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Nonfiction

‘The Bitch in the House’ Has a Sequel: ‘The Bitch Is Back’

Cathi HanauerCredit...Phoebe Jones

THE BITCH IS BACK
Older, Wiser, and (Getting) Happier
Edited by Cathi Hanauer
332 pp. William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99.

Much has been made of the midlife crisis, often portrayed as the clichéd sports-car-driving ­silver fox with the shiny young girlfriend in the passenger seat. For women, the cliché is . . . um . . . let’s see. . . . Why can’t I think of it? Maybe because once women reach menopause, they, like their crises, become invisible.

Well, not anymore.

In Cathi Hanauer’s anthology “The Bitch Is Back: Older, Wiser, and (Getting) Happier,” 25 women from their late 30s to their 60s give voice — loudly, boldly and without apology — to the issues they face in Phase 2 of their lives, and what it all means in a postfeminist world.

About 15 years ago, Hanauer was a working married mother of young children when she found herself, like her peers raised on ­assumptions of domestic and professional equality, consumed by anger. As she explains it, “We were exhausted, disillusioned, resentful and angry at our husbands.” The resulting essay collection, aptly titled “The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage,” laid bare those frustrations. (Her husband, Daniel Jones, edited a companion volume, “The Bastard on the Couch,” and currently edits the Modern Love column for The Times.) Since then, a lot changed for Hanauer and her cohort: Children grew up, priorities shifted and identities emerged. Most notably, the searing anger had mellowed, and “we’d adjusted our lives and expectations accordingly.”

Of course, these adjustments looked different for different women, and now nine of the original contributors and 16 new ones explain, sometimes in excruciatingly intimate detail, how they’re navigating “enlightened middle age.”

The women in “Bitch 2,” as Hanauer calls it, grapple with companionship, widowhood, infidelity (including their own), appearance, cancer, their pasts, their parents, empty nests and finding love a second or third time, sometimes with men a decade or two younger. They talk about shame and loss, tolerance and compromise, their insecurities as well as their hypocrisy. In other words, they talk about the hard stuff, the gritty stuff, the stuff you aren’t likely to find on their Facebook pages. And that’s exactly what makes this collection at once thrilling and reassuring. It’s the discomfort of the topics that provides comfort, a sense that however knotty our lives have turned out, they’re far more normal than we think.

Take the issue of sex. There’s a marketing and sales executive who considers ending her otherwise “enviable” marriage because she’s not getting any sex from her faithful and avowedly heterosexual but unwilling husband. Meanwhile, a financial adviser ponders the opposite quandary. To keep her beloved husband from leaving, should she force herself to have sex with him once a week?

Out in the postdivorce world, the publisher Sarah Crichton, in a tour de force of comedy and poignancy, describes the travails of dating again at almost 60. Discovering that her anatomy, once “as inviting as Gauguin’s Tahiti,” has changed, she enlists the aid of Vagifem and a vibrator. Even so, after having sex with her handsome boyfriend, she wakes up “on fire — not with lust, but with searing pain.” (She’s struck with sciatica; he, with palpitations.) But she also reveals a deeper, starker pain: “The vulnerability and the ultimate intimacy of sex is even more profound when you’ve lost more than you ever thought you could lose, and at this age, we have all lost too much.” Susanna Sonnenberg, too, strikes a bittersweet chord when, happily in love after the end of her long marriage, she notes the challenges of trying to know and be known anew at midlife: “I have not locked eyes in the delivery room with David. I haven’t met his mother.”

Other contributors re-examine their values. In one of the most affecting essays, Anna March writes about her hard-won ­battle to distance herself from her difficult mother, even after her mother’s stroke. What do we owe our parents, she asks, not just the good or even the mediocre ones, but one who’s a “solid F” with “a mental health issue”? At what point, she wonders, are we finally free to live our lives? On a seemingly lighter but equally complicated topic, Debora Spar, the president of Barnard College, tries to reconcile “nipping and tucking and suctioning and hormoning” — some of which she cops to — while also being a role model for young women. And Hope Edelman surprises herself when, in contrast to her previously ardent insistence on financial equality in marriage, she feels an “undeniable sense of relief” from not having to support herself.

“Bitch 2” has a more mature and existential feel to it than “Bitch 1,” which makes it all the more jarring when a few of the essays come to trite conclusions. But in the stronger pieces, which often pop with subversive wit, the anger of the previous book has been replaced by a graceful reckoning and the welcome realization that if we’re trapped at all, it’s only within the confines of certain realities. Instead of the problem being men or society, this time the grievances are with the human condition and the propensity to chase an illusory ideal. When Jennifer Finney Boylan, who is content despite her tricky marriage, is asked, “Don’t you want more, sometimes?” she remembers a line from a friend’s movie: “Well, no one ever wants less.”

Most of the essayists are professional writers, and despite their differences in temperament, race and sexual orientation, their concerns do fall into a similar bucket. So at first it feels surprising when the story of Kathy Thomas — a cleaning lady who dramatically flees from an abusive partner — appears, as if it landed in the wrong book. But near the end of that piece, Thomas says ­something that magnificently ties together these women’s experiences. Reflecting on her situation, she tells Hanauer: “I’m not angry, though. Or sad. Or happy, for that matter. It’s just life.” Gaining that awareness, it seems, is the real gift of middle age. I can just see the rest of the Bitches raising their glasses to that.

Lori Gottlieb, a contributing editor at The Atlantic, is the author of “Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 23 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Other Side of 40. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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