Please can you recommend some books that will show me which way to turn in the full-on storm of an all-questioning midlife crisis?
Anonymous, 46, London
Sam Leith, author, journalist and literary editor of the Spectator, writes:
I’m a bit in the dark, here, questioner. I don’t even know if you’re male or female. And what sort of midlife crisis are we talking about? Sexual redundancy? Professional disappointment? Gibbering fear of death? The “full-on storm” suggests there’s more to this one than buying a leather jacket. Good news: all literature is your friend, one way and another.
The original literary midlife crisis is Dante: “In the middle of our journey of life, I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost...” Men have had a lot to say about midlife crises ever since. Martin Amis’s The Information (“Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say nothing”) has a stab at all three of the categories I mention above. Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy is another classic of the genre. And the 20th-century male American canon – Updike, Roth, Yates, Richard Ford, etc – is one big bourbon-soaked nervous breakdown.
But women have midlife crises too. Anne Tyler spreads them among her characters in A Spool of Blue Thread (as does Anne Enright in The Green Road); and dumps it on one in Ladder of Years. Germaine Greer’s The Change is a nonfictional approach of the most obvious sort; Marina Benjamin’s recent The Middlepause offers philosophical balm. There: saved you from Iron John and Eat, Pray, Love.
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