“I no longer want what I used to want,” Marina Benjamin declares somewhere towards the end of her lucid and sophisticated exploration of what it means for a woman to turn 50 in a culture that glorifies youth and encourages us at every turn to “disguise … deny … disown” the process of ageing. Single-word chapter headings – Skin, Muscle, Guts, Spine – speak to her promise to bring “the body back into the frame at every turn”, although what she discusses roams far beyond and beneath the merely physical.
For Benjamin, the body is the first port of call in seeking understanding, and forcing brute truths on us. A hysterectomy in her late 40s propels her into “middle age all at once” – leaves her dry-haired and grey-skinned, an exhausted insomniac wandering the streets feeling herself to be in the “slipstream” of humanity. Her father’s death precipitates an extended period of frenetic exercise until injuries force her “to look elsewhere for survival techniques”, and the realisation that “mourning and ageing require a classier sort of attention”.
Benjamin finds no consolation in the popular “Fifty and fabulous!” genre of self-help books that mistake “morale boosting for genuine empowerment” and fail to distinguish “self-knowledge from self-satisfaction”. Despite having turned to oestrogen herself, she is scathing about the “blunt hammer of misogyny that taints the entire history of HRT”. Instead, she looks to literature, offering us a detailed reading of Edith Wharton’s underrated late novel Twilight Sleep, which predicted the “machine age” anxieties and scientific management of time that now besiege us all; she also admires the “absorbed coping” of the ever-inventive Colette in later life.
Top 10 books about middle age Read moreBenjamin’s central argument, that one must face loss and sadness – “the reconciliation of the ego to the true self, shadow-side and all” – in order to age authentically, seems right to me. But is it bracing honesty or a form of melancholy defeatism to casually describe 50 and beyond as “over the hill”? Older women may indeed turn to a more “generative” role, helping and guiding others, but there is a risk here of underplaying profound cultural, economic and political shifts that have led to a new wave of highly effective women in public life, including, quite possibly, a seventysomething female president of the United States.
For all its interesting examinations of the science, literature and psychology of mid-life, this is essentially a memoir, capturing the poignant changes in the relationships between Benjamin and, among others, her parents, peers and teenage daughter.…