-at-home parenting. I’d even guessed that 40(ish) would “celebrate” heterosexual marriage with all extremities clenched upon it. For many, the decade of one’s forties is when relationships are most fragile, whether friendly or romantic, because of ambient changes. (Not menopause, though Lisa Borders’s piece deserves a shout-out in this context. I mean concerns about mortality, dependent care both fore and aft, and employment/cash-flow issues.)
What I didn’t anticipate is putting the book aside for a while upon reaching Alison Winn Scotch’s contribution. Scotch frames the aftermath to her ski accident’s snapped femur thus: she loves her husband, she’s had the more flexible work schedule all this time with which to handle kid logistics, she can multitask and he can’t (she says), and though he’s always asked to be told what to do and how to help, she just wishes he would figure it out and not need to be told at normal times, never mind moments of crisis.
That’s nearly my line both ways, in the sand and spoken. Such factors comprise our daily lives until they don’t. You know whether Scotch’s partner stepped up because the anecdote is in this collection at all. We—humans, any gender—mention such things rarely, and then only when they turn out “well”; these Jenga towers did not tip over or explode into shrapnel. Gemma Hartley’s Medium piece of Nov 2018 is another datum.
I suppose that the collection’s theme is loosely “I struggled, and then I found something therein that showed me I don’t need to struggle in quite that way.” That part speaks to me well enough. It’s the upshot of the art sequence, certainly, in which Sujean Rim shows a model-thin woman doing her damnedest to put on skinny jeans, succeeding, then tossing them over her shoulder and striding out of the last frame in fraying boyfriend jeans. Though there’s no caption, I recognize the garment styles. This isn’t the kind of book that asks why we label women’s styles “boyfriend jeans” and “grandpa cardigan,” however; it only tries to reassure the reader that slouching is okay at times. I mean, we should still wear cute shoes with our mimetically fraying af jeans, right? (psh.) Theme, shakily: Tori Amos’s “Silent All These Years.”
My age/gender-sliced demographic seems quite anxious. It’s nothing new; alongside the contemporary casual “jokes” about red wine, consider the pervasiveness of Valium in the 1960s–’70s. But—is this relatively narrow range of attempted soothing and validation really it? Even Bridget Jones would want us to do better.