
Mark Twain once said, “Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.” And both minds and matters can come to a head in one's fifties, when middle-age introduces a means of looking back over the life you've lived so far as well as casting forward to what else lies ahead.
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Authors include: Barbara Anderson, Barbara Taylor
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Marriages may be crumpling or coming back together after children leave the nest, mid-life crises lurk and new leases of life are on the horizon. Literature has covered them all – and more besides. Here are the best books to read before the big Six-Oh!
“If you retire from love... then you retire from life"
Nine Island by Jane Alison (2016)
Here is a deep, vulnerable and shudderingly honest meditation on what it means to be alone, post divorce. J is a middle-aged divorcee tucked away in a sun-bleached Miami apartment where she spends her days translating sex stories by Ovid into English. She has an ageing mother, an incontinent cat, and a past punctured by romantic disasters. Now, she's beginning to contemplate giving up on sex and love all together.
Through J, Alison evokes beautifully the interior life of a single woman of a certain age who – for many reasons, both personal and societal – feels invisible to the outside world. But in this story – awash with humour, irony and no shortage of watery symbolism – there is always hope. As one friendly neighbour tells her, “if you retire from love... then you retire from life.” It's up to J to choose her path.