The thing about writing memoirs, or personal essays of any kind, is that you are inviting people to critique your life as opposed to say, your craft (though I suppose at the point you put your life on paper they begin to become one and the same). I generally stay away from places like Goodreads or Amazon reviews for the same reason I don’t walk into traffic blindfolded. The chances I’m going to emerge feeling great are slim to none.
Sometimes, though, when I’m having an especially good day I will dip a toe in. I can take, it, I think
And, of course I can. I’m a grown up. There are worse things than being critiqued by strangers. Also, therapy is expensive. And every once in a while someone’s remarks on how you’ve portrayed your own life can lead you to think hmmm I wonder if that’s true. Naturally, all the lovely things people say about what you’ve written are terrific to see, but they don’t stick like the other stuff.
Last week I wrote a fun little piece in the New York Times about eyebrows. Like many of us who survived the nineties, mine are feeble. Writing for the NYT is like putting yourself in front of a firehose of attention, even for small stories. Less so now that Twitter has been decimated. But still.
Anyway, someone had enough time on their hands to send me this note
I confess, I had to think for a minute what this person was referring to. But then I remembered in 2021 I was hired to do a weekly newsletter for a few months and wrote about how on my 47th birthday someone had guessed I was turning 33. A man. And my complicated feelings about that. Which weirdly mimic my complicated feelings about this email, in so far as I’m quite certain this person, who took time out of their day to go and search out the contact form on my website and send me this, did not do so because they wanted me to feel better about myself. They assumed, as we are all supposed to, that age is bad. Bad bad bad. How dare I think I’m escaping it. Which is sort of a funny assumption to make about a person who keeps writing about how old they are. But c’est la vie.
And yet, I am turning fifty this year. I’m mostly enjoying age so far. I don’t particularly want to be mistaken for being younger. I definitely don’t want to be younger (there is actually a chapter in the book about this). Which makes it hard to feel bad for anyone here other than the writer of this note who clearly thinks aging is something to be ashamed of. (Also, I’m here to tell you as emerged as this week’s most favorite dinner party punchline…I’m here to tell you, I need another glass of wine. I’m here to tell you, that lipstick looks fantastic. Etc.)
Somewhere in No One Tells You This I wrote about how skewed our idea of age is. How we have an archaic idea of what age looks like that few of us (presumably thanks to sunscreen and water etc.) fit anymore. Our narratives around age have not caught up to our lived experiences. What does fifty even look like anymore? WHO KNOWS. I’m so much more interested in how it feels, and even more than that the stories we tell about it. Which is why I keep writing about it.
Good Decision: I loved The Lost Daughter. I still think about it. I couldn’t include it in ENJOY because the film came out after the summer I write about, but I saw so much of myself reflected in Olivia Colman’s performance. The caftans. The annoyance turned rage in the cinema. One scene in particular comes back to me every time I travel. Colman’s character is trying to quietly leave her airbnb in the middle of the night. Ed Harris (solidly past 50, and hot) is no longer around to help her with her many suitcases. She stands at the top of steep staircase, contemplating how she will get them all down and then stands back and gives each one a swift kick, watching as they tumble to the bottom. I’m here to tell you, it was very satisfying to see.
Gratis decision: The Advanced Reader Copy/Galley of ENJOY is full of errors/typos and in the case of one chapter is entirely missing a concluding and somewhat tone-shifting paragraph! This is the nature ofARC’s, lots of thing don’t get caught until the next pass. But I’m here to tell you, it’s still mortifying. That said! If you’d like a chance to win one for free, Goodreads is having a giveaway you can enter from now until the end of the month.
I am here to tell you that your writing has been so influential on my way of thinking about aging as a single, childless/free woman and I am grateful!
Women coming at other women like this never ceases to feel profoundly cruel. I’m so sorry you had to even see a message like this!