I’m not having a midlife crisis. Any actuary would tell you I’m well over halfway, plus the years 30-40 were one long, undignified, slightly premature MLC (I won’t apologise for abbreviating; time is short – see first point) that I refuse to revisit. But I’m interested in that moment when mortality ceases to be a vague, polite murmur and becomes a screaming alarm. My cohort is now traversing Dante’s dark wood, so I feel surrounded if not by midlife crises (I’m experiencing disappointingly few vicarious ones), then by culture exploring them.
Of course, each generation rediscovers and makes a fuss about universal experiences, but it feels like the MLC is in the midst of a makeover. First, it’s female. The new MLC queen is Miranda July, whose new novel All Fours is reframing perimenopausal turmoil as urgent, sensual, even “hot”. July has managed to make midlife angst feel fresh, but positing All Fours as a singular overdue examination of the crystallising, life-upturning effect of the end of fertility is a bit unfair to many who came before. What about Bridget Christie’s brilliant menopause sitcom The Change, for a start? I also think you don’t need to explicitly articulate the physical and emotional reckonings of perimenopause to create art informed by it. Rachel Cusk has been dissecting aspects of female midlife turmoil since her divorce memoir Aftermath, surely; Fleishman Is In Trouble is, in large part, a female MLC novel, and Deborah Levy’s extraordinary Living trilogy became a lodestar for a generation of women navigating the shifting sands of middle age (I solemnly gave it to my sister for her 39th birthday, as if transmitting a sacred text).
