Out of Time: Midlife, If You Still Think You're Young by Miranda Sawyer - review

Ultimately Sawyer comes across as an irritating adolescent trapped inside a middle-aged body, says Katie Law
Clever writing: Miranda Sawyer
Emma Peios/Getty
Katie Law @jkatielaw15 July 2016

In August 2011 the Observer ran an article by arts journalist Miranda Sawyer titled Is This It, which was the starting point for this book, in which Sawyer described how it felt, aged 44, to have probably passed the halfway point of her life, knowing that she had less time ahead of her than behind her.

Her midlife crisis seemed mild by some people’s standards, she thought. She didn’t run off with a builder, shag her Pilates teacher, move to Thailand to find her real self or embark on a brand-new drug habit. No, wait for it, she had her second child (having had her first in her late thirties) and after two decades of uninterrupted partying, going to gigs and nightclubs, drinking and pill-popping, turned down the volume.

The once-youthful Sawyer, with her old prejudices which included “a hatred of wheelie suitcases, of drawer tidies for cutlery drawers”, had morphed into “an overgrown teenager with a family, mortgage, a fridge-freezer, all that”.

In a series of chapters on wide-ranging subjects from Sex, Fitness and Looks, to Work, Music and Death, Sawyer explores her own and others’ attitudes to this morphing process. And although she professes to be happy with her husband, the actor Michael Smiley, and their two young children, the book is propelled by her indignation and feelings of disappointment. “Is this the person I am now? God, how dreary,” she writes.

She interviews people, talks to friends and consults relationship therapist Philippa Perry (wife of Grayson) and fellow journalist Suzanne Moore, as well as a whole range of “experts”, academics and authors.

She quotes anecdotes and statistics about drinking, divorce, suicide and sex, some fascinating, some funny. “He can’t keep it up for long. It’s OK, really, I don’t mind all that much, I can finish myself off easily enough,” one interviewee tells her, adding, “Oh, and then, one morning after a not very successful night before, I went in to wake up X (her teenage son) and he wouldn’t move, so I pulled the duvet off him and he had a stonking hard-on. That was a very weird moment, for lots of reasons.”

Yet Sawyer reveals little about her own levels of desire, except, in passing, that she is probably peri-menopausal and that when her beautician Esther, who at 57 “doesn’t look her age”, tells her “an orgasm a day will keep the miseries at bay” she thinks of it as yet “another thing on the to-do list”, but doesn’t say so.

She is more open about being envious of her peers who have made more money than her, while still liking the “nutso-rich,” people who are so wealthy that they open their houses to anyone and “host festivals somewhere on their rolling lawns… They are divorced from the world in a fantastical way, free from conventional worries, tied down by family and manners but not much else.” How does she know?

She claims not to be vain yet is surprised, furious actually, at the physical changes that are happening “too slowly for you to notice and too quickly for you to do anything about”. She is mortified by her dried-up feet, her unkempt-hedge eyebrows, her sagging knees and the difference between having been “a really thin girl” at 35 to being “matronly and womanly” at 44.

She is spot-on when she identifies Frieze art fair as the best place in London for Botox-spotting. Although she hasn’t had it herself she doesn’t condemn it, partly because so many of her “beauty-conscious” friends have, one suspects. She inhabits a world of luvvies, pop stars and artists and, ever the rebel, she likes to dress down at formal occasions and wear a lot of black, because she wants to look “cool or clever or interesting”.

Although she stopped smoking and rarely drinks now, she occasionally scoffs a bag of Haribos in one go and still places huge importance on identifying herself through her love of music (she likes grime).

While broader-scoped than many a menopausal monologue — she is a clever, efficient writer — ultimately Sawyer comes across as an irritating adolescent trapped inside a middle-aged body, to whom you want to shout “Oh, just grow up, FFS.”

(4th Estate, £12.99)

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