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In the acknowledgments of her 2024 novel \u201cAll Fours<\/a>,\u201d Miranda July explains that she was inspired by a series of conversations about \u201cphysical and emotional midlife changes\u201d with several women close to her.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd while there is almost no trace of these actual conversations in the book,\u201d she adds, \u201cthey made writing it more necessary.\u201d<\/p>\n The novel finds a middle-aged mother choosing to leave home and drive across the country in search of herself. Sound a little hackneyed? Maybe that\u2019s why she gives up after about 30 minutes, pulling into a dingy motel and instead trying to turn back time from her new home base, the appropriately chosen Room 321.<\/p>\n In this bland environment she undergoes a physical and spiritual awakening \u2013 a dance to the Muzak of time. Whether remodeling her motel room or defying libidinal decline with a nearby Hertz rental car employee, July\u2019s protagonist, who talks a lot about respiration \u2013 \u201cI breathed in; I breathed out\u201d \u2013 finally breathes life back into herself.<\/p>\n Along the way, \u201cAll Fours\u201d frames middle age as something that must be felt and communicated afresh, one powerful, awkward, minutely recorded sensation at a time.<\/p>\n Easier said than done. Some clich\u00e9s are like planets, their gravitational pull too strong for all but the most propulsive acts of creativity. Middle age is one of these. The changes often associated with being in your 40s and 50s \u2013 gray hairs, career doldrums, time\u2019s squeaky-wheeled chariot drawing near \u2013 can seem as inevitable as aging itself.<\/p>\n And yet, as my research\u00a0on the construction and representation of aging has shown<\/a>, the middle years aren\u2019t what they used to be, nor what they will one day become.<\/p>\n The history of middle age begins as far back as the eye can read.<\/p>\n In classical Western literature, the middle of life is represented as a time to live and die magnificently.<\/p>\n In the Greek epics,\u00a0Odysseus<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Ajax<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 are middle-aged, and neither loses sleep wondering about his life choices or whether his skills are falling off. Nor does Homer worry much about conveying how these men became who they are. Wily Odysseus, you can only assume, was wily pretty much from the cradle.<\/p>\n Beowulf,\u00a0the hero of an early Anglo-Saxon poem<\/a>, likewise does not show signs of slowing down until old age, when a dragon proves too much for him to kill without help from a much younger man. Embarrassing.<\/p>\n The middle phase of life, these works imply, is the time when people are most themselves, with the greatest abundance of skill and purpose that life will ever confer.<\/p>\n Even Shakespeare saw midlife as little cause for anxiety. Among the \u201cseven ages of man<\/a>\u201d described in \u201cAs You Like It<\/a>,\u201d middle age corresponds roughly to the part of \u201cthe justice,\u201d a man with \u201cfair round belly\u201d and \u201cwise saws\u201d who sounds a little quaint, perhaps, but also content; it is only during the sixth age, with the approach of what Shakespeare calls \u201csecond childishness,\u201d that a major shift occurs and quality of life starts to drop.<\/p>\n Then everything changed. The Industrial Revolution\u00a0gave rise to a new bourgeois class<\/a>\u00a0that, when not reeling from the latest market crash, had time and money to burn.<\/p>\n Middle-class leisure, unlike the aristocratic kind that greeted one at birth, required shifting gears, from a full-steam-ahead search for one\u2019s place in the world to the relative stagnancy that came with having found it.<\/p>\n This kind of whiplash was enough to make a crisis of midlife: a deep-seated feeling of anxiety about the value of one\u2019s achievements, the meaning of existence and the proximity of death.<\/p>\n While the actual term \u201cmidlife crisis\u201d\u00a0was not born until 1965<\/a>, thanks to 48-year-old Canadian psychoanalyst Elliot Jacques, its gestation stretched across the 18th and 19th centuries. Romantic poets such as\u00a0John Keats<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Percy Shelley<\/a>, who died at 25 and 29, respectively, taught readers to covet the summer of life with almost desperate intensity, and even a slight chill in the air became cause for dread.<\/p>\n The Victorians, perhaps sensing that Britain\u2019s empire could not stay young and virile forever, took this Romantic dread and ran with it. In the 1853 novel \u201cLittle Dorrit<\/a>,\u201d 41-year-old Charles Dickens portrays 41-year-old Arthur Clennam, who gloomily meditates on what he\u2019s done with himself and how little it\u2019s gotten him:<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018From the unhappy suppression of my youngest days, through the rigid and unloving home that followed them, through my departure, my long exile, my return, my mother\u2019s welcome, my intercourse with her since, down to the afternoon of this day with poor Flora,\u2019 said Arthur Clennam, \u2018what have I found!\u2019\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n For Clennam, a jaded merchant who recently vacated his position with the family firm in search of some greater purpose, taking stock of one\u2019s life seems a painful but necessary exercise. He also takes another kind of stock, investing in a Ponzi scheme that plunges him, with most of London, into a state of financial crisis that mirrors his personal one.<\/p>\n A generation later, in the U.S., Theodore Dreiser\u2019s 1900 novel \u201cSister Carrie<\/a>\u201d tells the story of George Hurstwood, a successful businessman whose life begins to unravel the moment he stops working long enough to question its real worth.<\/p>\n Both Clennam and Hurstwood eventually take up with a 20-something woman \u2013 one finding regeneration in that relationship, the other dishevelment and death.<\/p>\n In another time, both men might also splurge on a red Corvette.<\/p>\n What about middle-aged women in the 19th century?<\/p>\n In a way, there were none. The critic Sari Edelstein, in her 2019 book \u201cAdulthood and Other Fictions<\/a>,\u201d encourages readers to think about adulthood not as a biological fact but as a cluster of political rights and privileges conferred on some people in the U.S. \u2013 usually white men \u2013 and largely withheld from others, such as women and people of color.<\/p>\n While race, class and marital status profoundly impacted women\u2019s experience of midlife, one fact remains constant for much of the century: the absence of full adult status under the law. Even as they matured, women were kept little.<\/p>\n They were also portrayed as such. Popular novels such as \u201cThe Lamplighter<\/a>\u201d and \u201cThe Wide, Wide World<\/a>\u201d retraced time and again the approved boundaries of a married woman\u2019s life, which extend no further than the home. Unmarried women and widows could hold property and manage their own financial affairs, but the period literature far too seldom represents their point of view. Not until the advent of second-wave feminism, and works such as Doris Lessing\u2019s 1974 novel \u201cThe Summer Before the Dark<\/a>,\u201d did middle-aged womanhood become a topic more openly and creatively explored on paper.<\/p>\n For all that creative labor across the past century, the English-speaking world has been largely\u00a0resigned to the idea of middle age as a dreadful, isolating crisis<\/a>.<\/p>\n This is likely due in part to the midlife crisis\u2019s amazing elasticity \u2013 the way it stretches to accommodate shifting cultural contexts and the rise of whole new artistic forms. Few other topics seem to lend themselves so generously to esoteric offerings and crowd-pleasing genre fare, to the page and the screen. (For my money, one of the best films about midlife crises is Martin Scorsese\u2019s \u201cCasino<\/a>.\u201d)<\/p>\n If not a crisis, what else could midlife be?<\/p>\n Perhaps the gateway to something universal.<\/p>\n While the narrator of \u201cAll Fours\u201d suffers plenty of distress and ennui, she never uses the word \u201ccrisis\u201d without scare quotes. She\u2019s clearly holding out for another kind of midlife.<\/p>\n That faith is rewarded in the last chapter, when she watches a dance recital and feels the \u201cwarm, hallowed feeling\u201d from her hotel retreat \u201cgilding the whole neighborhood, the whole city \u2026 The whole universe? Yes\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n She reflects: \u201cIf 321 was everywhere then every day was Wednesday, and I could always be how I was in the room. Imperfect, ungendered, game, unashamed. I had everything I needed in my pockets, a full soul.\u201d<\/p>\n Her consciousness expanding and contracting between the scale of the universe and that of her own pockets, July\u2019s narrator does more than regenerate. Rising and falling, part St. Teresa and part Lady Macbeth, she embraces both the ecstasy and the tragedy of life and is twice empowered.<\/p>\n It is a midlife metamorphosis.<\/p>\nInventing midlife<\/strong><\/h4>\n
The birth of crisis<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Future midlife<\/strong><\/h4>\n