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flared jeans in what I thought, mistak- enly, was my size. Nothing to see here. I therefore fall squarely into the tar- get audience for Lindsay Goldwert and Gabrielle Moss’s delightful new book, The Midlife Plot Twist : How to Reboot Your Life Without Burning It Down (Even If You Really, Really Want To) . It addresses women in their 40s and 50s — younger Gen Xers and elder millen- nials — experiencing is-this-it? angst. It does so in a way that reaches out to the broadest possible audience within those age and generational parameters (Xennial women having some feelings about the aging process, if they are not in outright crisis mode), but in a voice that speaks particularly well to some- one who shares the authors’ profes- sional (writer) and personal (Jewish, woman) demographics. The term midlife crisis was, the authors note, coined in 1965 by Elliott Jaques, a Canadian psycho- analyst, and is commonly associated with men, and more specifically, with their sudden embrace of fast cars and much-younger women. But women have midlife crises as well, even if their symptoms are not as well cata- logued. As the authors put it, we just don’t “have a cliché of our own.” While The Midlife Plot Twist is not the first book to take on middle-aged women’s dilemmas (Ada Calhoun’s 2020 Why We Can’t Sleep is proba- bly the best-known recent example), the way women experience midlife remains under-discussed. And a funny book about this topic? I’m in. The book is strongest when it func- tions as a great big screw-you to the myths about midlife that women can internalize. One hears about how, by the time you’re whichever age, every- thing will have fallen into place, and you’ll have reach a serene level of not caring what others think. Your broke and messy 20s will be behind you,
and good riddance. You will have found happiness in the social and family ar- rangements of your choice, and you will be respected at work. This, as most ac- tual women discover and Goldwert and Moss demonstrate, is not always how it goes. The authors write about how, on social media and in the culture, it can look as though everyone else has things sorted, whereas, in fact, “many of us hit our forties and realize that not only are we not the boss, but we’re also actually still getting yelled at for getting some- one’s salad order wrong.” THE EXPANDING MIDDLE WHAT IS “MIDLIFE,” even? Before we get to the crisis bit, it’s worth look- ing at the scope of this life stage. Midlife is, like so many of our waist- bands, elastic. Officially, it’s the condi- tion of being 40 to 64 years old, which is already a wide range. Colloquially, emotionally, it starts whenever you’re no longer young — which could mean not getting carded at the bar or qual- ifying for certain cancer screenings. As for when it ends: propriety, in an ageist society, is such that nobody ever ages out of this life stage. The 100-year- old is euphemized as late-middle-aged. There’s a gendered component to determining whose midlife starts when. For women, the moment you’re no longer “miss” or a “girl” can be the onset of middle age, even if that happens when you’re in your 20s. Classically, for men, the awareness of being not-young-anymore happens
once they are “settled down.” It’s the man with the mortgage, who cannot drop everything and sling cocktails in the tropical location of his choosing even if he still yearns to. It’s the man with the similarly middle-aged wife who sees an attractive 20-something woman walk by and has a pang of some kind. Whether the result of sex differ- ences in fertility changes or Hollywood leading-actor-versus-actress casting choices, it can seem as though men arrive at middle age later. They don’t, but it can feel that way. What midlife looks like — where someone’s at personally or profession- ally in midlife — is also quite variable. Some 40-year-olds are new parents, others are grandparents, others still are not looking to settle down. And middle-aged is not the same as mid- career. In academia, “junior faculty,” the term used for early-stage profes- sors, are pushing 40. For decades, millennials and (when not forgotten) Gen Xers were dis- cussed as almost inherently youth- ful, as though this were not a fleeting state for us, as for all generations, but something intrinsic to who we were. If media representations were to be believed, millennials were the ones who refused to grow up, who spent money we didn’t have from jobs we couldn’t hold down on avocado toast. The millennial icon (a millennial icon, anyway) was Lena Dunham’s character Hannah Horvath on Girls , introduced as an unpaid intern stealing money her parents had left for a housekeeper. So it shook up not just many millenni- als ourselves but also, even more so, cultural narratives about millennials when this group of eterna-babies start- ed showing up at IVF appointments and divorce courts. At this point, even the youngest millennials aren’t young. If there was ever a time for a self-help book for the middle-aged, this is it.
Midlife is, like so many of our waistbands, elastic.
62 AUTUMN 2026
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