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A review by alexisrt
Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis by Ada Calhoun
4.0
I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this book (I think I'd rate it 3.5). On the one hand, as a Generation Xer (#ForgottenGeneration) it was nice to see a book specifically focused on us--that we do have a generational identity, and that we didn't have it as easy as the Boomers (a fact often ignored in Generation Wars). Calhoun is close to my age and she nails a lot of the experiences of my childhood--the kind of benign neglect (and why we don't do the same for our own kids), the being taught that everything was on an upward trajectory for women and we could do everything, only to discover that we were just going to have to do everything.
The problem is partly in the execution. She made a decision that while she would interview a diverse group of women, the vast majority of them are not identified, and the feeling that comes across is that differences are smoothed over into a homogeneous experience that reads as white even when it isn't. The fact is that not all of us were given precisely the same messages as kids, even if we encountered many of the same structural obstacles (student loans, recessions, expensive childcare) as adults.
She deliberately decided to focus on the middle class, deciding that class differences were too great. That's actually a valid decision for this type of book, but the sample felt more specific than that: not just middle class, but a certain kind of middle class, the urban middle-to-upper-middle. Women who had followed what she was taught was the accepted path of college-career-family. Other than a chapter on women without children, there felt like little deviation from that: there was discussion of the stigma for the childless, but not the flipside, the stigma for women who had focused on family.
There's a lot of territory covered in under 300 pages, and while it's interesting, that gives it a highlights reel feeling. That said, there is a lot of good in the book. She accurately describes the way GenX women often feel they were set up to fail: that we were told we could do anything, only to find that we weren't really supported in doing it. I think Calhoun has a bit of a tendency to understate just how big those social obstacles can be--that in effect we were told we could have it all, but that no one would change for us. For example, in the section on "Lean In" and negotiating, she doesn't mention that research has disproven the thesis that women don't get raises because they don't ask. They do; they're less successful at it.
A lot of this resonated with me, but not all. I am interested to see how younger women, who I often see scoff at those of us now in our 40s, experience things as they hit our age.
The problem is partly in the execution. She made a decision that while she would interview a diverse group of women, the vast majority of them are not identified, and the feeling that comes across is that differences are smoothed over into a homogeneous experience that reads as white even when it isn't. The fact is that not all of us were given precisely the same messages as kids, even if we encountered many of the same structural obstacles (student loans, recessions, expensive childcare) as adults.
She deliberately decided to focus on the middle class, deciding that class differences were too great. That's actually a valid decision for this type of book, but the sample felt more specific than that: not just middle class, but a certain kind of middle class, the urban middle-to-upper-middle. Women who had followed what she was taught was the accepted path of college-career-family. Other than a chapter on women without children, there felt like little deviation from that: there was discussion of the stigma for the childless, but not the flipside, the stigma for women who had focused on family.
There's a lot of territory covered in under 300 pages, and while it's interesting, that gives it a highlights reel feeling. That said, there is a lot of good in the book. She accurately describes the way GenX women often feel they were set up to fail: that we were told we could do anything, only to find that we weren't really supported in doing it. I think Calhoun has a bit of a tendency to understate just how big those social obstacles can be--that in effect we were told we could have it all, but that no one would change for us. For example, in the section on "Lean In" and negotiating, she doesn't mention that research has disproven the thesis that women don't get raises because they don't ask. They do; they're less successful at it.
A lot of this resonated with me, but not all. I am interested to see how younger women, who I often see scoff at those of us now in our 40s, experience things as they hit our age.