Last night I was tooling through the blogosphere, you know, one of those late night, start with a link from an email, and before you know it you find yourself reading something like Shari Strong MacDonald's essay "Love-40"--the must-read of this post's title.
I am 42. One of the pleasures of turning into my forties, and there are many, is that writers of my generation have come of age. I can thumb through any number of pages, on and off line, and find 40 and almost-40 something writers who are really good, essayists and authors who have sat with our generation's decades, its icons, its memories, its promises, disappointments and failures, and have resurfaced with glorious sentences and rhythmic paragraphs, with metaphor and image and detail that greets my eyes and takes me home. I'm especially proud of some of the early forty-something writers like Claire Messud, and A.M. Homes, and a writer whose about to be published manuscript I just read for MotherTalk--Joshua Henkin's Matrimony, which I swear was written about two guys I knew in college, even as I know it wasn't, it's just that he's captured a somewhat universal ennui and ambition among a certain well-educated, writerly, 1980's set.
So settle in with Shari's essay and send more 40-something literature my way.
I am 42. One of the pleasures of turning into my forties, and there are many, is that writers of my generation have come of age. I can thumb through any number of pages, on and off line, and find 40 and almost-40 something writers who are really good, essayists and authors who have sat with our generation's decades, its icons, its memories, its promises, disappointments and failures, and have resurfaced with glorious sentences and rhythmic paragraphs, with metaphor and image and detail that greets my eyes and takes me home. I'm especially proud of some of the early forty-something writers like Claire Messud, and A.M. Homes, and a writer whose about to be published manuscript I just read for MotherTalk--Joshua Henkin's Matrimony, which I swear was written about two guys I knew in college, even as I know it wasn't, it's just that he's captured a somewhat universal ennui and ambition among a certain well-educated, writerly, 1980's set.
So settle in with Shari's essay and send more 40-something literature my way.