When I started working on The Middlepause, I was desperate to read books I could learn from and argue with – books that would mother my own, so that I could duly rebel against them. I’d been pitched directly into menopause, the result of undergoing a hysterectomy, and as I clawed my way back to health, I hungered for fresh options, new pathways, the promise of hope.



What I found, mostly, was self-help. Books with frivolous upbeat titles, like Fifty and Fabulous, or Fifty Is the New Fifty, which traded in stock answers and easy certainties, when what I wanted was intelligent questioning. They assured me that middle age could be the best time of my life, if only I was smart enough to recognise it. I knew better. I knew that middle age was dowdy and maudlin and complaining, that our hormones ride rollercoasters; that we thrill to adulterous affairs; that in midlife we lose parents and sometimes friends and feel as if our identities are dissolving – it’s why we cry over empty nests, fret over our truncated futures, suffer breakdowns and breakups and mourn our disappearing youth.

For middle age to be genuinely transformative we need to change the script – scrutinise our mistakes, admit grief and regret, confront personal failings. Then we have to knead this catalogue of hurts into more textured and mature self-knowledge.

The books I’ve picked here were, for different reasons, milestones on that journey for me. They weighed the depredations of ageing and loss against the wonder of self-acceptance. I say wonder, because emerging into a new sense of oneself is the hardest thing to do – and yet it’s internal, practically metabolic. And from the outside looking in, it is invisible.

1. In Our Prime: The Invention of Middle Age by Patricia Cohen (2012)

An attempt to write the biography of an idea. Mostly it’s a social history, from the mid-19th century to the present, but augmented by fascinating detours through science and psychology. With baby-boomer upswing, Cohen contends that middle age is a “malleable cultural fiction”, currently being rewritten to account for discoveries showing that the middle-aged brain actually grows, or that happiness studies point to a rise in reported levels of satisfaction in midlife. The book is a tonic, a boon and a placebo.



2. Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas (1846)

In this sequel to The Three Musketeers, Dumas brings his immortal quartet out of retirement to cross swords with time, the malevolence of men and the forces of history. Older now, the musketeers have to deal with their physical frailty and the difficult compromises that ageing brings, not least the foreshortening of their horizons. I love the moment when Athos clunks himself down on a stool, the feather in his hat still sprightly, and complains about his weary bones.

3. Break of Day by Colette (1928)

I don’t know how I could have turned 50 without this book. It is my talisman for midlife – an exultant and joyous paean to the unsung joys of regal solitude and monkish self-sufficiency. It’s cheeky, too, featuring a semi-autobiographical “Colette” who at the start of the book claims that she has renounced love, only to spend much of the novel flirting outrageously with a much younger suitor.

4. Force of Circumstance by Simone de Beauvoir (1963)

Part gossipy diary, part reflection on postwar Paris and her own life as a writer, this final instalment of De Beauvoir’s autobiography testifies to how unruffled and grownup she is – in contrast to the still-volatile, ego-driven philosophers, writers and artists with whom she hangs out. There’s a ringing confidence here that comes with self-knowledge, mixed with a willingness to forgive her past mistakes. Once upon a time I’d have misread this book: now its lessons penetrate, seeding calm and acceptance.

5. Brown Sisters: Forty Years by Nicholas Nixon (2014)

This book is quietly epic. It features portrait photographs Nixon took of his wife Bebe and her three sisters in the grounds of their Connecticut home, and in various locations in Massachusetts. The pictures begin in 1975, when the sisters were aged between 15 and 25. Every year, Nixon took another photograph. The series catalogues the sisters ageing. You see how time has worn lines into their features, but also softened them; how they appear to have grown closer over the years, with age strengthening the bonds of care. You wonder at the different relationships between the sisters. But mainly you marvel at how life’s grand journey can be contained in the details of the everyday.

Nicholas Nixon talks about his epic photographic project

6. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2010)

Egan’s novel is a kind of madcap gambol through four decades, told by a dozen characters on the run from their younger selves – including a rock star organising his final “suicide tour”, and a disgraced PR commissioned to create a soft-focus makeover of a genocidal tyrant. The humour is deadpan, but Egan’s take on ageing is brutal: getting old, she suggests, is like being beaten up by a gang of thugs.



7. Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)

This is a novel about transformation, inwardly channeling and then outwardly refracting women’s liberation during the interwar years. Its heroine Lolly Willowes morphs from a maiden aunt, dependent on the largesse of her city-dwelling brothers, into a wayward witch living independently in the rural wilds where she enters into conference with the devil. Women “know they are dynamite”, she tells him.

8. Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing by Lynne Segal (2013)

Segal’s gentle and sustained engagement with Simone de Beauvoir’s various writings about ageing offers a rich read that fires in multiple directions, ricocheting off psychoanalysis, literature and feminism. The book is intensely personal, but at the same time weighs how feminists have fared in redefining cultural attitudes towards ageing. (Spoiler: not that well.)

9. In Midlife by Murray Stein (1983)

What better than a Jungian handbook for midlife? The central idea here is that surmounting the midlife hurdle involves breaking down the persona or “false self” that we cling to in our youth. This should release our “shadow” selves from the dungeons of repression, and behind that, the “contrasexual other” (the animus for a woman, the anima for a man). It sounds vaguely gothic, and also destabilising, which is what it should be; for according to Jung, midlife is a zone of transition.

10. Maximising Manhood, beating the Male Menopause by Dr Malcolm Carruthers (1996)

This book’s the odd one out, though it had its own kind of influence. Prodded into writing by Gail Sheehy (she of Passages fame), Carruthers calls for the introduction of TRT – or Testosterone Replacement Therapy, to counter men’s “declining vitality” in midlife. A mirror treatment for a mirror condition? Or a bloated bag of tripe? Perhaps the clue comes when Carruthers suggests that this “Hormone of Kings – King of Hormones” ought only to be given to menopausal women in low doses, in case their libido “may become excessive”.

• The Middlepause by Marina Benjamin is published by Scribe, priced £14.99. It is available from the Guardian bookshop for £12.74.