In 2021, I heard a female critic I respect say, “there are no novels about happy middle-aged women.” Since then, this statement has haunted me. I couldn’t accept it as true. Had I just misunderstood a joke? Was this a cry for help? Even if it was a joke, it didn’t sit right with me. If it’s true that there are no books about happy middle-aged women, then there’s a real gap in the market. If society expects women to be uncomfortable as they age, aren’t books at least the place where the inconceivable comes to life? I’m tired of the male-gaze centered narrative that once past youth, female desire is laughable. I hope for better for myself and for everyone. We have the ability to set the stage for our futures through the media that we consume and nurture.
So I set off to compile a list of novels about happy middle-aged women and was promptly but gently stopped in my tracks. Through speaking to women thirty years older than me, I was told in various ways that “happiness is so elusive especially in middle age.” What I understood this to mean was that happiness was maybe beyond or besides the point, that happiness is fleeting and does not speak to the constraints that form the circumstances of oppression. With the normalisation of GLP-1s and the revelations of the Epstein files confirming pedophilic beauty standards, I realised what I was searching for instead of happiness, was freedom. It was endlessly easy to find examples of unhappy women in affairs or married to men who were having affairs, or women longing for affairs, or women jealous of their friends who were married/unmarried/childless or with child. There is nothing wrong with this. This is proof of life. Beyond the stereotypical tropes of affairs, I was looking for a story of joy, rebellion, peace, and sexual awakening. I think this list satisfies these desires. The throughline? Women must carve out their own destiny.
The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy
I don’t think Levy would consider this novel a eulogy, even though it is a documentation of loss, both the loss of a marriage and the death of her mother. It’s written with all the grace and tenderness of a eulogy, but refuses to shy away from life’s darker aspects. The complex human experience has not been lost in death or ending, which is what makes this memoir so compelling. Maybe, in a way, it’s a coming of middle-age story.
Freshly single with two teenage children, Levy finds herself starting over at 50. In the midst of her divorce, she finds herself struggling to balance the mundanities of life. As she packs up her family home, she is leaving behind a place that contorted her into the physical manifestation of a maker (of home, of life). The reader realises that in her absence would be left a God-shaped hole. In this new chapter of her life, Levy is attempting to create a new world for her daughters in a small North London flat full of birds and bees. “Now that I was no longer married to society, I was transitioning into something or someone else,” Levy writes while she’s wearing a postman’s jacket over her nightgown to unclog her sink.
“Perhaps my children and my e-bike were my only happiness,” she suggests. To some, this might not seem like enough. To Levy, it was representative of choosing a path that centered herself and her children, and de-centers romantic attachment. The discomfort that Levy experiences while creating her new life is the cost she pays for her independence. This is dramatised but fairly explained: it sucks when your tote bag breaks on a rainy bike ride and the chicken that you were planning on roasting for your child and her friends gets run over by a car. But it happens, and you cook the damn chicken. Above all, you persevere.
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw
There is strength in the polyphonous – often combating – perspectives of Black mothers, daughters, grandmothers, sisters, lovers, and friends throughout this collection of nine short stories. Christian faith informs the decisions of the narrators, providing a reference point for the patriarchal expectations these women must quell. Not all of the women in The Secret Lives of Church Ladies get to fully explore their desire, but each of them are written with empathy. Men who have wronged the narrators are sometimes satisfyingly avenged; in other stories like “Instructions for Married Christian Husbands,” archetypal male figures are humbled in the face of female power. “Snowfall,” the fifth story, highlights with deftly balanced tenderness, the familial loss that can accompany queer love. The sixth story, “How to Make Love to a Physicist,” explores relationships dynamics most closely to our theme when a forty-something year old art teacher works through her fears in order to start a relationship with a man she meets at a STEAM conference. Although these characters are not strictly middle-aged, this collection contemplates how women can consciously or subconsciously propagate misogyny, ageism, and homophobia. It makes the success of our heroines that much sweeter.
Cantoras by Carolina de Robertis
This triumphant, complex, and tender story centers five women. We start in the 1970s in Uruguay and follow these characters as they move through the decades, landing in the year 2013. As they travel between Montevideo and Cabo Polonio during and after Uruguay’s 12 year dictatorship, their relationships shift and adapt as friends become lovers and love becomes transcendent. Cantoras, which means female singers in Spanish, was also used colloquially under the dictatorship as code for “women who are interested in other women.” From subversive organising to the abandonment of husbands, to opening a secret queer bar, our heroines risk everything in order to sustain their community. As they age, passion might change form, but it does not fizzle out.“What is love if it can’t hold all the channels of the spirit?” asks one of the women towards the end of the novel. This question represents the heart of the story.
All Fours by Miranda July
In this autofictitious tale, an artist has every intention to go on a cross-country road trip but ends up no more than thirty minutes from her home in a motel room which she renovates without the consent of the owners. Her marriage is a precarious thing that is on the precipice of great change. Her sexuality is undergoing a renaissance that is explored in an unnerving, heady, but alluring manner. The narrator’s time is split between fantasising about interior design and fantasising about the man she hired to help with the renovation. The way this fantasy is realised is as uncomfortable as it is beautiful. July writes about sex in a way that urges the reader to consider their own bodies, needs, and fears.
In a novel that could easily be about the reshaping of a marriage, it is more about a person’s true and provocative artistic explorations. Some have called it audacious, but I was riveted from the first page to the last. I wonder if a man prioritising his work and whims while also raising a child with love and devotion would be considered as divisive? As I read, I kept thinking, this is what I’ve been waiting to read. As wrinkled flesh, tampons, and cringe-worthy dance moves are revered and deified, July suggests the key to unlocking unlimited sexual prowess is rooted in bravery over beauty. Her writing reignited in me the belief that art can tangibly improve one’s quality of life, by the use of whimsy and play to navigate the complexities of menopause.
Intemperance by Sonora Jha
A professor of feminism who has an adult son and two ex-husbands throws a swayamvar, an ancient Indian ceremony where a woman selects her groom from a group of competing men. This causes stirs from across the United States to India as people applaud her confidence or question her sanity. The author contends with the difficulties of balancing feminist theory and cultural expectations while expressing her heroine’s shameless desire for a husband. As the narrator says, “…oh, I know it will come back, my inquiring mind, but for now, I am enjoying the intersectionality of menopause and time off.”
The beauty of this book goes beyond its flowing sentences; it presents a well-rounded life full of ritual, friendship, non-nuclear family, and canine connection. The narrative is interspersed with re-imagined Hindu mythology and ancestral tales of queer love that provide the mystical strength for our heroine to follow through with her swayamvar. The descriptions of sex are passionate but adapted to fit the professor’s differently-abled body. I read these sentences with a curious fervor like I did as a child when reading about puberty. If this might be my future, thanks to Jha, I welcome it.
In most of these novels, I saw reciprocated, unabashed, unashamed desire. In the absence of romantic or sexual desire, Levy prioritizes independence and de-centering sex. De Robertis writes a guide for alternative ways of being. To suggest that there is one way to be happy in middle age would be antithetical to the purpose of this list. At a time when Western medicine is finally offering easier access to hormone replacement therapy for people experiencing symptoms of menopause, books like these destigmatise what previously was a taboo subject.
Beyond an education, these stories all showed me something about my own heart, my own fears, and my own prejudices. Predating this line of contemporary female writers, I think we have Judy Blume to thank not only for answering our festering pre-teen questions but for carving out a place for burning hot adult female desire. I think I’ll read Wifey next – Blume’s first adult novel, about the “funny and baaad” Sandy Pressman, a bored 1970s housewife who throws a match on her orderly life. What chronicle of middle-age are you reading?