Out of Time: Midlife, If You Still Think You’re Young

By Miranda Sawyer.
Published by Fourth Estate.

How miserable is middle age? If you’ve spent your formative years running with the cool crowd and being french-kissed by Grace Jones (“her lips were very soft”), then midlife must seem dull indeed. 

For Miranda Sawyer, the journalist and broadcaster, her crisis began at the age of 44. She was a mother of two young children living in a small London flat with her comedian husband and seven bikes. One day she did the “death maths” — calculating how long she had left on this earth — and she didn’t like the answer. It was another 44 years, which sounds quite good to me. But then Sawyer is a glass half-empty kind of girl. 

What else didn’t she like? Mostly the inexorable march of time and what it does to our bodies. But also the fact that for her there was no house with a glass extension, no “Madonna patio” (she turned down a lucrative offer to write a Madonna book because she couldn’t be bothered), no more getting wasted on drink and drugs. The “Bad Guy Internet” had killed off much of the music and magazine world in which she once starred, and Sawyerhad been forced to adopt a domestic routine, have her mind turn to “mush” by toddlers and negotiate outstanding bills with Keith from HMRC. 

As I read her book, with its slightly hysterical title Out of Time (Sawyer is now 49), my 11-year-old son asked what it was about. I said it’s about a woman who doesn’t like being middle-aged. His reply — “She wants to be young?” — is to be expected from a child. I asked him why she might want to remain young, and he said: “You have no worries.” 

Indeed, Sawyer spends much of the book reminiscing on her worry-free youth, the heady days of the 1990s when she jetted around the world watching bands and interviewing celebrities, popping diet pills and staying up for days on end. “Your lost life filters through the life you have now,” she says, “casting too-bright light over your daily existence. It makes your real life seem tawdry and small.”

In her now-small world, she dreams of the old days and winning the lottery. But who can feel empathy towards Cheshire-born Sawyer, with her degree in jurisprudence from Oxford University, when she was never motivated enough to capitalise on her enviable education and early success as one of Britain’s brightest music and feature writers? “We had too much living to do to fit in too much work,” she admits.

This is a book for Generation X, who grew up without social media and struggled to adapt when the world changed in the noughties. Sawyer is at her best articulating with honesty the angst many of this generation feel about getting older. Using anecdotes gleaned from friends and various talking heads, she writes with droll wit about the midlife curses we all have to fight against or embrace — the loss of looks, fitness and sex appeal. A whole chapter is dedicated to jealousy. 

The least self-pitying of these missives is the one on death, where she brings in an eclectic cast of characters including Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, the cancer-stricken Wilko Johnson from Dr Feelgood, a pair of funeral directors and an existential psycho- therapist called Irvin Yalom. The latter pronounces: “The fear of death is always greatest in those who feel that they have not lived their life fully.” 

In a bid to save this book from becoming a 262-page angry moan by the Morrissey of her journalistic generation, Sawyer’s editors seem to have demanded a final upbeat chapter. Go running, says Sawyer. Seek out new music. Do more of what makes you happy.

She will need all that and more to get her through the menopause in the next few years, possibly the most challenging time in any woman’s life. 

Heaven knows she’ll be miserable then.