I’m Obsessed with the Female “Mid-Life Crisis”

By Leslie Price

Something about the uncertainty of life during a pandemic has, over the past year, sent me chasing nostalgia. This comfort food for my overwhelmed nervous system has taken all sorts of embarrassing forms: There was the time I purchased a vintage pair of Abercrombie & Fitch olive green cargos with drawstring hems at the ankle, for example (March 2020; it was a tough month). Or when I insisted on playing the Dave Matthews Band “Live at Red Rocks” album at top volume on repeat (November 2020). When I could not get enough of watching Drake dance in the “Hotline Bling” music video (January 2021). And then, there was that time last summer when I re-immersed myself in My So-Called Life on ABC streaming.

The show,which is also on Hulu, is in some ways a satisfying blast from the past. When it debuted, I was 12 years old and identified with Angela Chase. Now I’m almost the same age as Angela’s 40-year-old mom, Patty. (No? Yes! Ah!)

Now that I am of Patty-age, I have to say: Justice for Patty. Yes, she runs her own business, has her shit together, and can pull off a pixie haircut. But she’s also a bit uptight and kind of a killjoy. And while I remembered this show as an exploration of teenage angst, upon rewatch it’s clear that it’s also about Patty and her husband, Graham, going through twin mid-life crises.

Is this what hooks me into the show again? I’m turning 40 this year, like so many other elder millennials, and though certain aspects of my life feel established, I really have no clue what the next 40 years are supposed to look like. There are not that many female “mid-life crisis” storylines to look to. When I revisit my streaming habits, it’s clear that I’ve been searching them out. Patty is just one of the more tragic examples.

Towards the end of My So-Called Life, things with Graham are unraveling a bit and Patty attempts to “reconnect” with him on a weekend trip with Graham’s brother, Neil, and his new girlfriend, Cheryl. 

Cheryl is in awe of Patty. “You’ve got this great job, you’ve got this husband and children. It must be so satisfying,” she says to her. “Like with me, there are so many, like, paths I could choose. Every single possibility of life is, like, open to me. But you, I mean, your choices have been made. Your life is totally settled. It must be really, like, comforting.”

“Yeah, it is,” replies Patty flatly. Patty’s made her choices and now her life is set. She has children, a marriage, a house, and a business: the traditional trappings of adulthood. But she doesn’t seem happy. 

The term “mid-life crisis” was invented in the ‘60s and was long seen as the preserve of men. It’s often paired with a new sports car, or a sudden return to the gym, or a youthful girlfriend. As Ada Calhoun wrote in Why We Can’t Sleep, “Part of the reason we don’t know much about women’s midlife experience is that the focus has often been on men.” 

According to one study, slightly more women than men (26.3% vs 25.4%) experience some sort of mid-life crisis. Women internalize, “focus[ing] more on physical and health changes,” while men peg it to “disappointment in their career or job.” Of course, for women midlife brings a lot of physical changes, including peri-menopause, and a sense of looming invisibility. The pandemic has also caused plenty of people to reconsider their course in life, and even hastened the “mid-life crisis” for some.

Patty and Graham are headed down a destructive path. Graham was poised to cheat on Patty with his restaurant partner Hallie Lowenthal, potentially breaking up his marriage. Patty, who throughout the show struggled with her appearance and sexuality, was going to have to reckon both with Graham’s choices and with her lack of self esteem (despite being successful and totally hot?). If My So-Called Lifehadn’t ended after just one season, the show’s creators planned on Patty falling into a depression after Graham’s affair. 

These sort of narratives, and the term itself (it’s a crisis!) imply something awful, but taking stock of where you are and working on yourself to try to discern what makes you happy and fulfilled doesn’t sound bad to me. Maybe it’s some sort of reckoning, but it doesn’t have to be uniformly negative.

Around the time I was spiraling with DMB, Netflix began streaming what has to be the best new film about midlife out there, The Forty-Year-Old Version. The black-and-white movie, which won “best directing” at Sundance last year, tells the story of Radha, an unattached, Black playwright who’s pushing 40 and losing sight of her creative dreams, until she decides to embark on a rap career. As The Hollywood Reporter reviews, “Radha Blank the character is a unicorn when it comes to film history: a black woman protagonist who is middle-aged, has no children (or angst about that fact), has a love interest 20 years her junior and uses her big mouth at full volume without apology or code-switching according to who is in front of her.”

The film has it all: middle-aged vulnerability, being made fun of by people a good 20 years your junior, and the classic Gen-X fear of selling out. There is something refreshing about watching an almost-40 female protagonist who lives in a one-bedroom apartment instead of a beautiful house (sorry, Nancy Meyers), who works a normal job, who hasn’t been able to erase all the physical changes age brings (Radha’s knees creaking whenever she squats down is a recurring bit).

In so many ways it feels more realistic than Under the Tuscan Sun, wherein a post-divorce Diane Lane moves to Italy and renovates a villa with the help of a motley cast of characters and the support of her best friend, Patti (Sandra Oh). (This film got me through many of the darkest days of winter ‘20/’21.) Or than How Stella Got Her Groove Back, because 40-year-old Angela Bassett is ageless and perfect and whose second act includes Taye Diggs? 

Thanks to student loan debt, rising housing costs, recessions, etc many Gen-Xers and millennials are stuck in a sort of proto-adolescence, staring down an uncertain future that may or may not include a 401k, mortgage, marriage, or children. This could be frightening, or it could be freeing. 

In this way, Radha’s 40-something experience rings truer than that of Patty or the other thin, beautiful, financially established female protagonists of the ‘90s/early ‘00s (how does Frances finance all those villa renovations??). Radha’s life is stalling out, rather than fissuring. There’s no relationship or big career to leave. In this she shows us that the “mid-life crisis” doesn’t have to be some massive story arc that ends with a new house or a new marriage. It can simply be a time to excavate and prune and explore. And that can be as exciting and reinvigorating as anything else.