Wait, I'm the same age as my favorite middle-aged protagonists?
The just-under-40 struggle extends to literature
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When you realize you don’t have any middle-aged neighbors, it’s because you are the middle-aged neighbor.
That’s how I figured out I’d hit middle age. It was in conversation with my neighbors, chatting as one does about the relative age of the new family moving into the vacant house. I was mid-sentence about younger families moving when when I was like OH MY GOD, we are the middle aged people in the neighborhood. My husband was a part of this conversation and we reference it often.
Today is my last day being the age of Olga from Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment. Tomorrow I turn 39, the age of Dayna from
’s forthcoming novel If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant For You.
In the first book, Olga loses her mind when her husband announces he wants a divorce. They have two young children and a dog and she’s left to take care of them, but she can’t even manage to unlock her apartment door.
In the second book, Dayna is an unemployed journalist when her boyfriend dumps her. She decides to go rogue and move into a TikTok hype house in hopes of resurrecting her career.
These women are shattered, desperate — and almost 40. Part of the drama is their age: A breakup at 20 doesn’t compare to a breakup at 40. Likewise the loss of a job. Almost-40 adds an element of distress because the stakes are higher.
When I was 30, I never noticed when protagonists were my age. The reason it’s hitting me now is because of the drama inherent in being this age. Women nearing 40 have a lot to think about: Are we in the right career? Are we sure we don’t want (more) children? Are we going to survive if we don’t have a book published by the arbitrary deadline of 40, if we never make a 40 under 40 list?
A 40-year-old protagonist is on-the-nose and doesn’t come with the anxieties of turning 40. But 38, 39 — that’s interesting. Not yet 40 but definitely not 30; it’s the liminal space between younger and older.
I, like the protagonists in these books I love, am treading the spatial in-between. Not 45 like the unnamed protagonist in All Fours, whose story is centered around a perimenopausal self-identity crisis. Not 30 like Eleanor in Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, who comes of age as she tussles with her identity. Instead, I’m in that wobbly space like Olga and Dayna, not yet what society perceives as old but not able to fumble my way through life like Eleanor.
In Charles D’Ambrosio’s short story The Point1, 13-year-old Kurt is assigned the job of safely accompanying drunk elderly guests home from his mother’s raucous parties. The blitzed guest that Kurt escorts home in this particular story is Mrs. Gurney, who has “silver hair, which was usually shellacked with spray and coiffed to resemble a crash helmet.”
Poor Mrs. Gurney, too drunk to keep her hair in tact as Kurt leads her down the short stretch of beach to her house, too drunk to refrain herself from plopping into the sand, rolling her nylons down her legs and “tossing the little black doughnuts into the wind.”
And poor sober Kurt who has to fetch her dispensed nylons and who notices that the “tan skin of her chest looked like parchment, like the yellowed, crinkled page of some ancient text, maybe the Bible, or the Constitution, the original copy, or even the rough draft.”
You may have guessed it, but Mrs. Gurney is not old.
She’s 38.
This is hubristic of course, coming from a 13-year-old boy, but I do question the choices the author made and the perceptions he created in his story. It’s almost like Kurt regards Mrs. Gurney as decrepit. And while a 13-year-old boy may think I’m ancient, most 38-year-old women do not look like her. I don’t know any 38-year-old women with a full head of silver hair and a chest crinkled like parchment.
Despite the physical descriptions of Mrs. Gurney, Kurt remains respectful throughout his telling of the story. He never sexualizes her, even when she takes off her nylons, and doesn’t take advantage of her obliterated state. But is this because he’s a respectful child or because of Mrs. Gurney’s rough draft skin? Her crash helmet of silver hair?
Naturally, in a time when I’m questioning everything, I’m also now questioning if this is how male authors see middle-aged women or if it’s merely a symptom of the time, when distressed housewives like Mrs. Gurney drank and smoke and tanned without sunscreen; when they aimed for bottle blond and ended up with silver.
Either way, forty is nigh for me. I have a year left in this reflective space before I turn 40 and you better believe I’m going to live it like a protagonist.
Are you joining us for My Brilliant Ferrante, a celebration of Elena Ferrante for Women in Translation Month? Throughout August, we’ll be reading Ferrante in two ways: 1) a slow read of the first book in her Neapolitan Quartet, My Brilliant Friend, and 2) a standalone book each week.
Details and reading schedule here.
Order your books or request them from the library! My Brilliant Ferrante begins in two weeks!
Your turn!
❓ What are your favorite books with middle-aged protagonists?
❓ Have you ever read a book and realized the protagonist is your exact age? Did they feel younger or older than you?
❓ What are you reading? What are you underlining?
Thank you, love you, can’t wait to read with you.
— Kolina
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The Point was originally published in The New Yorker in 1980. If you have a subscription, you can access the story in the archive. It was reading assigned by my workshop instructor, the same one I yapped about last week in The Shape of Stories.
If 39 is middle aged, what is 51? It is older by 12 years that felt like 4.5 years.
After 40, the ride speeds up exponentially. 63 is here in 2 “felt” years from now.
Sigh…
In 2021 when I started writing IYSTIMFY, Dayna was my age (37) and a friend in my writing group said make her 39… she was right because being right on the cusp of the next decade brings up a lot of feelings and regret. I’m launching the book at 40. I could think and talk about aging all day—it’s the most interesting subject!