Striving children, aging parents, job pressures, financial anxieties, physical ailments, generalized hope and dread—a memoir of middle age that is both literary and confessional

What is the most baffling period in our lives? Not childhood, not old age, but the decades of our forties and fifties, the period now generously known as middle age. Of all the challenges that face us in this time of reckoning, the effort to accept the limits of our character, the dwindling of possibilities, and the gap between our aspirations and reality is perhaps the most daunting. It’s both an occasion for regret and an opportunity for coming to terms, the moment when we come up against our limits and discover—for better and worse—who we are.

My Life in the Middle Ages is a portrait, in 12 chapters, of what that unnerving experience is like. A collection of unified essays about the pleasures and pathos that haunt us on the threshold of old age, it charts an original course between reportage and confession. Drawn from the author’s own life, from the testimony of parents, children, teachers, and friends, from the books he’s read and the life that he chose (and that chose him), My Life in the Middle Ages is a comic and poignant memoir that’s both personal and generational.