Midlife On Life's Terms

Fork In The Road , . Photography. Britannica ImageQuest, Encyclopædia Britannica, 25 May 2016.
quest.eb.com/search/165_3346570/1/165_3346570/cite. 

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.  

- Max Ehrman The Desiderata

At some point in our lives, if we are lucky, we will make it to forty years old....and beyond. There are unmistakable mild aches and pains and our metabolism goes out for cigarettes and never comes back. You find yourself saying insufferable things like, "What a nice young man" regarding someone in his thirties. Worst of all, the day comes when you're standing in the supermarket and the 1990s grunge music that defined the prime of your youth plays over the loud speakers as muzak while you contemplate a selection of calcium chews. The positive moments comes with deciding to take adult ballet classes, enroll in graduate school, and hearing yourself say assertive things like "no" that your people-pleasing younger self would have been unable to utter.

Stereotypes abound over the specter of aging hipsters growing older gracelessly. However, midlife can also give us an opportunity to hit a reset button on our creativity, ambitions, and relationships. The new responsibilities we are entrusted with provide growth and foster deep connections with our family and friends. We are held in the center of no longer being young, but old enough to see how we need to fearlessly prepare for old age and accept our mortality. It becomes possible to mellow out, forgive ourselves and others, and prepare for the next chapter of life, equipped with abundant knowledge about the creative, emotional, and spiritual possibilities for living midlife abundantly .

The Age of Miracles: Embracing the New Midlife by Marianne Williamson

The Breaking Point: How Female Midlife Crisis is Transforming Today's Women by Sue Shellenbarger. 

Carved in Sand: When Attention Fails and Memory Fades in Midlife by Cathryn Jakobson Ramin 

Coming of Age-- All Over Again: The Ultimate Midlife Handbook by Kate Klimo and Buffy Shutt

Crossing to Avalon: A Woman's Midlife Pilgrimage by Jean Shinoda Bolen 

Crossroads At Midlife: Your Aging Parents, Your Emotions, and Your Self  by Frances Cohen Praver

Eat to Defeat Menopause: The Essential Nutrition Guide for a Healthy Midlife--With More Than 130 Recipes by Karen Giblin & Mache Seibel

Fear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir by Erica Jong

Girl Walks Into a Bar... : Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle by Rachel Dratch

Going Gray: What I Learned About Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood, Authenticity, and Everything Else That Really Matters by Anne Kreamer

A Good Goodbye: Funeral Planning for Those Who Don't Plan to Die by Gail Rubin

It's Never Too Late to Begin Again: Discovering Creativity and Meaning at Midlife and Beyond by Julia Cameron

Life Reimagined : The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning by Claire Dederer

Menopause Confidential: A Doctor Reveals the Secrets to Thriving Through Midlife by Tara Allmen, MD

A Year of Reading Women Authors

While catching up on some of my internet reading, I stumbled across a blog post Kelly Jensen wrote on Book Riot, in which she talked about how reading books only written by women for a year changed her life. Initially, I wasn't sure how I felt about this idea, but after reading her post and her replies to some of the comments she received, I'm intrigued. For our reading themes, my sister and I read books written by women in January, but now I'm wondering if this is something I could do for a year (or if I even want to do it). I also wondered how my reading already looks in terms of books I've read that were written by men versus books I've read that were written by women. I've never made it a point to read books based on author's gender, but I did assume that I read more books by women, just because I read so much young adult and so much of young adult books are written by women.

So, I took a look at what I read in 2016. I keep track of the books I read using Excel, and what I found was that I read 102 books by 89 female authors (one of those authors is transgendered), and I read 39 books by 25 male authors. I also read one book that was co-authored by a male author and a female author. I was surprised by the number of books I read that were written by men.

Then, I talked to one of my friends about Kelly Jensen's blog post, and the more my friend and I talked and thought about it, the more interested we became in trying it for ourselves. I still haven't decided if I'm going to try reading only women authors for a year, but if I do, I'll need to have a couple exceptions:

• I'll still read a favorite male writers (Stephen King and Ted Kooser)
• I'll still read books written by men if the books are work-related (which would primarily be advanced reader copies, but also middle grade fiction and non-fiction that I might want to booktalk during class visits and outreach events)

If I want to try reading only women authors, I'll need to push myself out of my comfort zones and not just read young adult fiction (which I've been more selective about anyway). I can already think of several books I'd want to read for this that I probably wouldn't read otherwise, like Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison, How to be a Woman,  and Eat, Pray, Love. I can't help but feel that if I don't read out of my comfort zone during an experiment like this, then there's no reason for me to try it.

What are your thoughts on this? Would you ever limit your reading in this way? Let me know in the comments!

Girls to the Front: Female Music Critics

...men writing songs about women is practically the definition of rock 'n' roll. And as a woman, as a music critic, as someone who lives and dies for music, there is a rift within, a struggle of how much deference you can afford, and how much you are willing to ignore what happens in these songs simply because you like the music.
~Jessica Hopper, "Emo: Where the Girls Aren't"

We've always had an interest in music. As teenagers, we read Rolling Stone and Spin; we've checked out Mojo's playlists and NME's Albums of the Year; we pay for Spotify, stream Pandora (and Freegal, with our valid library card), read reviews on Pitchfork, watch Tiny Desk Concerts on NPR. We still want the albums so we can read the liner notes. We remember when MTV played videos. And, while now that we're older and probably never going to make it to Coachella or Glastonbury (though we've watched movies about both, and we've been to SXSW twice), we'd still consider staying up late on a "school night" if there's a good show in town, and driving to Denver to to catch Florence & the Machine this May is a distinct possibility.

So, of course we've heard about music journalists like Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, Peter Guralnick, Stanley Crouch, Nat Hentoff, Chuck Klosterman, Rob Sheffield, Alex Ross, Robert Christgau, and Legs McNeil. A keyword search of "Music history and criticism" in the catalog (to search by subject you would need to add a specific era, music, instrument, or location, such as "Rock music -- California, Southern -- History and criticism", "Musicals -- United States -- History and criticism", or "Piano music -- History and criticism") brings up 674 titles - in the first 3 pages, there are 8 books written by women; in the next three pages, there are only 3. Yet there are plenty of female music journalists out there, including Stacey Anderson, Daphne Carr, Dream Hampton, Nekesa Mumbi Moody, Julie Burchill, and others.

We've been thinking about this a lot, since we recently read two books by female rock critics Ellen Willis and Jessica Hopper. Ellen Willis was, notably, the first popular music critic for The New Yorker, between 1968 and 1975, though she wore many other hats; until last year, Jessica Hopper was a senior editor for the Pitchfork website and editor in chief of the print quarterly The Pitchfork Review.

The First Collection of Criticism By a Living Female Rock Critic by Jessica Hopper

When the chasm of human experience feels unbridgeable, and the past is keeping you like the stocks, and there is no absolution to be had, no forgiveness to salve you, and the world feels too much in its infinite newness and it's midnight and people are screaming and feeding babies ranch-flavor chicken fingers from a bucket, when all you see is difference and a long string of your own unqualified failures, there is Van singing, "Lay me down...to be born again." There is so much  wanting in "Astral Weeks." but it's not desperation, it's all vessel; it's faith enough to cover us all.

Whether Jessica Hopper is talking about Van Morrison, Lana del Rey, Bruce Springsteen, Superchunk, or Kendrick Lamar, you will want to listen to their music to feel the emotions her writing evokes; trips to Coachella, L.A.'s all-ages venue The Smell, and Michael Jackson's hometown after his death will move and entertain you; "How Selling Out Saved Indie Rock" showed us how the music industry works today.  The pieces in Hopper's First Collection range from "Emo: Where the Girls Aren't" for Punk Planet in 2003 to "You Will Ache Like I Ache: The Oral History of Hole's Live Through This" for Spin in April 2014, and are split into sections such as "Real/Fake", "Nostalgia", and "Bad Reviews". At 201 pages, it's a slender tome, and one we highly recommend.

 Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music

Ellen Willis' book was a bit of a harder sell for us, probably because (the horror!) we are not fans of Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones, and both these artists get extensive coverage by Willis. Her book, just a bit longer than Hopper's, is separated into sections such as "The Adoring Fan", "The Navigator", and "The Sixties Child", gathered by content rather than chronology. Most are short pieces, although the collection includes the 20-page essay on Bob Dylan that got Willis noticed by the New Yorker in the first place. Willis' Rock, Etc. columns for that magazine make up the bulk of the collection.

Willis' voice is serious and scholarly for the most part; there is a review of Dylan's Love and Theft that describes the tensions in his music as "never...about electric versus acoustic but about personal and idiosyncratic versus collective and generic; topical and profane versus primordial and sacred; transcendence as excess versus transcendence as purgation..." Yet, in "The Decade in Rock Lyrics", she wittily uses lyrics from some of the decade's most popular tunes to sum up its history on topics like celebrities, style, the Battle of the Sexes, and economics; and the pictures of Willis in the book include one of her in typical music nerd posture, in front of a large vinyl collection, plugged into giant headphones and taking notes on her latest record, and one of her wearing a T-shirt that says "Anarchy in Queens". Interestingly, having just recently read a lot of adulation of David Bowie in the press since his death, Out of the Vinyl Deeps contains an essay about "Bowie's Limitations", written in 1972. There are also essays about Janis Joplin, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Grand Funk Railroad, and others.

The library catalog features more of Willis' essays in The Essential Ellen Willis, which is a broader collection of her writings. These essays are "...both deeply engaged with the times in which they were first published and yet remain fresh and relevant amid today's seemingly intractable political and cultural battles". There are a few pieces on Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin, but far more about politics and women's rights. Like Out of the Vinyl Deeps, this collection was edited posthumously by Willis' daughter, Nona Willis Aronowitz.

We hope these books will pique your interest in reading music journalism by female writers, or perhaps to start writing your own. In focusing on female critics, we are trying to do for their work what Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill did for female audience members too put off by all the all-male mosh pit to approach the stage when she would tell the crowd,“All girls to the front! I’m not kidding. All girls to the front. All the boys be cool, for once in your lives. Go back! Back! Back!” [quoted in the film The Punk Singer] 

If you would like to read more music journalism by women, try: Rip It Up: The Black Experience in Rock'n'Roll edited by Kandia Crazy Horse; Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution by Sara Marcus; Record Collecting For Girls: Unleashing Your Inner Music Nerd, One Album at a Time by Courtney E. Smith; Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology by Deena Weinstein; A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man by Holly George-Warren; and Madonna: Like An Icon by Lucy O'Brien.

Links

The World Needs Female Rock Critics [New Yorker]

33 Women Music Critics You Need to Read [Flavorwire]

The Good Listener: How Do You Break Into Music Journalism? [NPR]

Spotlight on Women's Fiction

Do you just want to read a good book about women's lives, written by a woman? You may be looking for "women's fiction", not in itself a genre but a recognized subsection of fiction which includes novels that may have romantic, suspense, or literary themes. Rebecca Vnuk, author of Women's Fiction Authors: A Research Guide, defines women's fiction thusly:

...these are novels that explore the lives of female protagonists, focusing on all kinds of relationships, be it lovers, spouses, parents, children, friends, or members of a community. The common thread is that the central character is female, and the main thrust of the story is something happening in the life of that woman (as opposed to the overall theme being a romance or a mystery of some sort). Emotions and relationships are the common thread between books that belong in this category. A woman is the star of the story, and her emotional development drives the plot.

It still can be a bit of a nebulous description of a polarizing concept, Vnuk admits, but she argues that if the main character being a woman is essential to the plot, if there are romantic elements but there is "more to the story", if it is written by a woman (Nicholas Sparks, Nicholas Evans, and Chris Bohjalian are authors she notes have written books with female protagonists, but "their stories identify much more with romance, gentle reads, or literary fiction"), and if you are reading the novel not for its use of language but for its woman-centric plot, you are probably reading women's fiction. True women's fiction, Vnuk asserts, are "books that get into a female character’s head and heart".

Where do you weigh in on the question of "women's fiction"? If you are a devotee, we have a list of some recommended reads for you below.  If you are not a fan of the "women's fiction" classification, let us know why in the comments!

The House at the End of Hope Street by Menna van Praag

The Best of Us by Sarah Pekkanen

And Then I Found You by Patti Callahan Henry

The Memory of Love by Linda Olsson

As Husbands Go by Susan Isaacs

A Killer Stitch by Maggie Sefton

Murder 101 by Maggie Barbieri

The Mystery of Mercy Close by Marian Keyes

Size 12 and Ready to Rock by Meg Cabot

Arranged by Catherine McKenzie [eBook]

The Girl on the Cliff by Lucinda Riley

The Lucky Dog Matchmaking Service by Beth Kendrick

So Far Away by Meg Mitchell Moore

You Are the Love of My Life by Susan Richards Shreve

10 authors all women's fiction fans should know: Elizabeth Berg; Barbara Taylor Bradford; Barbara Delinsky; Emily Giffin; Jane Green; Kristin Hannah; Jodi Picoult; Luanne Rice; Danielle Steel; and Jennifer Weiner.

Lists compiled with help from articles in Booklist magazine, including:

"Top 10 Women's Fiction: 2013"

"Rebecca's Rules: Defining Women's Fiction"

"No Clue Where to Shelve These: 6 Women's Fiction Novels That Think They're Mysteries"