Changes

Middle-aged women disappear. They are not see seen on television, their lives do not appear in newspapers, the legions of novels that are written each year rarely feature them. At least, that is what the author Jane Shilling believes as she wakes up aged 47 to find the narrative of her contemporaries and their lives which she has been reading about and living in parallel with since leaving university has vanished. She looks in the mirror and sees a face she does not recognise. Even with a punishing regime of early bed, no alcohol and litres of water, it refuses to regain its youthful bloom. So she decides to take a magnifying glass to this particular moment in time, this journey between youth and old age.

However, it is her own story that makes this book so compelling. She is a single mother of a teenage boy, living in a small house in Greenwich and working as a columnist for a national newspaper. She has had a normal English middleclass middle-class upbringing with parents and grandparents and teen rebellion. So far, so unremarkable. What is remarkable is the way that she writes about her life. She is articulate, literate and exact as she describes events and emotions. For instance, she took up riding horses in her late 30s and finds the process harder than she imagined: ''To have the fragility of my compsure composure so exposed felt like having my personality pried open and its crevices probed with sharp instruments. I felt like a soft-boiled egg, a dissected frog, a jellied blob of sea anemone pecked by the cruel beaks of seabirds.''

She has written about her riding and hunting in another book, but she is equally sharp-eyed about agingageing. She dresses for a work interview in what she believes to be an intriguing mixture of modern and vintage only to find herself feeling shabby in contrast with the women at the newspaper. Her description of having botox for a before-and-after article is funny and sad. The range of emotions that she describes when she wonders momentarily whether she is pregnant again is beautifully truthful. But perhaps my favourite chapters are the ones dealing with her son growing up. He begins to burst out of their house: ''he filled rooms just by sitting in them'' – and she finds that his quiet indifference to everything she asks of him infuriates her. ''Days and weeks passed in which every word I uttered turned into a complaint. Angry reproaches fell from my lips like the toads and serpents from the mouth of the wicked sister in the Grimms’ fairy tale.'' For this middle-aged single mother that is oh-so-very recognisable.

There is anger and bleakness in Shilling’s view of the world. She finds this in a newspaper: ''Her bosum bosom is not what it was – these days no more pneumatic than a couple of bicycle tyres… With her butch upper arms, long hair and wing-three-quarters legs… she is the siren of lost ideals fading youth, an Orpheus for a generation that still doesn’t want to grow up.'' This is a description of Madonna, who has the effrontery to sing and dance in public beyond her first youth. Shilling is bewildered by what has happened and where her life has vanished to. As the book progresses, and she faces the reality of her age and her precarious lifestyle, panic begins to set in.

Further reading suggestion: [[Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill]] and [[The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir]]. You might also appreciate [[To Bed On Thursdays by Jenny Selby-Green]].