Writing Middle Age

Examining narratives of the middle-aged woman

Photo by Priscilla du Preez on Unsplash

As I contemplated turning 50 years old in January of this year, I found myself lost in the FX Series Better Things.  The series is a comedy drama based on the real life of Pamela Adlon who as well as playing the lead role, also writes, directs and acts as show runner. The show follows her character of Sam Fox as she negotiates life as a working actor whilst trying to raise three spirited (and often challenging) daughters, a practically non-existent love life, her ageing and eccentric British mother (played by the remarkable Celia Imrie), and a host of close friends.

The series touches on the difficulties of raising children alone whilst balancing a full-on career. What it also felt to me though was an exploration of losing and finding your place as a middle-aged woman, when the world feels geared towards the young and the beautiful.

In some scenes, we see the talented Adlon wrestling with lack of sleep as she burns up in the typically recognisable hot flashes of perimenopause, whilst engaging in shouting matches with her daughters over who has used all the tampons in the bathroom when she has a particularly heavy period.  It isn’t a series for the easily offended, but throughout, there is a deep sense of appreciation and celebration for women and the men who respect them.

What I found most distressing in the series was the way her daughters appear to have an utter disregard for what she is going through.  Adlon exposes the way that our children, dealing with their angsty adolescence, are often so caught up in their own lives that their mother becomes an invisible annoyance to them, rather than being seen as a real, whole person.

When she discovers her eldest daughter has had an abortion, but felt unable to tell her until it was over, leaving Sam’s gay best friend to do it for her, I felt the anguish of her distress and heartbreak.  When her middle child leaves home to stay with friends because she no longer wants to communicate with her, I felt the abandonment.  And when her children decide to spend time with their errant father, who drifts in and out of their lives on a whim, and whom Fox is supporting financially because of her successful acting career, I felt the appropriate anger and rage of the wronged woman.

But what I also loved about this series was the way Adlon doesn’t make Fox a victim.  At no point do we feel that Fox doesn’t have agency, despite the forces against her, including the irony of losing out of an audition to play the voiceover for a character she invented when the studio decide to “go another way”.  Or when she bumps into a man she has engaged in an ongoing occasional sexual relationship with, seeing him with his wife. 

What I found instead in Fox’s character was an enormous amount of empathy: for her daughters negotiating adolescent life; for her friends dealing with divorce and relationships; for the abusive treatment of actors on set; and ultimately, for herself.  Sam Fox is not a victim of family drudgery, but instead revels in her daughters’ company and opens her house to their friends. 

I was thinking about all these ideas whilst trying to seek out contemporary reading touching on the middle-aged woman.  Returning to my bookshelves to seek out some of the 20^th century writer’s ideas on this often misrepresented and even joked about stage of life, I found some connections with Adlon’s Better Things.

Virginia Woolf’s eponymous title character Mrs Dalloway observes, whilst walking through the London streets on a day in June, a group of younger women, pondering that they are not yet even feeling half of what they are going to later in life. 

Woolf turned 40 when she wrote the novel that was to become perhaps her most famous creation, whilst her title character Clarissa Dalloway is 52.

‘Laying her brooch on the table, she had a sudden spasm, as if, while she mused, the icy claws had had the chance to fix in her. She was not old yet. She had just broken into her 52nd year. Months and months of it were still untouched. June, July, August! Each still remained almost whole, and, as if to catch the falling drop, Clarissa (crossing to the dressing-table) plunged into the very heart of the moment, transfixed it, there–'

Although Mrs Dalloway is about a middle-aged woman throwing a party and reflecting on her life, there are none of the usual cliches of this trope.  Neither Clarissa or husband Richard are engaging in extra-marital affairs with younger lovers, nor challenging the political and bourgeois status of their lives so far.

Woolf famously stated in A Room of One’s Own that a book is deemed to be ‘insignificant’ when dealing with ‘the feelings of women in a drawing-room’, yet important when it deals with more serious, universal subjects such as war.  Within Mrs Dalloway, we get a glimpse of Clarissa’s opposite – the shell-shocked Septimus Smith – whose experience represents the dark side of a war the country are recovering from.  His suicide crosses the threshold of the Dalloway’s party at the end of the book, but it is Clarissa’s solitude and reflection of her own life choices that permeate the novel.

Ultimately, Clarissa’s joy at the moment she has arrived at in her life, despite the loneliness that threatens to envelope her, comes through.

‘In the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.’

I always think that we find different meanings in books when we read them at different points in our lives.  There have been books I have read several times, in different seasons of my life, and found I empathise with different characters within them.  Similarly, there have been books I have picked up and discarded as uninteresting to me, only returning to them when I am ready.

In Grace Paley’s three collections of short stories, a character named Faith Darwin reappears.  In fact, these stories are perhaps the closest Paley came to writing a novel.  In true Paley style, the Faith Darwin sequence of stories appear as disparate points in the character’s life, and Paley reported that she did not do well with plot but preferred more abstract character portraits.  The character of Faith has been suggested to be Paley’s alter-ego, and it is easy to make this assumption, though Paley herself denied this.

The Faith stories began in her first collection The Little Disturbances of Man in 1959 with the story ‘Two Short Sad Stories from a Long and Happy Life’, and extends through to several stories in her collection Enormous Changes at the Last Minute in 1934, with a total of seven ‘installments’ appearing in Later the Same Day in 1985.  The stories take the form of both first- and third-person narration, and feature a women named Faith Darwin who has two sons, ageing parents, a sister called Hope and brother called Charlie.  She also references an ex-husband, a male friend who later becomes a lover, as well as other lovers.  Importantly, like Adlon’s Sam Fox, Faith has many female friends with whom she shares the messiness of life: raising young children, the unreliability of male partners, and illness and ageing in later stories.

When I was a parent of young children, I found her stories of parenting and the relationships she shared with other mothers of interest.  But this time around, it was her story ‘The Long Distance Runner’, written in 1974, which interested me, coming right at the end of the Enormous Changes collection.

Photo by Francesco Gallarott on Unsplash

Her sons are now a little older - ‘quite old’ as she refers to them – and she has a boyfriend named Jack.  Faith in this story is forty-two years old and has taken up running.  At the start of the summer, Faith says goodbye to her sons and takes the subway to Brighton Beach, an area of the city where she lived as a child.  We follow her as she runs along the boardwalk and turns inland, eventually finding herself on the street where she was raised.  There, she finds herself amidst the African American community, both young and old, some of which make fun of her for being fat and white. 

Unexpectedly finding herself admitted into her old apartment, she finds there an African American single mother referred to as Mrs Luddy, with a young son and three girl babies.  There Faith takes up residence for a total of three weeks, discussing men, domestic culture, and life with Mrs Luddy, who fears the outside world.  Mrs Luddy finally asks Faith to leave when she encroaches too far into her children’s life, acting as a surrogate grandmother.

‘It’s time to go…Don’t you think your little spoiled boys crying for you?  Where’s Mama?  They standing in the window.  Time to go lady.  This ain’t Free Vacation Farm’. 

Faith sets off running again, finding that in the three weeks of her ‘vacation’, running has become so popular that there are many others on the street running alongside her.  Far from unique, she finds herself now one of the crowd.  As she runs home through a playground, which features in another story ‘Faith in a Tree’, she tells the young mothers she encounters there with their children: ‘In fifteen years, you girls will be like me, wrong in everything’. 

Paley’s story not only represents the changes in Faith’s life as an ageing woman, but in the multicultural society of her childhood.  In her old Jewish neighbourhood, now populated by African Americans, Faith’s encounter with Mrs Luddy allows for an exploration of their differences, and their shared sisterhood.  Paley’s writing was heavily influenced by her experience as a child of Jewish Russian immigrants, and multiculturalism, politics and activism featured throughout her writing. 

As Paley’s stories continued throughout her writing life to explore the centrality of motherhood in women’s lives, her exploration within ‘The Long Distance Runner’ of multiculturalism and minority ethnic communities was perhaps an attempt to redress the predominantly white middle-class feminist movement of mainstream America.

When Faith finally returns home, her sons and Jack barely remark on her absence, though later ask where she went.  She points out their lack of understanding, saying one son asks: ‘What are you talking about?’  Whilst the other, trying harder to comprehend, also eventually says: ‘I don’t know what she’s talking about either.’  In an attempt to make Jack understand, she tells him the story twice, with Faith saying that, in the end, ‘They all said, What?’

In the final paragraph, Faith narrates the moral of her story:

‘A woman inside the steamy engine of middle age runs and runs.  She finds the houses and streets where her childhood happened.  She lives in them.  She learns as though she was still a child what in the world is coming next’.

‘The Long Distance Runner’ is one of the most rounded and self-contained of the Faith stories.  Reading the whole of Paley’s oeuvre allows the reader the insight into the earlier incarnations of Faith’s world, but here they merely compliment the story, adding to the depth of experience which has brought her to run along these familiar streets in middle age.  They help to add to the layers of what has brought her to this point in her life, allowing for an appreciation of the lived experience she embodies, perhaps encouraging the reader to see her life as a whole, rather than the often referred to invisibility of the woman ‘inside the steamy engine of middle age’.  Her running symbolic, perhaps, of the need to escape her ageing body and the way she is not understood by her male children and partner.  

Her return to her childhood home feels like a reckoning with her old life.  The encounters with both the single mother and the other young mothers in the park, who are at a stage where child-rearing and female friendship are all consuming, represent the familiar life which she is leaving behind.  

Faith’s warning; ‘In fifteen years, you girls will be like me, wrong in everything’, reminds me of the protagonist of Better Things, who, despite providing her daughters with an inspiring and accepting environment in which to grow, cannot help but continually get things wrong in their eyes. In a particularly touching scene, Fox’s eldest daughter accuses her of hating her because she is now middle-aged and no longer menstruates, therefore she no longer experiences life as a woman.  Seeing how much she has hurt her mother, she breaks down, and as the pair hug and cry together, she tells her mother how she only just realised how awful it must be to raise three daughters and have to let them go.

But like Adlon’s feisty and inspirational Sam Fox, Paley’s story also feels like a celebration.  This woman, who has had all of this life experience, has taken up running as a means to be in her body in a visceral way.  Her running represents, at first, a running back to the past, and later, running back towards her present and future, and the freedom her age is to bestow on her.  Similarly, for Adlon’s Sam Fox, there is an understanding that as her daughters become women, they look to her as a role model, recognizing her strength and tenacity as a single, working mother.

The idea that middle-aged women become less visible around the time of menopause has been well documented in recent years and the conversation is beginning to gain momentum.  The arrival of middle age to many well-respected writers, artists, journalists, and media personalities has meant that this topic is becoming mainstream. 

Seeking out representations of such women in both 20^th century writing and more contemporary examples such as within Adlon’s show, I am convinced that this age group have many more narratives to explore.