How does it feel to have your sexual currency depreciate that abruptly — and what stock, if any, can replace it? There has been remarkably little good writing about this thorny topic but here, with excellent timing, comes Pamela Druckerman’s pitch-perfect and brutally frank There Are No Grown-Ups ... quick switches in tone work to memorable effect ... Druckerman is the heir to her impish, unembarrassable spirit and adorable storytelling. There Are No Grown-Ups loses its way at times, but there is so much to enjoy, especially for those who need a little help feeling 'bien dans son age,' or wearing their age comfortably. Let’s hope it marks a bold new chapter for older women in society — the forgotten and the madam’ed.
Her latest book, There Are No Grown-Ups: A Midlife Coming-of-Age Story, is part memoir and part witty how-to guide about being in your 40s ... Druckerman’s writing is humorous, conversational and revealing, so it’s surprising when she admits to finding it incredibly hard' to open up ... Druckerman decided to write a book, focusing on the physical and emotional changes she has experienced in her 40s and how they have impacted on her friendships, marriage, parenting, fashion choices and other aspects of her life. She weaves this together with data, academic research and anecdotes about her friends and acquaintances.
For some reason, I had the impression that Pamela Druckerman’s new book, There Are No Grown-Ups: A Midlife Coming-of-Age Story, would be more like Bringing Up Bébé, her charming and funny book that mixed in plenty of good advice about what French parents are doing right, and American parents are doing wrong, in childrearing. That book was ambitious — Get a baby on a four-times-a-day feeding schedule? No bananas before dinner? — but overall, the self-effacing tone made it highly readable and thought-provoking ... Granted, Druckerman is an entertaining writer who can make cancer laugh-out-loud funny ... I wish every chapter were this funny and personal. There are too many boring chapters, fillers with subjects like wisdom, the history of the midlife crisis and why finding your fashion style is a good thing.
This is no journalistic tome, though. Druckerman’s voice—self-deprecating but also keenly observant—will remind readers of the late Nora Ephron. Her family members, especially her husband, Simon, appear, but this is largely her story of reconciling what she thought she knew about aging with what she is actually experiencing, from the unique perspective of an American expat living in Paris. Peppered with 'You know you’re in your 40s when' lists, this is a delightfully funny, thoughtful, coming-of-middle-age story.
The book chronicles Druckerman’s progression through her forties, tackling children, work, cancer, friendships and threesomes. In doing so, she learns self-acceptance but also that other adults are winging it too ... While men facing midlife crises might be mocked for sports cars and affairs, at least they are visible. Women’s experiences have too often been ignored — it is a frequent complaint that they feel invisible as their faces crease with age.
Though Druckerman is diagnosed with and treated for cancer in the course of her story, her tone remains predominantly light ... Druckerman’s vision of aging is far from sugarcoated, and by the witty book’s end she’s matured into her role as a grown-up, making the 40s seem not so awful after all.
Half memoir and half ironic how-to guide, Druckerman’s book is not only a humorous meditation on the gains and pains of a time in life “when you become who you are”; it is also a thought-provoking meditation on 'what it means to be a grown-up.'
A trenchant and witty book on maturity and 'middle-age shock.'
So much happens both physically and mentally between 40 and 50 that there are enough stories to fill a million books, but one that has touched a nerve with me and fellow midlife adventurers is Pamela Druckerman’s new work, There Are No Grown-Ups. It’s such an accurate depiction of what lies ahead if you are hurtling towards the big four-oh or living through it. However, having come out the other side, I can confirm that not only are you older and wiser, but also you get the added benefit of what I can only describe as an irreverent, ‘I don’t give a f***’ attitude. It’s most welcome, I can tell you. That and the permission to say, ‘We didn’t have them in the Nineties,’ every time someone asks you a question you don’t want to answer.
