My Life in the Middle Ages

A Survivor's Tale

By: James Atlas

Narrated by: James Atlas

Striving children, aging parents, job pressures, financial anxieties, physical ailments, generalized hope and dread—a memoir of middle age that is both literary and confessional

What is the most baffling period in our lives? Not childhood, not old age, but the decades of our forties and fifties, the period now generously known as middle age. Of all the challenges that face us in this time of reckoning, the effort to accept the limits of our character, the dwindling of possibilities, and the gap between our aspirations and reality is perhaps the most daunting. It’s both an occasion for regret and an opportunity for coming to terms, the moment when we come up against our limits and discover—for better and worse—who we are.

My Life in the Middle Ages is a portrait, in 12 chapters, of what that unnerving experience is like. A collection of unified essays about the pleasures and pathos that haunt us on the threshold of old age, it charts an original course between reportage and confession. Drawn from the author’s own life, from the testimony of parents, children, teachers, and friends, from the books he’s read and the life that he chose (and that chose him), My Life in the Middle Ages is a comic and poignant memoir that’s both personal and generational.

Flashes of brilliance, overall worth it

Overall I’m glad I spent the time with this book, but I’ll be honest, by chapter 4 I could not wait to get out of this guy’s company. He often comes across as a whiny, over privileged sad sack who at 57 STILL hasn’t learned to let go of his unrealistic youthful ambitions, and his observations and viewpoint is banal for long stretches. His awful reading voice does not help this impression. HOWEVER, often enough he would write these passages of such insight and beauty that it drew me up short and kept me going for more — and also when he remembers to deploy self-deprecating humor it is very funny and saves him from the bathos that otherwise would ruin this book. He can be really quite funny and I laughed out loud at his jokes many times. It would have been better with a professional narrator, but I liked it well enough even with its shortcomings that I’m going to give his other book, about writing biography, a try too.