Culture, Digested: You are having a midlife crisis. It's fine.

Miranda July joins the revolutionary divorced lady brigade

Why can’t women just admit they’re having a midlife crisis? I was wondering that as I was reading Miranda July’s new book All Fours, which is a lightly fictionalized account of a woman artist “who had success in several mediums” as she emotionally separates from her husband and blows up her life in pursuit of more sexual and creative passion. Just don’t call it a midlife crisis.

All Fours joins the trend of divorce memoirs, from Lyz Lenz’s An American Ex-Wife to Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful, that are so uncomfortable with the gendered, narcissistic associations with the term “midlife crisis” that they overcorrect in the opposite direction, claiming a kind of revolutionary status. They elect themselves feminist leaders, here to guide women to liberation, and the journey begins in divorce court.

I think part of it is a rhetorical twitch, this reflex association with any conscious action to a revolutionary purpose. We’ve been through a decade of “shop your way to enlightenment” consumerism, “my avocado toast is a radical act of self-care” personal essay writing, and “I am here to represent my people based on the guidance of my ancestors” representational artwork. When someone writing in a personal mode is looking for an ideological box in which to shove the shapeless mass of their life, Revolutionary Politics is still a handy and marketable one to default to. And for women, that Revolutionary Politics box is easily adaptable to turn it into Aspirational Thought Leader.

our best midlife crisis avatar ever, Michael Douglas

All Fours isn’t a novel so much as it is a job application for the public role of female guru. Marital malaise, the difficulties in raising a child, artistic stagnation -- this is all standard midlife crisis stuff. But All Fours turns from being a personal story about a breakdown into a kind of handbook for living July’s glamorous and liberated life. She advocates – not only for herself, but for all women – for luxury and sensual pleasures like plush carpeting and hand-painted wallpaper, polyamory and sexual exploration, and perimenopausal hormone replacement therapy. (On that last one, she even includes a handy chart about estrogen production levels in the female body throughout a lifespan.) Her struggle is not hers alone. When she confronts her husband about her dissatisfaction, she imagines “all the women in the neighborhood were also leaving their houses.”

July does consider the possibility that she’s just having a midlife crisis, although she ultimately rejects it. She associates it with “silly men in red convertibles” and argues that what she’s going through is much more complex. For a woman, a midlife crisis must be a moment of spiritual awakening and political activation. And it wasn’t just good for the woman, it was good for the world. Because if women remain unsatisfied, “our yearning and quiet rage would be suppressed and seep into our children.” But when men also experience profound dissatisfaction and attempt liberation from the stifling domestic sphere and monogamy and all the rest of it, what they are doing is the opposite of enlightenment. It’s selfish.

Of course this aligns with our current gendered prejudices. A typical man is too liberated, what he needs is domestication, we need to inhibit his movements and put obstacles in his path. A typical woman, on the other hand, is overly self-restrained. She is too tied up in responsibility, she is too inhibited sexually and emotionally because of a misogynistic culture, and we need to loosen her up. Because someone put “the personal is political” on a t-shirt once, we can confuse this behavior modification with political activism. (This is how something like the cover story about Andrew Huberman happens, a grand expose into how he… cheated on a girlfriend. By interfering with his let’s say liberatory sexual practices, this actually becomes a feminist act.)

But why is it always these rich ladies who want to lead “the revolution” as July frequently calls it. And why is the revolution always something emotional and sexual, rather than material? What she ends up advocating for is basically just polyamory, something that will not come as much of a surprise to anyone who follows July, as she made a public announcement in 2022 that she and her husband Mike Mills were staying married but dating other people. The plot of All Fours is just a very lightly fictionalized version of a marriage opening up because of midlife dissatisfaction, the only difference is that in the novel her husband is a music producer instead of a filmmaker.

July flaunts her wealth throughout. When she considers going on a long road trip and the possibility that she might hate driving all day, she self-soothes with, “I could simply fly home at any moment and pay someone on Craigslist to drive the car back to L.A.” When she holes up in a suburban motel instead of continuing on her journey, rather than deal with scratchy linens and the kind of art that hangs on motel walls, she pays a designer $20,000 to recreate a luxury hotel in Paris and bring in original furnishings, tiles for the bathroom, wallpaper, and a new memory foam mattress for her stay. This is shown as being bold and daring (and probably tax deductible, since the narrator holds a series of consciousness raising meetings in the room). It’s revolutionary because women, in July’s understanding of gender, are not quick to say directly what it is that they want.

I do think the tide of opinion is turning on this. This sort of version of politics was fine when the economy was doing okay and we didn’t have multiple wars dominating the news and we still had a functional media industry. But a lot has changed over the last couple years, and “rich lady as feminist liberator” is probably not going to have a place in the culture moving forward.

giving what the kids call big “divorced man energy”

This hesitancy to use the term “midlife crisis” is interesting, given its origins as a feminist concept. The term was popularized by Gail Sheehy in her 1976 book Passages, which documented the malaise and frustration that tended to pop up in women in their 40s. As Susanne Schmidt writes in Midlife Crisis, women entered a moment where, as was the norm for the age, they were facing the emptying of the house as children went to college and “reappraised their lives… They asked: ‘What am I giving up for this marriage?’ ‘Why did I have all these children?’ ‘Why didn’t I finish my education?’ ‘What good will my degree do me now after years out of circulation?’ ‘Shall I take a job?’ or ‘Why didn’t anyone tell me I would have to go back to work?’”

But when the idea became popularized in the media, the feelings were said to be happening to men. It was men restless in the domestic space, men feeling the cold chill of mortality for the first time, men finding themselves dissatisfied. This certainly is how it was presented in the culture; there are any number of television shows, films, novels about the ennui of the suburban male, the once respectable man showing up to divorce court riding on a motorcycle, the man running away with his young secretary.

This cliché, though, was something of a defense mechanism, because the changes shaking the nuclear family at the time were originating in the acts of women. As soon as no fault divorce became the norm – starting in the early 1980s – the vast majority of divorces were being filed by women. And it was dissatisfaction sparking the divorces, more than infidelity or abuse. Once women were contributing financially to the household as well as domestically and emotionally, surveys revealed that they expected men to also contribute to the domestic labor and emotional ties. But men weren’t meeting expectations, and women felt their own contributions were not being reciprocated equally. The vision of men in little red convertibles snipped out that guy’s origin story: he ended up in there after he was kicked out of the house.

And in some way, this cliché also reveals the beginning of a widening separation between the cultural imaginary and reality for most people. A lot of television and magazine culture prior to the 1960s was supportive of the heterosexual norms: this is how to be a good father, this is how to be a good husband, these are important and cutesy lessons from the nuclear family beamed into your home. But after the start of the second wave of feminism, we got the cliché of the divorced man, the “I can’t be bothered to follow the rules of this hospital/bank/police station because I am a renegade,” midlife crisis guy. He was always perceived as somewhat cringe, somewhat embarrassing and lacking in self-awareness, but this was deemed less embarrassing than admitting that men were failing to please women emotionally, domestically, and sexually and being abandoned as a result.

Being middle-aged myself, I can attest to the fact that the midlife crisis is real. You get a whiff of your own mortality, you get some perspective on the way you are living, you face some consequences of past behaviors and decisions, and suddenly, your priorities change. I had a very scary health crisis and emergency surgery which rubbed my nose in the dumb way I had been living and like six months later I got married. I know, I do everything wrong, even the midlife crisis.

If you don’t want to call it a midlife crisis, that’s fine, there are a lot of different terms for it. Astrologically, there is one opposition after another during the 40s (Uranian, Saturnine, Nodal) that forces a person to look at aspects of their life they’ve been rolling through unconsciously for decades, so just call it your Saturn Opposition. Call it your Dantean Journey Into Hell if you like. Just don’t call it a feminist revolution.

Because I think one unfortunate downsides of this current trend in the midlife revolutionary impulse is that the vision of the life it presents is not very useful to most people. Miranda July’s idea of fucking your way to freedom (which requires a personal trainer to help her regain her desirable backside and all kinds of leisure hours and childcare arrangements to manage the various “date nights” that she and her husband go to separately) is not really going to be attainable, or desirable, for a lot of people. Reading it, I felt very alienated from this whole vision of fulfillment, much like I suspect some of the guys desperately trying to figure out how to keep their wives from leaving them might have been watching any of these middle-aged men trying to shove their middle-aged spreading waistlines into tiny European cars. “Just give up. Like me!” But with July, I’m watching her frantic pursuit of revolutionary liberation through medical interventions and kettle bells and strap-ons and I am just thinking, maybe we have different ideas about what constitutes a good time.

Lately I’ve been watching videos made by DINKS (double income no kids), and many of them brag about what they can do with all the money they are not spending on their children. They can go to Disney World whenever they want! They can watch Marvel movies whenever they want! They can go out to eat whenever they want! And I watch with fascination, because they are frequently in their thirties acting like teenagers, and this crisis of meaninglessness and the epiphany about the inherent emptiness of consumerist hedonism is looming on their horizons. Hopefully by then, for their sake, people will be admitting to having a midlife crisis again.

Recommended:

• I was asked to review Miranda July’s All Fours for the Telegraph (forthcoming), and fell into a spiral for a week trying to figure out what July’s whole deal is. She seems so much from a very specific era, that maximalist age of faux profundity that encompasses everything from Dave Eggers to Michel Gondry to the Polyphonic Spree to Spike Jonze, that it was odd to see her publishing again. I thought she and her ilk had been encased in amber like mosquitos. Anyway, I didn’t like it the first time around, and it hadn’t improved with age. I couldn’t manage to work in the review, though, that she seems to have a mistreated animal leitmotif in her work — in The Future she forgets to pick up her cat from the shelter so they euthanize it, in All Fours her dog almost dies because she had not noticed it stopped pooping. (As a dog owner, I have to ask…………. how??) Her headshot should be hung in animal shelters around Los Angeles, do not let this woman adopt any more pets!

• It’s funny that the Netflix adaptation of Three Body Problem is so boring and lacking in characterization, when the controversies around it, like the murder of its producer and controversies it’s sparking in China, are so interesting.

• Happy solar eclipse.