  | Book Details Title: Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis |
Book DescriptionReview Praise for Why We Can’t Sleep New York Times Editors’ Choice Featured on The Today Show, The Tamron Hall Show, Live with Kelly and Ryan, NPR, and on the Cover of O, Oprah Magazine The Indie Next Pick of January 2020 One of Vogue’s Best Books to Read this Winter One of 10 Most Anticipated Books of 2020 by Forbes Named One of Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2020 “[C]andid and engaging. [Calhoun] is a funny, smart, compassionate narrator…. I admired her insistence on taking women’s concerns seriously.” ―Curtis Sittenfeld, New York Times Book Review “Women are taught to not feel anything for ourselves and to not feel for one another. And our generation is the smallest generation…[Why We Can’t Sleep] is a book that makes you feel less crazy. Like oh, it is not my imagination.”―Kelly Ripa on Live with Kelly and Ryan “[A]n engaging hybrid of first-person confession, reportage, pop culture analysis, and statistics… it aspires to something larger than memoir.” ―The New Republic “[A] Bracing, empowering study… Women of every generation will find much to relate to in this humorous yet pragmatic account.” ―Publishers Weekly “Calhoun speaks directly to her own generation, peppering the book with so many specific cultural touchstones… that I found reading Why We Can’t Sleep to be a singular experience – driving home her point that Gen X is so often overlooked. ―Minneapolis Star Tribune “Timely, humane, raw, honest, and sincere.”―Forbes, 10 Most Anticipated Books Of 2020, According to Independent Bookstores “Ada Calhoun provides a thoughtful, incisive account of the myriad challenges facing Generation X women.” ―Shelf Awareness “An assured, affable guide, Calhoun balances bleakness with humor and the hope inherent in sharing stories that will make other women feel less alone. She also gives good advice for finding support through midlife hardship. This is a conversation starter (as well as a no-brainer for book groups that count Gen X women among their members) that might get Boomer and Millennial readers curious, too.” ―Booklist “Ada Calhoun’s soulful investigation into the complex landscape women in midlife face today is downright stunning. Calhoun has captured the voices―some broken, some resilient, many barely staying afloat―of over 200 women from around the country and in doing so, shown us how much we share in divisive times. You will recognize yourself in these pages, breathe a sigh of relief, and think, I’m not alone.”―Susannah Cahalan, author of the New York Times bestselling Brain on Fire “This is the book of our generation. Ada Calhoun brilliantly encapsulates the struggle and confusion that is the Gen X woman’s experience in middle age. And by placing this condition into the context of the generations coming before and after, she makes sense of how it is that we’re so surprised that we have failed at having it all. Heavily researched, expertly paced, and seamlessly woven together, Why We Can’t Sleep provides an ‘aha’ moment that at once validates our experience and establishes a sense of community and hope.”―Janet Krone Kennedy, PhD, Clinical Psychologist, author of The Good Sleeper and founder of NYC Sleep Doctor “It’s difficult to grapple with the immense anxiety and fear so many women go through alone, but Ada Calhoun’s artistry as a writer makes her the perfect guide through the rough business of middle age.”―Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill “Helping women realize that some difficulty, some confusion, is not just all in their mind is probably one of your more feminist acts, and the impressive amount of research Ada Calhoun did on the very specific forces, past and present, that are bedeviling Gen X women as they face the strange period that is midlife is just that kind of gift. But the other gift is that she writes with clear sight, compassion, and hope about our very specific talents and tenacity. Which means: this book is a thousand times more healing than a jadeite egg!”―Carlene Bauer, author of Not That Kind of Girl “I love Ada Calhoun’s writing. Why We Can’t Sleep just took me to school, laughing all the way there.”―Adam Horovitz of Beastie Boys Read more About the Author ADA CALHOUN is the author of the memoir Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, named an Amazon Book of the Month and one of the top ten memoirs of 2017 by W magazine; and the history St. Marks Is Dead, one of the best books of 2015, according to Kirkus and the Boston Globe. She has collaborated on several New York Times bestsellers, and written for the New York Times, New York, and The New Republic. Read more Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. An acquaintance told me she’d been having a rough time, working three jobs as a single mother since her husband left her. Determined to cheer up her family, she planned a weekend trip. After working a long week, she started packing at ten p.m., figuring she could catch a few hours of sleep before their five a.m. departure. She asked her eleven-year-old son to start gathering his stuff; he didn’t move. She asked again. Nothing. “If you don’t help,” she told him, “I’m going to smash your iPad.” He still didn’t move.As if possessed, she grabbed a metal hammer and whacked the iPad to pieces.When she told me this, I thought of how many parents I know who have fantasized or threatened this very thing, and here she’d actually done it. I laughed. “Yeah, my friends think it’s a hilarious story too,” she said, “but in reality, it was dark and awful.” Her first thought as she stood over the broken glass: “I have to find a good therapist…right…now.”Since turning forty a couple of years ago, I’ve become obsessed by women my age and their―our―struggles with money, relationships, work, and existential despair. Looking for more women to talk to for this book, I called my friend Tara, a successful reporter a few years older than me who grew up in Kansas City. Divorced about a decade ago, she has three mostly-grown children and lives on a quiet, leafy street in Washington, D.C., with her boyfriend. They recently adopted a rescue dog.“Hey,” I said, happy to have caught her on a rare break from her demanding job, “do you know anyone having a midlife crisis I could talk to?”The phone was silent.Finally, she said, “I’m trying to think of any woman I know who’s not.” Read more Customers Review: I picked up this book thinking it would just be some sort of self-helpy thing, but I was absolutely wrong. It’s a book of solid statistics and “stories from the field” about the women of Generation X (those born between 1965 and 1980) and why some of us feel burned out, fatigued, and restless. “Why We Can’t Sleep” is about this sense of malaise so many of us are feeling- what caused it, why we experience it, and how women are dealing with it.The book covers everything from psychology to neuroscience, health care to parenting, the economy to marriage. Not just in our current moment, but in the span of years that Generation X have been alive and the impact that growing up in unstable socio-economic times can have on an entire generation of women, even if we believe we weren’t individually impacted by many of the events that happened in our lifetimes.The reason why this book hit so close to home is because around six years ago, I started feeling a deep unease that I couldn’t put my finger on. There are definitely factors within my immediate circumstances that I could see had an impact on me, but it felt like something much deeper was going on way outside my control and maybe even my comprehension, and to be honest, it’s really spooked the heck out of me.What I got from reading this book is that this “unease” is a universal feeling for many of us in this age bracket and it’s the culmination of many of the circumstances of which we grew up and navigated as children and adults. These “circumstances” were sort pf put into motion by the Baby Boomers (the generation ahead of us) and are now being sort of dismantled by the Millennials (the generation after us) but the Xers were the ones to actually experience everything first hand and try to make some tricky choices on which way to navigate some of these unusual circumstances that didn’t have any precedent in history.The author doesn’t shy away from saying, outright, that these circumstances and choices can definitely be what many consider “first world problems” but in reality, if you crunch the data- all the economic and political instability of both our youth and recent times, the rise and explosion of the internet in our lifetime (we went from having 12 channel TVs with antenna and tube screens to internet being beamed into handheld flat screens we CARRY with us without wires!) and the changes in society that have been influenced by that- it’s actually a really tricky thing to wrap your brain around.This book was exactly what I needed. It explained to me, in details and statistics, and through the stories of many other women from all walks of life and all sorts of situations, why I feel the way I do. And why I should have some hope for the future because I’m not alone. | |
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