Narrating Midlife

Narrating Midlife: Crisis, Transition, and Transformation explores how managing and living through change at midlife is ultimately a communicative endeavor. Using autoethnography, contributors narrate midlife experiences as diverse as the empty nest syndrome, sexual fluidity, mixed-retirement marriage, spousal abduction of a child, and cancer.

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Narrating Midlife: Crisis, Transition, and Transformation is rooted in a discussion about why it is important to address the midlife years in ways that challenge and interrogate the myths that surround this phase of life. Although readers are free to construct their own meaning after reading each narrative, they are encouraged to attend to the ways in which each narrative reveals how the author grapples with their particular issues communicatively. More important, readers are invited to see the power of narrative re-framing as authors seek to understand, interpret and “live” midlife change(s) in ways that are empowering and life affirming.

In this book, contributors spin compelling and meaningful narratives about change at midlife. The empty nest, the surprise discovery of cancer, re-defining one's life at midlife and re-imagining long term commitment after divorce are just some of the topics explored in this book. Auto-ethnographically crafted, the narratives presented throughout the book aim to show how managing and living through change at midlife is very much a communicative endeavor.