An Announcement and Five Friday Finds

Five of my favorite reads and a new opportunity for collaboration

March is here, finally. February is a short month, but somehow always feels very long.

For me, February was not the most productive month, as it included a couple weeks of the flu for my family, as well as winter vacation for my kids.

What I did manage to do this month is discover a lot of great writing and several new midlife writers here on Substack.

But first, a question:

Are you a midlife writer with your own Substack?

Substack has just ended its popular Writer Office Hours, which has been an amazing opportunity to connect with other writers who are writing about similar topics and on similar paths.

Now Substack has encouraged all of us to create our own smaller writer communities for collaboration and growth. With our decade of experience in community building for writers across various platforms, we’d already been thinking of this possibility, and now — with the end of Office Hours — we think it’s the perfect time to start something new, a community space for midlife writers to share insights, ask questions, promote their writing, and host meetups. We hope to create a database of writers who are exploring this messy middle of life (in many different ways) so that we can connect, follow each other, communicate about collaborations, and more.

If you’re interested in the possibility of being a part of a community of midlife Substack writers, please fill out this form and we’ll be in touch!

Photo by Tony Hand on Unsplash

Here are five of my favorites from last month:

1. This

   Memoir Land
   Author Questionnaire interview with Leslie Jamison. I loved Jamison’s previous books, especially The Empathy Exams, and her most recent book, a memoir entitled Splinters: another kind of love story, was published February 20th and is next up on my To Read pile.

   In the Memoir Land questionnaire, Jamison describes her new memoir:

   “Splinters tells the story of the birth of my daughter and the end of my marriage, these simultaneous experiences twined like a double helix plotline through the book. It illuminates my consuming love for my daughter, and the rupture of my marriage falling apart, examining what it means for a woman to be many things at once: a mother, an artist, a teacher, a lover.”

2. This essay from

   What Now? with Lindsay Johnstone
   : “I’m a Raging Hagolescent: How About You?” Read it to find out if you’re in hagolescence. (Hint: If you’re reading this Substack, you probably are.)

3. I keep thinking about the question posed by this essay, “How the 19 Billion Dollar Menopause Industry Exploits Women: Why aren't we free to be ourselves as we age?” As I near 50, I feel this tension. We are told that it’s okay to “age gracefully,” just as we are also being told that we can still look just as young and fabulous as ever.

   Marychris Melli
   of Princess Never writes, “They have found us, stood up, took notice and told us we can still have beauty. Exploited the transition, the sorrow, loss, acceptance and freedom of it all. Now they get to decide what empowerment and grace look like too.

   The 19 billion dollar menopause industry tells us 56 isn’t supposed to look like it does. Just like the beauty industry told us our entire lives we weren’t supposed to look like we did.”

4. I read Melli’s essay soon after I read “Jennifer Aniston's face: why it's symptomatic of our confused narrative around ageing” by

   Anniki Sommerville
   of
   'Midlifing it,' with Anniki Sommerville
   , and they’re great companion pieces.

   Sommerville writes, “I hasten to add that we never (or I haven’t) hear about older men and their faces in this level of detail. Have you ever read an article about Bill Gates and his ‘remarkably refreshed looking eyes’? What about Elon Musk who in actuality looks like Leonard Nimoy’s nephew and wouldn’t be out of place in an episode of Star Trek? Boiled egg face men. Men with gigantic comb overs. Men who don’t get out of bed in the morning and worry about whether some dick wad is going to call them out about their skin texture looking a ‘uncannily smooth,’ today?”

5. Finally, please read

   Alice Kuipers
   of
   Confessions & Coffee
   and her lovely and insightful meditation on imposter syndrome, “A Little Life List: When Mean Girl is on Your Shoulder.”