BOOKISH
family caretaking, and friendship” the authors interviewed. But the most en- joyable, and informative, passages are the case studies: “Over 150 women took part in ‘So, How’s Your Midlife?,’ an in-depth survey we created about wom- en’s midlife experiences and emotions. Roughly 30 of them were gracious enough to give us in-depth interviews, letting us know all about the big life changes they made, wanted to make, or simply had thrust upon them.” It’s not that the portraits of indi- vidual women negotiating midlife cover the whole of society, every race and socioeconomic status and sexual orientation in precisely repre- sentative measure. It’s that n-of-1 narratives fill in the blanks to convey what data and opinion cannot. They write that “nearly seventy percent of women who completed our survey say that they thought their lives would be more stable and predictable by now.” And if you’re someone who can relate to feeling like there’s a place you’re meant to be, but it’s not where you are, it helps to hear from these women, one after the next. The chapter on women who did burn it all down is great, too: less as self-help and more as a reminder that life is a series of trade-offs. One woman moves to the Australian country- side to escape high-pressure corpo- rate life and deals with “‘gutters to be fixed, nosy and very noisy neigh- bors on dirt bikes, never-ending gum leaves in the pool, the dog escaping for miles, fire risk, never-ending rain, hot nights, spiders, expensive lawn mowing.’” Another, who’d been work- ing in an ostensibly feminist media environment, was so screwed over by not-so-feminist-after-all men at her company that she left the workforce. She’d hoped to use the time produc- tively, and did, to a point, but also “fell into a massive depression” in which
SELLING THE MIDLIFE CRISIS
I’M NOW GOING to make two claims that need spelling out: book pub- lishing is a business, and books are products. Those two realities, taken together, are the likeliest explanation for why The Midlife Plot Twist reads as a hybrid between voice-y, Nora Ephron–y memoir and self-help. It’s a combination that works here, render- ing what otherwise might have been a midlife crisis workbook readable and, dare I say, a hoot. No matter who de- cided to take this tack, framing a book as self-help — which is more market- able than cultural criticism — is a way to sneak clever writing to wider audi- ences than it might otherwise reach. (I know this as an author in the lat- ter category, who periodically comes up against the mistaken expectation that, because I write non-fiction about women’s topics, I will have an action- able plan for improving women’s lives.) I picked up The Midlife Plot Twist because I was already a huge fan of Moss’s newsletter, The Worst Years of Our Lives: The 2000s , which crit- ically analyzes the pop culture of the recent past. A taste: “As a short, trashy, naturally brunette, formerly hard-drinking Jewish girl with a big nose and shitty parents, no celebrity has ever meant as much to me as Amy Winehouse (please let the fact that she had a once-in-a-generation voice while I have a Substack go unremarked upon, thanks).” Many of Moss’s subjects are more obscure than Winehouse. Her previous book was 2018’s Paperback Crush: The Totally Radical History of ’80s and ’90s Teen Fiction. Co-author Goldwert’s, from 2020, was Bow Down: Lessons from Dominatrix- es on How to Be a Boss in Life, Love, and Work. While Goldwert is a jour- nalist on the personal finance beat,
THE MIDLIFE PLOT TWIST Lindsay Goldwert and Gabrielle Moss
Running Press Adult September 15, 2026
these are two funny American Jewish women. Her own midlife plot twist was deciding, at 37, to start performing stand-up comedy. The generation-specific cultural references (a section headed “Smells Like Self-Compassion: Beginning to Look at Your Past Differently”; a chapter titled “What You Want, What You Really, Really Want: Tuning In to Your Needs and Actually Making Changes”) hint at the book it might have been, if it had gone in a less practical direction. Or, perhaps, that I might have wanted it to be. For my own selfish reasons, I read a line like, “Why didn’t I spend my twenties going to professional networking events instead of going to warehouse raves with a guy named Frisbee Mike?” and find myself wanting to hear more about the Frisbee Mike interlude than a self-help book would permit. ADULTING WHILE FEMALE THERE ARE moments when Goldwert and Moss mention lessons they’ve learned from experience or therapy, but the book is not self-help in the “be like us” mode. Much of the book comes from the “roughly sixty experts in finance, psychology, sexuality, careers,
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