Why We Can't Sleep

by Ada Calhoun

  Phillips, Adam. Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.

  Pitkin, Walter B. Life Begins at Forty. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1932.

  Primis, Ashley, “Whatever Happened to Generation X?” Philadelphia, January 27, 2018.

  Putnam, Robert D. Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015.

  Rauch, Jonathan. The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2018.

  Richards, Lyn, Carmel Seibold, and Nicole Davis, eds. Intermission: Women’s Experience of Menopause and Midlife. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1997.

  Robbins, Alexandra, and Abby Wilner. Quarterlife Crisis: The Unique Challenges of Life in Your Twenties. New York: Putnam/Tarcher, 2001.

  Sawhill, Isabel V. Generation Unbound: Drifting into Sex and Parenthood Without Marriage. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2014.

  Schmidt, Susanne. “The Anti-Feminist Reconstruction of the Midlife Crisis: Popular Psychology, Journalism and Social Science in 1970s USA.” Gender and History 30, no. 1 (March 2018):153–76.

  Schwartz, Barry. The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. New York: Ecco, 2004.

  Scribner, Sara. “Generation X Gets Really Old: How Do Slackers Have a Midlife Crisis?” Salon.com, August 11, 2013.

  Senior, Jennifer. All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood. New York: HarperCollins, 2014.

  Sheehy, Gail. Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life. New York: Ballantine, 2006. Original publication: 1974.

  ———. The Silent Passage: Menopause. New York: Random House, 1992.

  Shellenbarger, Sue. The Breaking Point: How Female Midlife Crisis Is Transforming Today’s Women. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2004.

  Spencer, Anna Garlin. Woman’s Share in Social Culture. New York and London: Mitchell Kennerley, 1913.

  Steinke, Darcey. Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life. New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2019.

  Strauss, William, and Neil Howe. Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1991.

  Thomas, Susan Gregory. In Spite of Everything: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 2011.

  Traister, Rebecca. All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016.

  Twenge, Jean M., PhD. iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood. New York: Atria, 2017.

  Utian, Wulf, MD. Change Your Menopause: Why One Size Does Not Fit All. Beachwood, OH: Utian Press, 2011.

  Watkins, Elizabeth Siegel. The Estrogen Elixir: A History of Hormone Replacement Therapy in America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.

  Williams-Ellis, Amabel. The Art of Being a Woman. London: Bodley Head, 1951.

  Wilk, Katarina. Perimenopower: The Ultimate Guide Through the Change. Jönköping, Sweden: Ehrlin Publishing, 2018.

  Wilson, Robert A., MD. Feminine Forever. New York: Pocket Books, 1968.

  Yarrow, Allison. 90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality. New York: Harper Perennial, 2018.

  Acknowledgments

  I saw Working Girl when it came out in 1988. I was twelve, so most of the sex stuff went over my head, but I loved the part where Melanie Griffith’s Tess McGill has a career-making idea for Trask Industries while reading tabloids on the Staten Island Ferry.

  In 2017, I received an email from the editor Mamie Healey, then of Oprah.com, that read: “We came across something you wrote recently. And in one of those Working Girl/Trask Industries moments, we thought you might be great for a piece we’re looking to assign.” The proposed story was about why Generation X women seemed to be floundering in midlife.

  I was dubious. Sure, I was having a hard time that summer. Yes, many of my friends were. But I wasn’t bold enough to assume that this meant our whole generation was in trouble. A few weeks into the research, though, I became convinced, then obsessed.

  When the story came out that fall, the link was shared hundreds of thousands of times on Facebook in a matter of days. It seemed there was more to say on the topic than those six thousand words, so my heaven-sent agent Daniel Greenberg, in his usual graceful fashion, began looking for a publisher for a book-length version.

  With the help of his colleague, the delightful Tim Wojcik, Dan found the project a dream home—one that would even let the book incorporate audio from the interviews. I heard Tess McGill’s voice in my head: “And then I thought Trask … radio … Trask … radio!”

  How lucky I am to have landed at Audible. All praise to Laura Gachko, David Blum, Kristin Lang, Don Katz, Jess Kessler, and Esther Bochner. Thanks especially to my editors Katie Salisbury—she of on-target Track Change bubbles like: “Damn. This is dark”—and wise and wonderful Jessica Almon Galland. Audible even put at my disposal the services of meticulous fact-checkers Susan Banta and Mary Marge Locker.

  Thanks to Morgan Entrekin and his incredible team at Grove Atlantic, for publishing this book. Everyone I’ve encountered there—Kaitlin Astrella, Justina Batchelor, Julia Berner-Tobin, Sal Destro, Ian Dreiblatt, Chad Felix, Becca Fox, Susan Gamer, Jazmine Goguen, Judy Hottensen, Amy Hundley, Gretchen Mergenthaler, Erica Nunez, Deb Seager, Andrew Unger—has made me feel welcome and in good hands. The deservedly famous duo, editorial director Elisabeth Schmitz and editor Katie Raissian, worked wonders on this manuscript, as did their exquisite copyeditor Paula Cooper Hughes.

  On a personal note, thank you, Asia Wong, Carlene Bauer, Tim Gunn, Tara McKelvey, Jason Zinoman, Sarah Hepola, Kathleen Hanna, Adam Horovitz, Murray Hill, Bridget Everett, Jim Andralis, Larry Krone, my pen pals, my godchildren, my poker buddies, plus everyone with the Invisible Institute. I’m especially grateful these days for Sob Sisters, the journalists’ bar night I started last year with two women who vastly enhance my experience of midlife: Susannah Cahalan and Karen Abbott.

  My parents, Brooke Alderson and Peter Schjeldahl, give Boomers a good name (and my father gave this book a very good proofread). My Millennial stepson, Andrew Blake; and Gen Z son, Oliver, give me hope for the future.

  My husband, Neal Medlyn, whom I’ve been with since the year 2000, has been extra charming and helpful lately. I don’t even care if it was because I was writing this book and he didn’t want to look bad in it.

  So many busy experts took my questions with equanimity—among them, Isabel Sawhill, Jillian Bashore, Jessica Smock, Amy Jordan Jones, Dan P. McAdams, Kelly Maxwell Haer, Elizabeth Earnshaw, Chip Rose, Janet Kennedy, Amy Goyer, Bruce Bergman, Catherine Coccia, Aaron Lohr, Faith Popcorn, Eric Young, Jacqueline Thielen, Randi Epstein, Mary Jane Minkin, Brooke Erin Duffy, William Doherty, Brad Wilcox, Deborah Luepnitz, Virginia T. Ladd, Tom Smith, Stacy Lindau, Jennifer Deal, Tom Smith, JoAnn Pinkerton, Bryn Chafin, Tara Allmen, Rebecca Henderson, Margie Lachman, Judith A. Houck, Laura Vanderkam, Joanne Ciulla, Linda Waite, Debby Carr, Robert Fluegge, Vaile Wright, and Kelly Roberts.

  Finally, thanks most of all to the women who opened up to me about their lives with bravery, honesty, and dark humor. Tess McGill landed her dream job and Jack Trainer, played by in-his-prime Harrison Ford. Getting to spend time with so many smart and funny women, for me, has been that good.

  Endnotes

  Author’s Note

  1 In the 1970s, the number one girls’ name, with a bullet, was Jennifer. “Popular Baby Names by Decade,” SSA.gov. I interviewed six Jennys. The rest of the top ten names of the decade were: Amy, Melissa, Michelle, Kimberly, Lisa, Angela, Heather, Stephanie, and Nicole. Looking in my transcript folder, I see every one of these names.

  Introduction

  1 There are many opinions about what counts as Generation X. The Harvard Center’s years are 1965–1984. So, from the year Doctor Zhivago came out to the year Ghostbusters did. George Masnick Fellow, “Defining the Generations,” Housing Perspectives,
Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, November 28, 2012. I’ve also heard 1961 as a starting year—though in my experience people born in the early 1960s tend to identify more strongly with the Baby Boom—and either 1981 or 1985 as the Gen X end year. I tend to put most stock in the Pew Research Center: Silent Generation 1928–1945, Boomers 1946–1964, Gen X 1965–1980, Millennials 1981–1996, Generation Z 1997–2012. Michael Dimock, “Defining Generations: Where Millennials End and Generation X Begins,” Pew Research Center, January 17, 2019. I’m also well aware of the fact that plenty of people think the whole business of describing a generational experience or ethos is a fool’s errand. For this argument see, for example: David Costanza, “Can We Please Stop Talking About Generations as If They Are a Thing?” Slate.com, April 13, 2018. No, we can’t. Next question.

  2 Neil Howe and William Strauss, 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail? (New York: Vintage, 1993). And in their 1991 book Generations, the same authors called us “Gen 13ers.”

  3 Paul Taylor and George Gao, “Generation X: America’s Neglected ‘Middle Child,’” Pew Research Center, June 5, 2014.

  4 You can run these numbers a few different ways. By another measure, the breakdown is: Generation X at 66 million, Boomers at 74 million, and Millennials at 71 million. Kimberly Lankford, “Generation X: Time Is on Your Side for Retirement,” Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, January 3, 2019.

  5 Richard Fry, “Millennials Projected to Overtake Baby Boomers as America’s Largest Generation,” Pew Research Center, March 1, 2018. (Also, note: some people count Gen X as just 1965–1977, in which case we’re 45 million versus 75 million Millennials and 78 million Boomers.) Some demographers push for another category: Generation Y, which is generally thought to overlap a bit with both Gen X and Millennials. When people go with the Gen X years 1965 to 1979, the Gen Y birth years are typically given as 1980 to 1994. This category has always felt extra forced to me, though, so in this book I just stick with the bigger umbrellas of Boomer, Gen X, and Millennial.

  6 Ed Mazza, “Generation Xers Have the Most Gen X Response to Being Left Off the List,” Huffington Post, January 21, 2019.

  7 Faith Popcorn, interview with the author, August 30, 2017.

  8 Jennifer Szalai, “The Complicated Origins of ‘Having It All,” New York Times Magazine, January 2, 2015.

  9 It’s worth noting that Helen Gurley Brown, who popularized the term with her 1982 bestseller, did not have children. Helen Gurley Brown, Having It All: Love, Success, Sex, Money—Even If You’re Starting with Nothing (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982).

  10 Generation Unbound author Isabel V. Sawhill sees three issues that could make a real difference in the lives of women: birth control, so women can decide “if, when, and with whom to have children”; wage equality; and measures in aid of work-family balance (child care, flexible hours, paid family leave). Isabel V. Sawhill, “Improving Women’s Lives: Purposeful Parenthood, Decent Wages, and Paid Family Leave,” Talk for Bucks County Women’s Advocacy Coalition, May 23, 2018. Provided to the author via email May 30, 2018.

  11 Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 1, no. 2 (August 2009): 190–225.

  12 In December 2017, Gallup reported that eight in ten Americans say they frequently or sometimes encounter stress in their daily lives, with women and people between the ages of thirty and forty-nine more likely than men or people of other ages to report frequent stress. The poll showed 49 percent of women reporting frequent stress, compared with 40 percent of men; and 56 percent of those aged fifty to sixty-four claimed frequent stress compared with, for example, 24 percent of those sixty-five and older. “Eight in 10 Americans Afflicted by Stress,” Gallup.com, December 20, 2017.

  13 Roni Caryn Rabin, “A Glut of Antidepressants,” New York Times, August 12, 2013. Also: Daniel Smith, “It’s Still the ‘Age of Anxiety.’ Or Is It?” New York Times, January 14, 2012.

  14 AARP Snapshots: Generation X Health. Retrieved August 5, 2018.

  15 “Gen X Women: Flirting with Forty,” J. Walter Thompson Intelligence, Slideshare.net, May 19, 2010. Retrieved August 5, 2018.

  16 Margie E. Lachman, “Mind the Gap in the Middle: A Call to Study Midlife,” Research in Human Development 12 (2015): 327–34.

  17 There are some books about women going through crises in midlife. The cover of A Woman’s Worth (1993) by Marianne Williamson (the presidential candidate) shows a sepia-tone, topless woman hunched over. I opened to a random page and read: “Most women today are borderline hysterical.”

  18 One interesting history of the concept of a midlife crisis is Susanne Schmidt’s “The Anti-Feminist Reconstruction of the Midlife Crisis: Popular Psychology, Journalism and Social Science in 1970s USA,” Gender and History 30, no. 1 (March 2018): 153–76. She argues that the usual way the “midlife crisis” idea is understood—as discovered by male social scientists and then popularized by Gail Sheehy’s bestseller Passages (New York: Ballantine, 2006)—is wrong. She says, “the mid-life crisis has historical roots in debate about gender roles and work and family values, and the shape these took in the United States in the 1970s.” In other words, it was a conversation people were having; Sheehy reported on it; then a bunch of male social scientists whose work she had discussed along with her reporting and feminist critique said she had “popularized” their “discoveries.”

  19 Elliott Jaques, “Death and the Midlife Crisis,” in Creativity and Work (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1990), 306.

  20 Daniel J. Levinson, The Seasons of a Man’s Life (New York: Knopf, 1978), 199.

  21 Susan Krauss Whitbourne, “The Top 10 Myths About the Midlife Crisis,” PsychologyToday.com, July 21, 2012.

  22 Someone could write a dissertation on women insisting they don’t deserve to feel bad. In 1975’s The Romantic Englishwoman, the wife (played by Glenda Jackson) is asked in bed by her husband (played by Michael Caine): “Are you discontented?” Her reply: “I would be, but I don’t feel I have the right.” The husband steals the line for a screenplay he’s writing.

  23 The song was also covered in 1998 by Ace of Base. After I broke up with him, my boyfriend when I was fourteen left many notes in my locker that sometimes included Ace of Base and Wilson Phillips lyrics. This did not rekindle the passion.

  24 Richard Eisenberg, “Boomers and Gen Xers Skipping Health Care Due to Cost,” Forbes.com, March 27, 2018.

  25 Viv Albertine, To Throw Away Unopened (London: Faber and Faber, 2018), 21.

  26 Jim Tankersley, “Jobless Recoveries Are Here to Stay, Economists Say, But It’s a Mystery Why,” Washington Post, September 19, 2013.

  27 Lynnette Khalfani-Cox, “5 Interesting Facts About Generation X,” AARP.org. Retrieved May 18, 2018. According to research by Experian, Millennials average $52,120 in debt (including mortgages, credit cards, and student and car loans); Boomers and the Silent Generation $87,438; Generation X, $125,000. Also see: Chris Matthews, “America’s Most Indebted Generation? Gen X,” Fortune.com, August 27, 2014.

  28 Khalfani-Cox, “5 Interesting Facts About Generation X.” Retrieved August 5, 2018.

  29 Jeffry Bartash, “Higher Rents and Home Prices Drive Increase in Consumer Prices in December, CPI Finds,” MarketWatch, January 12, 2018.

  30 The average age of a college-educated first-time mother in big cities like San Francisco or New York City is now thirty-three. Quoctrung Bui and Claire Cain Miller, “The Age That Women Have Babies: How a Gap Divides America,” New York Times, August 4, 2018.

  31 Clive Thompson, “You Know Who’s Really Addicted to Their Phones? The Olds,” Wired, March 27, 2018.

  32 Sheehy, Passages, 345.

  33 Ibid., xviii.

  1: Possibilities Create Pressure

  1 Details of Title IX are on the US Department of Education’s website, www2.ed.gov. Retrieved July 5, 2018.

  2 Enjoli commercial, YouTube.com. Retrieved August 30, 2018. I recently ordered some
Enjoli off eBay. It smells like musk, jasmine, peach, and unrealistic expectations.

  3 “I’m a Woman” was written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and recorded in 1962 first by Christine Kittrell and then by Peggy Lee. The song has since been covered by Bette Midler, Reba McEntire, Wynonna Judd, cast members of Ally McBeal; and, in duets, Raquel Welch with Cher, in 1975 on The Cher Show and in 1978 with Miss Piggy on The Muppet Show.

  4 Working Girl (1988), YouTube.com. Retrieved July 11, 2018.

  5 Matthew Hennessey, Zero Hour for Gen X (New York: Encounter, 2018), 45.

  6 Caryn James, “Television View; ‘Murphy Brown’ Meets ‘Life with Father,’” New York Times, November 15, 1992.

  7 Kathryn Chetkovich’s “Envy,” Granta 82: Life’s Like That, July 1, 2003, is a revealing essay about what it’s like to be Jonathan Franzen’s girlfriend and a writer with her own ambitions.

  8 Jay D. Teachman and Kathleen M. Paasch, “Financial Impact of Divorce on Children and Their Families,” Future of Children 4, no. 1: Children and Divorce (Spring 1994): 63–83.

  9 Mary E. Corcoran and Ajay Chaudry, “The Dynamics of Childhood Poverty,” Future of Children 7, no. 2 (1997): 40–54. And P. O. Corcoran, unpublished paper, Survey Research Center, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, May 1994.

  10 According to one study done when many Gen Xers were teenagers, even when combined, the asset base of a divorced couple was just half that of married couples. Joseph P. Lupton and James P. Smith, “Marriage, Assets, and Savings,” Labor and Population Program, Working Paper Series 99-12, Rand Corporation, 1999. This disparity tended to be even greater for black children: according to one study, 87 percent of those with continuously married parents exceeded their parents’ income in adulthood, whereas only 53 percent with divorced parents did. “Family Structure and the Economic Mobility of Children,” Economic Mobility Project, PewTrusts.org, May 18, 2010.