Two - Ways of Talking about Midlife

Summary

Introduction

The ways people tell stories about midlife are important. With stories, we learn broad contexts, we see what tropes and ideas are perpetuated, abandoned, contested and sometimes resurrected. Some such tropes – for example, ‘midlife crisis’ (Jaques 1965) – are embraced at certain times and in certain genres, while at other times they are vehemently criticized as an empty invention. At the same time, psychologists argue that midlife, especially gendered midlife, is a pivotal time with complex and changing psychosocial needs (Sherman 1987; Rosenfeld 2004). While the narratives in this chapter are not exhaustive, they crucially shaped the ways in which the people I met and observed as part of my research sought or imagined ways of sailing through midlife.

I look at co- existent perspectives, and narratives and counternarratives, drawing on work by Gullette (2016), who has demonstrated how the overwhelming socialization of the Western cult of youth gave rise to anxieties and neuroses about any signs of ageing. I draw on Frank's (1995) theory from crip studies, productively applied by Amini and McCormack (2019), who have studied menopause in non- Western contexts to discern what kind of storylines about midlife are solidifying in different geographic and social locations. Frank (1995) distinguished between three typical storylines of the wounded storyteller. In Frank's (1995) theory, a chaos story depicts transformations that seem never- ending, while restitution narratives rest on the idea that a normal life and full health can be restored after an unsettling event. In parallel, quest narratives seek transformation, with the protagonist becoming someone new as a result of the experience. Due to my own positionality as a woman in midlife, and as an avid reader across the social sciences and humanities, I am fascinated by the diversity of narratives and how they illustrate the relationships between cultural geographies, narrativity, emotions and power (Sharp 2009). I am inspired by stories of Black midlife and menopause drawing on different forms of knowledge that fuse emotion, the character of age, mythology and new forms of resistance (cf Harding 1991). However, I begin with the popular narratives that call on the middle aged to adopt introspection or to fix themselves using neoliberal techniques.