Midlife Crisis Bingo Recap: Spring Chicken

I hope you all had a good Groundhog Day. I sure did. I appreciate the fact that so many of you were inspired to send me groundhog related photos and videos, though that means that you were screwing around on the internet rather than reading. Put down your phone (after reading this post, of course), and pick up your book!

 

It’s time for us to begin our 2021 Midlife Crisis Bingo wrap-up. As promised, I will share my recently completed Bingo card. I wrestled a bit with how to do this wrap-up, and I’ve decided to do many short posts rather than just a few expansive ones. I wouldn’t want us to have to strain our eyes or to stop looking at TikTok for too long. Today’s post is the first one on my card: Spring Chicken.

 

The category description: Kids these days are fresh and creative, and they help you solve your problems connecting to the internet. The world is in good hands. Read a book by an author younger than you are. (For many of us, this should be an easy task!)

 

Doesn’t it bug you just a little bit when you see young people getting their writing done and getting published and acquiring literary fame and fortune? I am bugged. And I get just a little judgy. I mean, what do these youngsters really have to say?

 

It turns out that they have quite a lot to say. For this square, I read Beautiful Country, a memoir by Qian Julie Wang. Wang details her years as an undocumented Chinese child in New York City in the 1990s. It is a visceral account of deep poverty, hunger, illness without insurance, experiences in American public schools, threats, aspiration, defeat, and resilience. If you’re one of those people who is drawn to stories about the power of books and reading, you’ll find that theme here. Wang’s reading life plays a big part in her development.

 

I generally don’t love memoirs by very young people because of my aforementioned judginess, but I thought this one was terrific.  I was an adult in the 1990s and remember the decade well, so it was interesting to think about this child’s experiences in parallel time.

 

Feeling like you have missed your moment is a hallmark of a good midlife crisis. So in a way, being jealous of younger writers makes me a success in midlife crisis-ing. Win! For fun, I just searched for people who published their first book after 50, and here are some notable ones: Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep), Frank McCourt (Angela’s Ashes), and Anna Sewell (Black Beauty). And here’s a fun 2018 article from LitHub on “late bloomers.”

Speaking of being older than very accomplished people, I have been watching the Olympics this week while eating Pringles on the couch. I find myself looking at the parents of the athletes and recognizing my generation there. Hello, peers! Those lessons you dragged your children to in 2010 have really paid off. My kids were very busy assembling trash into works of art at that time. Too bad there's not a gold medal for freestyle mess making. 

 

Also, a note to the 30-year-old athletes that the announcers keep burying (“It’s the end of the road for him!”), you do have many more years of good times left. Don’t worry.

Review of Modern Lovers By Emma Straub

Two summers ago, I read The Vacationers by Emma Straub and was underwhelmed. I think I was underwhelmed because it was aggressively hyped as the ultimate “summer read.”  At the time, I compared it to a margarita at Applebees.  It looked like it was going to be a sharp cocktail of a book, but instead it was lemony water in a pretty glass.

With Straub’s new Modern Lovers, I just bought a second weak margarita. Don’t get me wrong, this book was completely pleasant. I did indeed read it on vacation, and it certainly got me from here to there and back. But maybe I’m just getting to the point in my life where I want to be moved in some way by what I read – I want to be deeply intrigued, or brought to tears or hearty laughter. I want to be able to say to a friend, “You have to read THIS.”

Modern Lovers is a book about mid-life crises. The main characters were members of a band in the early 1990s – and thus were “cool” and poised to live zesty lives. But marriage and kids happened, and they made compromises. Suddenly they had all sorts of questions about whether life was supposed to turn out so beige. There are several plot trails – a movie is going to be made about a band mate who died, and secrets emerge; the kids of the two main couples get together and face their own questions about what it means to live authentically; there’s a sketchy new age guru who moves to the neighborhood and offers new hope to one of the characters.

But here’s the thing – for a book that should be dripping in emotion, there is very little fire at the heart of it. Mid-life crises are usually pretty harrowing, right? Modern Lovers is a sweet story, and it’s difficult to do sweet and harrowing at the same time.

So, readers, please tell me – what are some books that really grabbed you? I’m looking for a little more tequila in my next summer read.