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missed opportunity, given that a lot of women in their target audience now have young children. Waking up at 2 a.m. on the regular to attend to a preschooler’s requirements when you’re past whatever was your peak age energy-wise can take a toll, or so I’ve heard. Those of us in that boat may be particularly overwhelmed or lack the bandwidth for introspection. Regardless, there are countless parenting-advice books, and no book can be everything. The Midlife Plot Twist hovers in a liberal, realist middle ground between identifying systemic factors hold- ing women back and offering strate- gies for doing what you can with the options available. It is, above all, a warning against romanticizing throwing away your life as you know it: “‘Burning it all down’ can become another impossible standard placed on women, like ‘having it all.’” It’s your standard change what you can, accept what you cannot fare, but with a light enough touch that this not-wrong ad- vice goes down easily. When I think of midlife crisis, I think of the morbid reality that none of us can know when we’re at our own midway point. The midlife crisis is not the realization, at 40, that you’ve got only half your life ahead of you. It’s the existential awareness that 40 more years are by no means guaranteed. You’ve reached midlife not at any numerical age, but when you realize you’ve aged past When I grow- up ... When I was younger, I could tell myself that if something I wanted — or even just something I was curi- ous about — hadn’t happened, it was that it hadn’t happened yet . In recent years (I’m 42 now), it hit me that I had reached my destination. But have I? A book about how it’s not too late appeals, even if there’s no particular it that I have in mind.
Notable Jewish Midlife Crises Through the Ages
ABRAHAM Genesis (2000 BCE; date approximate)
ISAAC DAVIS Woody Allen
list, but the titular heroine’s journey from New York lawyer to Californian summer-camp- crush-stalker is deeply midlife crisis coded. JACOB BLOCH Jonathan Safran Foer Here I Am (novel, 2016) A television writer’s marriage is on the rocks.
Manhattan (film, 1979)
A divorced man in his 40s dates a high school stu- dent. (If you misremem- ber Allen’s oeuvre as being about middle-aged men and young girls, it is be- cause you’re thinking of Manhattan . Plenty of his alter egos decompensate over more appropriate love interests as well.)
Covenant with God at 99, birth of Isaac at 100, dies at 175 — so technically a midlife rupture. THE BOURGEOIS HOUSEWIFE Betty Friedan The Feminine Mystique (manifesto, 1963) A second-wave feminist icon born of collective housewifely dissatisfac- tion, Mystique remains a reference point for women leading conven- tional lives but wondering what more might be out there. A 40-something historian divorces, loses his mind, and writes a lot of letters. NORMAN ZWECK Bernice Rubens The Elected Member (novel, 1969) A 41-year-old nice Jewish boy has a drug-induced nervous breakdown. (Rubens became the first woman author to win a Booker Prize on the strength of this novel, which made a Booker Prize roundup of literary midlife crises.) MOSES HERZOG Saul Bellow Herzog (novel, 1964)
BARRY COHEN Gary Shteyngart
Lake Success (novel, 2018)
“SWEDE” LEVOV Philip Roth American Pastoral (novel, 1997)
The prolific writer joined the midlife-crisis canon (a theme that continues into subsequent works includ- ing 2025’s Vera, or Faith ) with a hedge-fund- manager protagonist whose life falls apart. TOBY FLEISCHMAN Taffy Brodesser-Akner Fleishman is in Trouble (novel, 2019; miniseries, 2022–2023) A Jewish doctor is shabby compared with the preppy financiers around him. LENA DUNHAM Famesick (memoir, 2026) The bestselling burnout memoir sees Dunham approaching 40 and reflecting on a health crisis exacerbated by overwork and (social) media pile-ons.
A Pulitzer-winner about a Nordic-passing Jewish boy wonder whose down- fall exposed the sinister underbelly of American Jewish suburbia.
BOB DYLAN (spiritual journey, late 1970s)
The singer-songwriter who would go on to win a Nobel Prize, then in his late 30s, converts to evan- gelical Christianity. One man’s crisis is another’s religious awakening? REBECCA BUNCH Rachel Bloom Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (TV show, 2015–2019) A musical romantic sitcom in which the main charac- ter is in her late 20s may seem out of place on this
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