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I had a mammogram recently, and it felt like an initiation. Unlike perimenopause, which is years of “hmmm what’s going on here?”, My First Mammogram is an event on the calendar. I know many people start going younger than 40, but for me it was a middle-age rite of passage. (Hmmmm no one told me it is like having awkward sex with a vending machine, I thought as I wrapped my long arms around the giant whirring box.) Was it my imagination that the other women in the waiting room were making extra-friendly eye contact, as if they knew it was my first time?
Perhaps it was projection. I’ve always aspired to be an older women. Not necessarily old, per se, but older than I am at any given moment. “Then comes a day when you see a ‘woman’ who is buying tampons and you think of her as a girl,” writes Mary Ruefle in an essay I've read a dozen times. This sums up my interest in aging. I like the idea that it is shifting and relative. That there are levels to this thing. I’m so curious: What doors of my identity will aging unlock?
And so I devoured two new books by women slightly older than me—Glynnis MacNicol’s I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself and Miranda July’s All Fours. The authors are both big-sister types with boundless energy and iconic curly hair who are still sexy, still reinventing, still creative, still free as they round the corner into 50. Both are cis white women who are outside the norm in their own ways (July is queer; MacNicol is single and childfree).
The difference: Glynnis matches my excitement about aging, which is perhaps unsurprising because she’s a friend of mine. Meanwhile, July’s narrator gets hung up on this chart:
The narrator fixates on the hormone dip at age 50, and panics that she’s about to fall off a sexual cliff. “So much of what I had thought of as femininity was really just youth,” she muses.
I cannot relate. I locate my femininity in knowing kinship with other women, in feeling othered by systems of power that are organized around a certain type of masculinity, in a bone-deep sense that “woman” is just the right label for me—all things that grow stronger as I age, none of which are associated with youthful sex appeal. Although my feelings could always start to shift once my hormones start really messing around.
(Worth noting: Not having to grapple with your hormones until midlife is its own kind of privilege, one that July’s narrator and I share. I’ve never had to coax my body to match my identity the way most trans women do. And almost one third of 50-year-old women have had a hysterectomy, therefore experienced their hormonal earthquake before the stereotypical hot-flash era.)
When I think about aging, the most relevant chart is the U-curve that shows happiness and satisfaction over the lifespan:
Spirits are high in youth (though whew, look at that drop as adulthood hits in the early 20s), bottom out in midlife, and then rebound again in old age—at least in the United States as of 2010. Middle age is unhappy, some people argue, because we don't think the graph is going to bend upward. We have been conditioned to believe it's all downhill after 30 and pushed to locate our power in youth. (I mean, even 12-year-olds are buying wrinkle cream.) There are almost no culturally shared milestones that occur in midlife or later, which adds to the perception that there’s nothing to look forward to. Once we make it to older-age and realize it's not miserable after all, our happiness goes up. In other words, it's about expectations.
The u-curve is why these two books made such great companions. Glynnis knows how the curve bends and has written a memoir about reveling in the increase in her power. July’s novel is about bottoming out, then being surprised by the pleasures of feeling the ground rise beneath your feet.
Near the end of All Fours (spoiler! but a minor one) the narrator texts her older friends to ask them what’s great about being post-menopause. Prior to this, it had not occurred to her to inquire about the upsides of aging. Her friends respond quickly and effusively. Ping! Ping! Ping! The replies arrive in rapid succession. The older women have been perched on the upswing, just waiting to make extra-friendly eye contact with the next woman walking up.
-AF
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The job of the college president, which has always been complex, has been utterly transformed by campus activism over the war in Gaza, writes Fabiola Cineas. I found it way more helpful to read this than much of the daily/weekly news coverage of what university administrations are up to. [Vox]
Sex workers were the first beauty influencers, writes Arabelle Sicardi. On the simultaneous admiration and contempt that society has for "people who use their beauty as plainly and efficiently as any other skill in their repertoire." [You've Got Lipstick on Your Chin]
"I never expected to discover whether the image is a memory of something real or not—I don’t think I’ll ever know." Jeremy Butman on getting hypnotized. [The Paris Review]
Normcore was a misunderstood fantasy. Delia Cai interviews the members of KHOLE, the collective that coined the term. Trend stories like normcore are always more interesting to me in hindsight, when we know which aspects had staying power and which were just clever marketing coinages. [SSENSE]
“We might ought to look into that worm thing.” Michael Adno tells the story of a Florida family that has made its living worm-grunting, or harvesting worms to sell as bait, for three generations. [The Oxford American]
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The Normcore Pie
(Archival from 2015. 80% holds up, I think.)
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Stories about what it's like to be at the end of a long-term prison sentence (via Mariame Kaba).
And paying members can call The Hotline for a brief, off-the-cuff audio message, and leave their own in return. It's fun, I swear! +1 (323) 909-XXXX.
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James Baldwin's conversation with Maya Angelou, 1975. Transcript here.
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Learn about fellowships, grants, & residencies for creative writers with a focus on artist statements & project proposals. Sliding scale. Learn more.
27,000 trees: that’s the number of trees cut down around the world each day… just to make toilet paper. This luxury 3-ply bamboo toilet paper is changing that. It feels just like regular high-end TP, but doesn’t harm trees. Use code ANN30 for 30% off your first purchase through midnight. Read more.
Work your way through Julia Cameron's "The Artist's Way" with other creatives! Weekly meetings on Zoom, starting in June & July! Learn more here.
220+ Publications That Pay $1 a Word in 2024: Ever been told there are no well-paying markets left for freelance journalists? Here's a list of 228 markets that prove otherwise. Every publication on this list pays between $1 and $3 a word.
Ann says, "If you’ve been wondering why your work life feels so unsatisfying, you need to read this book”: The Myth of Making It by former Teen Vogue editor Samhita Mukhopadhyay. Launch events in NY at Powerhouse Arena (6/18) and The Strand (6/20).
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Doing an emotional excavation of your Gmail, using the methods outlined by Caitlin Dewey.
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Leysha has a data resource: "I was struggling with a client a couple years ago that was super data heavy and I needed to root it in storytelling. To help, I read Making Numbers Count by Chip Heath & Karla Starr."
Sarah was upset by my choice to link to that essay about fatherhood and (toxic) masculinity last week. "Parenting comes as naturally to men as it does to women," she wrote. "We're just taught to believe differently, even in our subconscious thoughts. Articles like this do nothing to help unteach that toxicity. For example, saying 'dad is helping' and not 'dad is parenting' is adding to the problem."
I agree with Sarah! And I don't always agree with everything in the links I include. Sometimes I am just interested in the perspective, or provoked by a line of thinking—writing that helps me hone my own values and articulate my own beliefs. In this case, I read that fatherhood essay with some interest because it felt like a different gendered lens on some ambivalent parenthood feelings I've written about and linked to in the past. Not because it's the best thing I've ever read on the subject, or because it seemed universally true, or because it signals a productive direction for fatherhood discourse. Perhaps I shouldn't have included it without these caveats.
The good and bad thing about newslettering is that once it's out, it's out. I can't revise or unlink, but I can make adjustments for next time. I do my best not to link to writing that is hurtful or damaging, though I don't always succeed—and I appreciate hearing from you when I don't.
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| This newsletter is not a girl, not yet an elder. |
| Forward it to someone on the upswing. |
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