Fear of Fifty (3 page)

As mediocre men are promoted upward, supplied with their platinum parachutes, stock options, lemon tart wives, new families, new cars, new planes, new boats, we get older only to become less and less employable. Of course, we are spiritually strong—who ever doubted it? But spiritual strength alone does not overcome discrimination.

In a world where women work three times as hard for half as much, our achievement has been denigrated, both marriage and divorce have been turned against us, our motherhood has been used as an obstacle to our success, our passion as a trap, our empathy for others as an excuse to underpay us.

In our prime, we looked around the world and saw an epidemic of rape frequently not even reported in mainstream newspapers. In our childbearing years, we frequently met our deadlines only by giving up sleep. We began to get angry, really angry, angry for the second time in our adult lives. But now we knew the time was short.

We are finally learning to harness our anger and use it to change the world. But we have not stopped turning against each other. Until we do, sisterhood will continue to be a comforting theory rather than an everyday reality.

This is the next great taboo subject: When will women learn not to divide but to unite? And how can we learn to be allies when society still pits us against each other as tokens?

 

At fifty, the madwoman in the attic breaks loose, stomps down the stairs, and sets fire to the house. She won't be imprisoned anymore. The second wave of anger is purer than the first. Suddenly the divisions between women don't matter. Old or young, brown or white, gay or straight, married or un-, poor or rich—we are all discriminated against just because we are women. And we won't go back to the old world of injustice. We can't. It's too late.

The anger of midlife is a ferocious anger. In our twenties, with success and motherhood still before us, we could imagine that something would save us from second-classness—either achievement or marriage or motherhood. Now we know that nothing can save us. We have to save ourselves.

My books have always been written out of headlong passion. Despite the fact that I've somehow made my precarious living as a professional writer for twenty-three years, I cannot write for hire. I have to feel a deep internal pressure that says: This book doesn't yet exist; I have to make it. I always write as if my life depended upon it—because it does.

At the beginning of Tropic
of Cancer,
Henry Miller quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies—captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly.” Actually, women have fulfilled this prophecy more than men have. Women writers have taken up Emerson's prophecy and made a whole literature of it—a literature that has also changed the way men write books.

“Truth truly” is what I am after. And clearly we live in an age where bearing witness has the force for us that fiction used to have. The novels and memoirs we take up as guides for our lives have that quality of immediacy, of truth told truly, at the expense of false modesty, shame, or pride.

Hard as it is to tell the truth without the comfort of a mask, “an autobiography must be such that one can sue oneself for libel,” as Thomas Hoving said—apparently not knowing whom he was paraphrasing. Mary McCarthy, in her Intellectual Memoirs, gives the source as George Orwell: “An autobiography that does not tell something bad about the author cannot be any good.” McCarthy then confesses more sins than even her detractors can load her with: And we are charmed. But then she's dead—always more charming in a woman than being alive.

The fear of criticism has silenced me many times in my writing life. And the criticism has often been fierce, personal, and wounding. But criticism—as everyone from Aphra Behn to George Sand to George Eliot to Mary McCarthy knew—is one of the first things a woman writer must learn to bear. She does not write of experiences that the dominant culture applauds as “important,” and, like any writer, she does not write with a guarantee. To become inured to ridicule is surely a woman writer's most important task.

Often I have tricked myself into writing with candor by telling myself I would not publish (or would publish only under a pseudonym—perhaps even a male pseudonym). Later, I might be persuaded to sign the book by the loving letters I received from readers or by the publisher's need for a brand name. But during the writing process, I could be free, could knock the censor—my mother? my grandmother?—off my shoulder only by promising myself never to let my words see publication.

I wrote Fear of Flying that way and many subsequent books (including this one). Writing has often been accompanied by terror, silences, and then wild bursts of private laughter that suddenly make all the dread seem worthwhile.

But the great compensation for being fifty in a culture that is not kind to older women is that you care less about criticism and you are less afraid of confrontation. In a world not made for women, criticism and ridicule follow us all the days of our lives. Usually they are indications that we are doing something right.

Is fifty too young to start an autobiography? Of course it is. But maybe eighty is too old.

 

Fifty is the time when time itself begins to seem short. The sense of time running out has been exacerbated lately by the AIDS epidemic and the deaths of so many friends still in their thirties, forties, and fifties. Who knows whether there will be a better time? The time is always now.

At nineteen, at twenty-nine, at thirty-nine, even—goddess help me—at forty-nine, I believed that a new man, a new love, a move, a change to another city, another country, would somehow change my inner life.

Not so now.

I know that my inner life is my own achievement whether there is a partner in my life or not. I know that another mad, passionate love affair would be only a temporary distraction—even if “temporary” means two or three years. I know that my soul is what I have to nurture and develop and that, alone or with a partner, the problems of climbing your own mountain are not so very different.

In a relationship, you still require autonomy, separateness, privacy. Outside a relationship, you still need self-love and self-esteem.

I write this book from a place of self-acceptance, cleansing anger, and raucous laughter.

I am old enough to know that laughter, not anger, is the true revelation.

I make the assumption that I am not so different from you or you.

I want to write a book about my generation. And to write about my generation and be fiercely honest, I can only start with myself.

When people say
“I've told you
fifty
times,”
They mean to scold, and very often do;
When poets say, “I've written
fifty
rhymes,”
They make you dread that they'll recite them too;
In gangs of
fifty,
thieves commit their crimes;
At
fifty
love for love is rare, 'tis true,
But then, no doubt, it equally as true is,
A good deal may be bought for fifty Louis.

—George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don
Juan

 

(Was Byron afraid of fifty? Probably. He died at thirty-six.)

So there I am at the spa with Molly, facing my fiftieth birthday, and feeling hideously depressed. I am no longer the youngest person in the room, nor the cutest. I will never be Madonna or Tina Brown or Julia Roberts. Whoever the flavor of the month is by the time this book appears—I will never be her either. For years those were my values—whether I admitted this to myself or not—but I cannot afford such values anymore.

Every year another crop of beauties assaults me on the streets of New York. With thinner waists and blonder hair and straighter teeth, with more energy to compete (and less cynicism about the world), the class of 1994, or 1984, 1974, is inexorably replacing my class—Barnard '63—yikes! Thirty-plus years out of college. Most of my contemporaries are
grandpères,
as my daughter would say. They press baby pictures on me at parties, the offspring of offspring.

Having started late, I have no grandchildren yet, but I do have a couple of grandnephews crawling around Lebanon, Lausanne, and Litchfield County. My older sister's children are moving me closer and closer to the state of grandparenthood. I am the older generation now, and I'm not always sure I like it. The losses sometimes seem more clear-cut than the gains.

The astounding energy of postmenopausal women (promised by Margaret Mead) is here, but the optimism to fuel it is not. The world seems ever more surely in the grip of materialism and surfaces. Image, image, image is all it sees. As an image, I'm definitely getting blurry.

What has happened to our twenty-five years of protest about not wanting to be plastic Barbies? What has happened to the anger of Naomi Wolf analyzing beauty myths, or Germaine Greer fiercely celebrating cronehood, or Gloria Steinem showing us how to accept age gracefully and turning inward at last?

Is all our angst (and attempted self-transformation) just more fodder for the talk shows as the youth culture grinds on inexorably? Are we just a bunch of old broads talking to each other in the steamroom, cheering each other up?

We write and talk and empower each other, but the obsession with newness and youth (newth?) does not seem to change. Ours is a world of shifting video images more real and more potent than mere words. The television age is here, and we word people are relics of a past when the word could change the world because the word was still heard.

The image is all now. And the time of the image is always NOW. History no longer exists in this flickering light show.

These were some of my thoughts as I trooped around the spa in the Berkshires with Molly, doing step aerobics, aqua-trimming, speed-walking, and other fitness rituals, and avoiding my own image in the mirror. Molly dragged me out of bed for every class, and I lost the same few pounds I always lose (and gain back), drank water, steamed my pores, and felt restored—but the gloom still wouldn't lift. (I was facing the eternal question: to lift or not to tift—and should I do it before the next book tour?)

Worse than my despair over my inevitable physical decline (and whether or not to “fix” it) was my despair over the pessimism of midlife. Never again, I thought, would I walk into a room and meet some delicious man who would change my life. I remembered the mad affairs begun with a flash of eyes and a surge of adrenaline, and the upheavals they inevitably led to. By eschewing upheavals and embracing stability, by disowning my tendency to throw my life into a cocked hat—so to speak—every seven years, I had also becalmed myself. I wanted contemplation, not boredom; wisdom, not despair; serenity, not stasis. The sexual energy that had always called forth the next book, the adventurousness of a life that settled nowhere, had begun to seem rash and foolish at fifty. At last I had “settled down” to cultivate my garden. Now all I needed to do was figure out where my garden was and what to grow in it.

Because that, after all, is the question, isn't it? You can never really “fix” mortality and death even if you can snip back your chin flab and eye bags. You may look good in a glossy, but in life, there are still scars. The real question has to do with how to grow inner-directed in a relentlessly other-directed society; how to nurture spirituality in the midst of materialism; how to march to your own drummer when alternative rock, rap, and hip-hop are drowning her out.

Thoreau is our touchstone writer in defining the central American dilemma: “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.” In this, contemporary women are more Thoreau's heirs than are men. Bill W's philosophy of AA is our touchstone spiritual philosophy (whether we are alcoholics or not), because we are always thirsting for spirit, looking for it in all the wrong places (booze, drugs, money, new clothes), and finally finding ourselves only by losing ourselves, surrendering the materialism on which we were raised.