![]() ![]() Generation X, born between 19 – and frequently characterised as rebellious and hedonistic – now find themselves (or ourselves) in a specific position. We'll all come out of the other side of middle-age as changed people, but let that be a positive change."Ī particular kind of reckoning awaits those who are now reaching their 40s and 50s, according to some recent writing. But the main thing I've learnt is don't fear it, embrace it. "I think most of us feel a sadness when we think about becoming middle-aged, we're mourning that loss of youth and everything that represents. In the end, Winn is philosophical about ageing. It allows you to examine the things that drive you, and those that hold you back." "Writing can do that, it makes you peel away the layers and question yourself, and what you find can be a real surprise. And the writing process, she adds, helps that sense of empowerment. When facing adversity in middle age, says the author, the most valuable thing for her "was coming to understand that ageing doesn't diminish you, it just adds another layer of experience, that gave me the greatest strength". In her follow-up book, The Wild Silence, Winn writes about recovering her self-belief, and how this helped her move on in her life. She concludes that he "viewed every female writer as a sitting tenant on his land". Later, she writes: "It seemed to me all over again that in every phase of living we do not have to conform to the way our life has been written for us, especially by those who are less imaginative than ourselves." ![]() At a literary party, an entitled male author suggests to the narrator that the attention that her writing has attracted is somehow "vulgar". Ownership and territory are recurring themes. The book describes the end of one version of herself and the tentative creation of a new one, a version that is free from rules and patriarchal expectations. ![]() The plant is a starting point for Levy's vision of a new life, and the creation of a new nest now that hers is empty. The memoir begins with the narrator's purchase of a banana plant, which, her daughter jokes, the author tends and cares for like a "third child". What does she want from life? What does it mean to be a female writer? What kind of female character should she be writing – or being? In it, the author contemplates her life after divorce, as her daughters start to find their independence. But perhaps the doyenne of the mid-life memoir is Deborah Levy, whose wry Real Estate – the third in her trilogy of "living autobiography" – was recently published. In recent years a growing number of female authors have been tackling the theme head on – Rachel Cusk, for one, who has candidly and acerbically related each stage of middle-age, and Caitlin Moran, author of the popular More Than a Woman. But the middle-aged woman of a certain age who is searching for meaning, purpose or a strong sense of self? She is a rarer creature. And, of course, in fiction and poetry, the mid-life hero on an emotional journey has been a staple for centuries – from Homer's Odyssey right through to Martin Amis's The Information and Hanif Kureishi's Intimacy, not to mention most of the novels by John Updike, Philip Roth and Richard Ford. He suggested that once we have jumped over the mid-life hurdle, which involves breaking down the "false self" of our youth, our "shadow" selves are released – and then the "contrasexual other" (the animus for women, the anima for men) – which all sounds quite traumatic. The mid-life period was a preoccupation for Carl Jung, who saw it as a kind of "second birth" of adult identity, for both men and women. Aristotle, Schopenhauer, John Stuart Mill, Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir are some of the writers and thinkers who have contemplated the subject. In these coming-of-age stories, it's the grown-ups doing the growing up. But increasingly in contemporary writing, there is another kind of coming-of-age story, in which the protagonist is not an adolescent but a middle-aged woman who undergoes a transformative process, gaining a new emotional maturity, a clearer intellectual perspective and an evolved sense of identity. Along the way there are obstacles to overcome – it is often a baptism by fire. ![]() In the familiar coming-of-age tale, a young adult experiences an emotional journey or a rite-of-passage ordeal that propels them towards maturity. ![]()
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