5 of the best books about aging and the midlife experience
My book shelves are overflowing, and I’ve felt an urgent need to make room for new books, ones that better reflect where I am right now in midlife.
Would you believe that I still own 10 books about baby sleep? (My 12.5-year-old son didn’t sleep for the first year of his life, and in my early days of blogging about motherhood, these soul-crushing sleep struggles were one of my primary writing topics.) Or about as many about raising (surviving?) toddlers? I own countless books about understanding neurodiverse children.
I collect books about topics that I’m struggling with. (This quirk may make more sense once you learn that my personality type is INTJ and my Enneagram type is Investigator.)
So it’s interesting to me that I own very few nonfiction or memoir books about understanding midlife. I’m not sure why that is. Is it because there aren’t that many books out there and the ones that are out there aren’t publicized widely? Is it because my wonderings and struggles are less precise (“is this all there is? why do I feel alone in this? Am I too late to reach my goals?”) than other big challenges from earlier periods of my life?
Here are five books that resonate with me:
Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis by Ada Calhoun
Perhaps I’m biased because I was interviewed by Ada for this book (as well as several other HerStories community members who are featured prominently), but I love the focus on the specific cultural, political, and historical moments through which Gen X have lived as a lens for understanding our generation’s feelings of anxiety and dread.
Navigating the Messy Middle: A Fiercely Honest and Wildly Encouraging Guide for Midlife Women by Ann Douglas
Just like Ada, Ann completed extensive interviews with midlife women and the richness of their stories drew me in. This is a profoundly hopeful and compassionate book about getting to the heart of midlife’s “messiness.”
Midlife Bites: Anyone Else Falling Apart, Or Is It Just Me? by Jen Mann of People I Want to Punch in the Throat
Jen was one of the first “big” mommy bloggers I got to know early on in my parenting writing. The first thing to know about her is that she’s very funny — and her humor veers toward the dark side, in a deliciously honest and relatable way. Her book is part memoir, part guide, and I loved every essay in it.
The Shift: How I (Lost and) Found Myself After 40 — And You Can Too by Sam Baker
I picked up The Shift recently after reading Sam Baker‘s Substack. It’s a gorgeously written manifesto, and I appreciated every word about the rage and outrage that many women experience and her thoughts about how to harness our power as midlife women.
The Third Chapter: Passion, Risk, and Adventure in the 25 Years after 50 by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot
I’ve only just started this one — maybe my reluctance to finish it is because I’M NOT 50 YET (I have more than 6 months left in my forties!) — but I can tell it’s one I’ll love. I first heard about it through one of the writers in a HerStories workshop. My own academic background is in educational sociology, and Sara is one of the giants in that field, and in sociology in general. Her gift is for sharing her subjects’ stories compassionately and with nuance and complexity.
This article was originally published here on The Midstory Substack.
