Review 103: Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis

Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis by Ada Calhoun
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In preparing to write this review I made some notes, three pages of notes. It got out of hand. The main take away in my note taking was how much I saw myself in the book, and how much I did not. Yes, I’m a woman of Generation X and do have trouble sleeping sometimes. This book is not about how to find solutions to that problem. Instead it gives us many reasons why mid-life women of GenX are having difficulties. There’s a lot of comparison to other generations: previous one, Boomers as parents, and the kids, as Millennials. We also have some comparisons on how male mid-life crises differ from women.

For the most part, I did enjoy reading the book, as it brought up reasons why this generation did things as they have so far, with parenting, or choosing not to have kids. The delays in marriage and how our prospects, in general, were the first to be expected to be worse than the parents. Some topics seemed to have never been mentioned before (or at least in mainstream consciousness). Yet this book doesn’t cover everything for all women born in the years of roughly 1967-1980. One of the most glaring to me was this book is mostly about middle class women, especially those who graduated college. There are a few nods to people outside that area, but not much.

The last chapter was one that tried to sum up and find personal solutions. I think for the author, she did find ways to cope better and enjoy life more. Hopefully the book will help other women of this era, and maybe a few outside of the targeted demographic.


Thanks to Grove Press and NetGalley for an uncorrected electronic advance review copy of this book.