A group of friends and I have adopted the ‘five minutes for ailments’ rule, for when we get together. Otherwise, discussions about health (and the health of our partners, parents and kids) would sap hours. Seriously, hours. This is my oldest group of friends – we were teens together in the eighties, at uni in the early nineties and had kids in the 2000s. I’m providing the timeline to give context to Ada Calhoun’s book, Why We Can’t Sleep.

Why We Can’t Sleep is essentially about why Gen X women are facing very particular problems as they enter middle age.

Calhoun found herself lying awake at night worrying about life, and at the same time admonishing herself because she had a happy family, a career, and was in good health. After speaking to friends, she realised that she wasn’t alone, and did further investigation into a raft of socio-economic indicators from housing costs and HR trends to debt and divorce data, to explain her discontent.

Essentially, Gen X women were raised to ‘have it all’. We were sold a lie. Sandwiched between the Boomers and the Millennials, Calhoun describes Gen X as the ‘Jan Brady’ of generations.

Boomers deserve full credit for blazing trails while facing unchecked sexism and macro-aggressions and for trying to raise children without giving up on their own dreams. But Gen Xers entered life with ‘having it all’ not as a bright new option but as a mandatory social condition.

It is really important to emphasise that this book is about middle-class white women, who have had access to education and have had minimal trauma in their lives (Calhoun stipulates this at the beginning, but I noticed that much of the criticism over at Goodreads is focused on her narrow lens). Anyway, I am absolutely the target demographic, and unsurprisingly, the majority of what she had to say resonated with me.

I particularly enjoyed the pop culture references and Calhoun gave interesting historical examples (such as the trauma of the Challenger disaster and the AIDS crisis) to explain why Gen Xers are the way they are (characterised as self-sufficient, wary, conservative).

And Calhoun made me laugh. She comments on the male versus female mid-life crisis, noting that the female version tends to be ‘quieter’, as she ‘…sneaks her suffering in around the edges of caretaking and work…’

Women might drain a bottle of wine while watching TV alone…or cry every afternoon in the pickup lane at school. Or, in the middle of the night, they might lie wide awake, eyes fixed on the ceiling. There has yet to be a blockbuster movie centered on a woman staring out her car’s windshield and sighing.

I didn’t learn much that I didn’t already know, with the exception of discovering that Gen X is the first generation in centuries to be downwardly mobile (in other words, in the past, each new generation is more prosperous than their parents i.e. upwardly mobile. Not so for Gen X, who have been in their prime working years during two recessions, delayed having a family because of economic pressures, then had the double burden of caring for children and parents). Gen X is the ‘…wrong place, wrong time’ generation: ‘thwarted by boomers who can’t afford to retire and threatened by the prospect of leap-frogging Millennials.’

Calhoun makes a number of statements that jumped out at me because they matched my own experience. For example,

“If you said you wanted to be a nurse, everyone would say, ‘Why not a doctor?'”

…feel guilty for complaining, because it’s wonderful to have had choices that our mothers didn’t have, but choices don’t make like easier. Possibilities create pressure.

The book finishes with a bunch of suggestions for avoiding the ‘abyss’, and although they’re not earth-shattering, it’s useful to be reminded that getting your physical health sorted is important, as is hanging out with people who enrich your life and letting go of unrealistic expectations. The key point is that we must stop telling middle-aged women to ‘…lean in, take “me-time,” or make a chore chart to get their lives and homes in order’, because actually, we’re a resourceful bunch and if that shit worked we would have done it years ago.

Exceeding expectations was so much easier when there basically were no expectations.

3/5 Fairly certain that readership for this book is narrow – if you’re not a Gen X woman, it will come across as whiney, ‘poor me’, or completely irrelevant. But if you are a Gen X woman, someone validating your experience might be helpful.

I received my copy of Why We Can’t Sleep from the publisher, Grove Atlantic, via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

Calhoun has included an appendix titled ‘A Midlife Crisis Mixtape’. It’s brilliant, and she included a track from an album I listened to exhaustively –