What to read when you turn 40.
You’re older than you’ve ever been and now you’re even older…
A quick note: This is the last Syllabus, at least for now. Not because I don’t enjoy writing them (I do) or because after 14 (!) of them I’m out of things to say (I wish), and not even because I’m too busy (I am) and should be writing fiction (I really should). It’s because this oddly exhibitionist project was, I’ve realized, how I dealt with the existential spasm of turning 40, an age that seems to inspire frantic retrospection. I woke up one day and wondered how I’d arrived at my life. Well, now I know. By freaking out about death; feeling unworthy; living in New York and leaving it; having a kid; being bad and then better at love; learning how to relax and laugh through the bullshit; making a home; writing; and going to therapy. The birthday (and these epiphanies) behind me, I feel I can stop emotionally disrobing in public and calling it literary criticism. But I do hope you’ve enjoyed the show.
As it turns out, turning 40 is delightful, but only after a year or so of heavy-duty mulling. With many difficult things in life, you just have to muscle through, but this time, I had to think my way to the other side. I can’t say I’ve come to many definitive conclusions, however. I can’t write you a tidy essay. But I can tell you what I’ve been considering.
Gertrude Stein said that “we struggle against most of our exceptional qualities until we’re about forty and then, too late, find out that they compose the real us.” (Well, she said something like that; this was Fitzgerald’s paraphrasing in a 1939 letter.) I’ve been pondering the volume of energy—a billion terawatts or more—that I’ve spent misunderstanding myself over the course of my life, and how readily I accepted others’ misunderstandings of me, too. What a mistake it is to believe people when they tell you who you are, including yourself.
I’ve been stumbling over Gertrude’s “too late,” with which I do not agree.
I’ve been thinking about that part in The Hours (a film I didn’t like based on a novel I didn’t read) when Meryl Streep says that once, when she was young, she thought, “this is the beginning of happiness, this is where it starts,” but now she sees that no, she was wrong. That was happiness. I’ve been wondering why life is spent peering down the pike, waiting to find out what else, what more, what better is forthcoming—and believing that only then, when it arrives, will things be just right. Desire is the root of suffering; desire for something you don’t realize you already have may well be the root of youth.
I’ve been thinking about my niece, two years old, who recently asked me, “Katie, do you know that I love you?” I’ve been thinking that love is useless to people unless they believe in it. That so much of being loved is deeming yourself fit to be loved, which is the prerequisite for accepting it.
I’ve been thinking about when my husband and I went to see a friend a few weeks back, who asked how I was handling the big birthday. I said something about how people are often bitter at this age because their lives didn’t turn out as they wanted, but I’m miffed that mine has and I don’t get infinite years to enjoy it. He nodded, then gestured toward the home he shares with his wife and child, the latter smirking at us from behind her toys, and said cryptically, “This is all there is, there isn’t any more than this.”
I’ve been thinking how in my twenties this would’ve registered as lamentation—is that all there is?—instead of the triumph he meant to express: Look, we made it.
I’ve been examining photos of myself at twenty-two, twenty-eight, thirty, thirty-three. Gosh, I was pretty, and bright, and full of longing and hunger and ideas. I don’t mean to denigrate my current self. I’m not mournful. I’m still at least a few of those things. I have this thought in a spirit of softening, of appreciation for a youth that felt largely unbearable at the time. (I was no blissed-out Meryl Streep, certainly.) That I can look at younger me and feel tenderness, not grief or rage, is progress.
I’m glad it’s over, though. Being young is all questions, and mine are safely answered.
I’ve been thinking about a dear friend and former colleague who hit this age a few years ago. One day back then, in the office kitchen, I found her counting the shrimp in her rice bowl. “I don’t want to be fat and 40,” she explained, her tone wobbly. Being one was bad enough. But both? Back then, I just felt sad for her—she seemed so scared. Now I understand.
This week, I began teaching a writing class, and I asked the students to spontaneously compose a six-word memoir. I told them that I’d done so when I was younger, writing at the time, “Did everything young, except be young.” But the mini-memoir I wrote this week—it wasn’t great, but it came instantly, and the immediacy seemed to solidify its truth—was, “I finally want what I have.” A ballad of grown-up contentment. Then I felt oddly guilty about that contentment, so I erased it and wrote, “I still have time to decide.” Also true.
But I’m not guilty, not really. I built that contentment with my bare, bleeding hands, as most everyone must.
One morning recently, after we took our son to preschool, my husband ran into our favorite bakery for pastries while I waited in the idling car. I watched him walk away in his t-shirt and baseball cap and loved him so acutely it made my eyes water. The Clash was on the stereo, the weather was warming, the honeysuckle in our backyard was back. He and I would work all day in our cozy house, down the hall from each other. Such luxury. Later, our son would squawk endearingly about his day: shifting best-friend power rankings, what he drew and sang. My husband would make dinner while I read in bed. It all elicited such a surge of gratitude that there in the passenger seat I screamed to the universe, I AM SO HAPPY.
I’ve been thinking about Holly Golightly saying (in the novel, not the film) that no woman under forty ought to wear diamonds. It’s true that the few fine things I own do seem lovelier on me now than they did before, more fitting and earned. More and more I see poise in the mirror, not perpetual adolescence. A woman, not a girl pantomiming womanhood. And while it doesn’t have any diamonds, on my birthday I did buy myself—the concept of time being newly of interest—an extravagant watch. It came from a venerable old London emporium, the storefront of which bears an ancient clock. Beneath it, and around my watch’s face, is printed the following edict:
No minute gone comes ever back again
Take heed and see ye nothing do in vain
I’ve been thinking about this whenever I look at my wrist. And child. And to-do list.
I’ve been thinking, too, about that line from Jack London: I shall use my time. And of my many childhood visits to the ruins of London’s California home, his time long since used, and of the classic epitaph I mentioned in our first Syllabus: As you are now, so once was I. I’ve been wondering how my house, a hundred years old, will look in a hundred more.
I’ve been thinking of Henry James imploring each of us to be someone on whom nothing is lost. And about the line from Rodin’s journals, une vie à plein bord, inscribed inside my husband’s wedding band—a phrase that may describe the only truly worthwhile human goal.
Roughly translated, it means a life full to the brim.
I hope the works below ease and aid your way to forty, fifty, eighty, beyond—that they help light your way out of youth’s desperate confusion and illuminate the grand gift of age.
1.
TV Series (2019-present)
I said earlier that turning 40 awakens a backward-looking impulse, but the second season of this weird and excellent show stretches it into a backward-traveling one. In season one, Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) attends her 36th birthday party, dies, somehow awakens at the party, then repeats the process numerous times, reckoning with her mortality again and again. But in season two, just days from her 40th birthday party, the rules change: Nadia can ride the 6 train to New York City in 1982, the year she (and I) was born, and inhabit the body of her mother, who is pregnant with her. (If this hurts your brain, just wait until she gives birth to herself.)
Though Nadia is a caricature of streetwise, codger-like flintiness, droll even in moments of true terror, beneath the booze and swagger she’s a puddle of transgenerational trauma, with a Holocaust survivor grandmother and a schizophrenic (now deceased) mother. As it turns out, Nadia can also take the subway to Budapest, 1944, where/when her grandmother’s belongings were pillaged by the Nazis. They included a valise of gold krugerrands, a potent symbol of the family’s compounding tragedies. To wrest back the coins would mend it all, Nadia believes. She’s determined to rewrite the wretched history of her grandmother and mother’s lives—and, consequently, her own. It won’t spoil much to say that her mission is doomed.
“Tabula rasa,” Nadia says, cradling her newborn self in ’82. At 40, you’d think she’d know better. Who we are is as much determined by the context into which we’re born and raised as by the contours of our personality. No one outruns their upbringing. We can fight it, hate it, grow around it, take steps not to visit it upon our own children. But escape it? Increasingly I think no, not entirely, and that there’s greater peace to be found in acceptance and mitigation than in futile resistance. The krugerrands are gone. Just enjoy the party.
2.
Author: Kate Christensen
Book; Fiction (2004)
Misanthropic hermit Hugo Whittier, 40, has a disease that makes cigarette smoking rapidly fatal. So, naturally, he exiles himself to the familial estate to smoke (and read, and seduce, and overeat) himself to death—a kind of hedonistic hospice. He is (how to put this delicately?) a real piece of shit, dismissive and superior, openly cruel. But the source of his shittiness is uniquely middle aged: Once, Hugo wanted to be a poet and essayist like his hero, Montaigne (remember him?). This never came to pass, which makes Hugo’s cynical indulgence—revealed to us through his torturously clever notebooks—look less like a gourmand’s gleeful blaze of glory so much as clinical depression. Soon, into the picture comes a parade of family members, vengeful acquaintances, potential sex partners, an estranged wife and possible daughter, and other life forms Hugo finds mostly irritating. And through their perspectives we see glimpses of a former Hugo, the young one who still had hope. He was a cad, yes, but not yet a coward. In the distance between that Hugo and this, one witnesses the worst-case outcome of midlife: bitterness, disappointment, the terrible fear that the best years are past. One sees, in short, how not to be.
3.
Your Second Life Begins When You Realize You Only Have One
Author: Raphaëlle Giordano
Book; Fiction (2018)
Is this French bestseller a great book? God, no. The prose is drab, the plot ludicrous. I regret to inform you that the author is some kind of life coach. But what a title! It’s an easy read for an airplane or beach, or when you’re, for example, nursing an existential crisis as you approach a pivotal birthday. The gist: Camille, 38—the age at which I began to officially panic about turning 40, and also began this newsletter—lives in Paris and possesses all the trappings of happiness, including a sound marriage, good job, and sweet child. But shocker: She isn’t happy. Her life has become too stable. So, a kindly “routinologist” encourages her to do stuff like ride in a hot air balloon and otherwise break up the monotony of her—
Actually, you know what? It’s really just the title that matters. Read the book if you like, but for our purposes, that title is the crux of it all—an elegant, buoyant encapsulation of one of life’s most impossible lessons.
4.
Author: Olga Grushin
Book; Fiction (2016)
This sly and inventive novel is structured around a curious conceit: Every middle-class woman’s existence takes place in forty rooms, and what occurs in them is the story of her life. Starting from, say, the childhood bathroom where her mother washes her hair, and extending all the way to the foyer in which she collapses and dies. The forty-room story told here concerns a woman we know only as Mrs. Caldwell, born in Russia, who comes to the United States and becomes a housewife. A novel that takes the long view of a person’s life, birth to death, is always delicious, especially when it’s about a woman (I’m writing one, in fact), but this one adds extra flourishes. Ghosts and other supernatural creatures, for starters, one of whom tells Mrs. Caldwell that forty isn’t just the number of a life’s rooms, but a figure imbued with all kinds of significance:
Forty is God’s number for testing the human spirit…Noah’s 40 days and nights of rain, Moses’ 40 days in the desert, Jesus’ 40 days of fasting and temptation. Forty of anything is long enough to be a trial, but it’s man-size, too. In the Bible, 40 years make a span of one generation. Forty weeks make a baby.
What does it all mean? I don’t know. But it’s a lovely and fascinating novel, and there does seem to be something momentous about this number and about becoming this age. Maybe especially if you turn 40 during a pandemic, since the word quarantine comes from quaranta, Italian for forty. During the black plague, this was the number of days that a ship had to isolate before its crew could come ashore. Which is admittedly pretty grim. Nonetheless, I’m stubbornly choosing to see my quarantine quaranta as auspicious.
Extra Credit: If you love entire-life-story novels about women as much as I do, you should check out The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky, by Jana Casale. In it, a girl buys a book by Chomsky after seeing a cute guy reading it, then lets it languish on her shelf, unread, as she goes about the rest of her life: growing up, falling in love, becoming a mother, growing old. It sounds like a small story, and in some ways, it is—but it’s also the story of finding meaning in an ordinary life, which is not at all a small endeavor.
5.
“Aging”
Author: Randall Jarrell
Poem (1954)
The last thing I’ll recommend is this just-right poem, which never fails to lump my throat. Something that veteran parents like to tell new ones is The days are long, but the years are short. Yes, absolutely. Brutally true. But do you think that only applies to your kid’s childhood, not your own life? Adult days often feel long in a different way—long in number, like a resource we can squander. There are so many, we think, what’s so wrong with wasting a hundred, a few hundred, more, before I do _____, the thing I know I should and must do, but for some unarticulated reason can’t or won’t do yet? I’ve got time. I’m in no hurry.
That position is defensible only for so long—about as long as it takes for those days to turn into years, which they invariably do. And in those wasted hours in which we think we aren’t yet living, our lives are made. Our selves are made. Jarrell writes, “I need to find again, to make a life / A child’s Sunday afternoon, the Pleasure Drive / Where everything went by but time.” How unconcerned you were as a kid with the passing days, so long as they pleased you. And how blind you were to the gift you had, that vast supply of time. What bliss that blindness was. But one day you woke up, as I did, and suddenly, terribly, saw your error.
This is what it means to turn 40. To balance upon a psychic fulcrum: too old to be young, too young to be old, ardently missing that long, sweet, ignorant era in which you believed time would never run out, while grasping with near-hallucinatory clarity how critical its remainder has become.
I’ll miss writing to you. Thank you all for listening.