THERE ARE NO GROWN-UPS

A Midlife Coming of Age Story

By Pamela Druckerman

288 pp. Penguin Press. $27.

No doubt about it, middle-aged women are having a moment. Isabella Rossellini was recently reinstated as the face of Lancôme after being fired by the French cosmetics house in 1996 for, she says, being too old (she was a haggard crone of 43). At this year’s Academy Awards, a majority of the best actress nominees were over 40 and the winner, Frances McDormand, is 60. This marked a great leap forward for Hollywood, which has traditionally cast women older than 38 in five roles: crazy mother-in-law, cameo librarian, Shirley MacLaine, lady with a dog at the crime scene or frumpy yet endearing confidante of the hero, a guy who was two years above said actress at college. You could call this the Harrison Ford Problem.

Ageism may well be the last taboo, but keeping it in place is not just male prejudice but the female’s secret dread of losing her youth. Rossellini says that Lancôme told her women dream of looking young. How does it feel to have your sexual currency depreciate that abruptly — and what stock, if any, can replace it? There has been remarkably little good writing about this thorny topic but here, with excellent timing, comes Pamela Druckerman’s pitch-perfect and brutally frank “There Are No Grown-Ups.”

In her 2012 memoir, “Bringing up Bébé,” Druckerman created a surprise best seller by observing the way the French manage to raise delightful, polite kids who eat everything on their plates while eagerly debating the merits of Jean-Paul Sartre. It provided the perfect escapist reading for American parents who tiptoe round their own young like a terrified concierge on a short-term contract.

In “There Are No Grown-Ups,” the American-born author is still living in Paris with her British husband and three children, but lately she has noticed something subtly and disturbingly different about the way she is treated in restaurants. Around her 40th birthday, there is “a collective code switch” as waiters start calling her “madame” instead of “mademoiselle.” Logically, Druckerman knows she is entering middle age — she observes it in the lines on the faces of her peers — but “I just didn’t expect ‘madame’ to happen to me, or at least not without my consent.”