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decisions of our lives: Is it time to give up on starting my own business? Is it time to switch careers? Should I get married? Should I get divorced? Am I done having kids? Will I ever have kids? Where should the kids go to school? Do I put my parent with Alzheimer’s into a nursing home, and, if so, who’s going to pay for it? When it comes to realizing my dreams, is it too late?

      Being beset with these hard questions while dealing with all of the pressures of midlife is like coming upon an emergency situation for which you’re untrained. Your performance is unlikely to be maximally efficient.

      In this, Gen Xers are ill-served by our default cynicism. When we saw the 1989 film Say Anything in our youth, kickboxing romantic hero Lloyd Dobler’s dinner-table speech, something many Gen Xers can recite verbatim, may have seemed profound: “I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed.” This proposed wisdom has not aged well.

      Dobler’s “unifying philosophy was adorable and original and so crazy it might work in 1989,” a friend said to me the other day, “but now that guy is sitting on your futon playing Grand Theft Auto in a Pavement T-shirt.”

      The year I was born, Gail Sheehy published the mega bestseller Passages, which took seriously both men’s and women’s midlife reckoning with their mortality and described predictable phases of life in the manner of the terrible twos, with tags including “Trying 20s” and “Forlorn 40s.”

      It was a new spin on the influential psychologist Erik Erikson’s work with what he described as eight psychosocial life stages. He said that infancy is about the tension between trust and mistrust. If you complete that phase successfully, you achieve the basic virtue of hope. Your adolescent years are a crisis of identity versus role confusion. Ages eighteen to forty are about intimacy versus isolation. At issue from ages forty to sixty-five, according to Erikson, is avoiding stagnation, with the goal being an investment in society that leads to “generativity,” shaping a legacy and having a lasting impact on the world.

According to Sheehy, the years between thirty-five and forty-five are the “Deadline Decade,” during which people might feel they are running out of time. She argued that Erikson’s writing on the stages of growth applied only to men: “If the struggle for men in midlife comes down to having to defeat stagnation through generativity, I submit that the comparable task for women is to transcend dependency through self-declaration.”32

When Sheehy wrote a new introduction to Passages in 2006, she acknowledged that Gen X women were a whole new ballgame: “There are still broad, general stages of adulthood, and predictable passages between them. But the timetable has stretched by at least ten years, and counting. Age norms for major life events have become highly elastic. Since there is no longer a standard life cycle, people are left to customize their own.”33 Women of this generation, she said, are living “cyclical lives that demand they start over again and again.”

      Gen X women had sky-high expectations for themselves. The contrast between our “you can be anything” indoctrination and the stark realities encountered in midlife—when you might, despite your best efforts, not be able to find a partner or get pregnant or save for retirement or own your own home or find a job with benefits—has made us feel like failures at the exact moment when we most require courage. It takes our bodies longer to recover from a night of drinking and it takes our spirits longer to bounce back from rejection. We may wind up asking questions like the one my friend posed to me the other night: “Do you think my life is ever going to be good again?”

      “You may or may not run out of money,” another woman said. “But you will definitely run out of time.”

      As dark as all this may sound, I promise that there is cause for hope.

      When I told someone recently what my book was about, he said, “That must have been depressing, talking to hundreds of women about how miserable they are.”

      Actually, I found it the opposite. The project made me feel less alone, and it gave me clarity about my life and my friends’ lives. I see now, finally, a way out of our crisis. It begins with facing up to our lives as they really are, letting go of the expectations we had for ourselves growing up, and finishes with finding a viable support system and realizing that this stage of life doesn’t last forever.

      Writing this book gave me the perspective I needed when, in the months around its January 2020 hardcover publication, I hit a patch of bad luck. Just a few weeks apart, my father-in-law had a stroke and died, my parents’ apartment was destroyed in a freak building fire, almost killing them, and my father was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer and given six months to live. I didn’t think things could get any worse. Then I started to hear reports of a terrible virus spreading through Wuhan, China.

      Meanwhile, at every stop on my winter book tour—­Chicago, L.A., San Antonio, Miami—I was meeting auditoriums full of women who made me feel less alone. They told me that this book had given them permission to discuss their lives more openly and that it made them feel validated and seen. Many of these women would come to the signing table with multiple copies—for their sisters and friends, who they thought would relate, and for other people in their lives, who they thought would understand them better after reading it.

      The book spent three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. I was interviewed by dozens of reporters and podcasters and radio hosts, and I went on several morning shows. In the dressing room of Tamron Hall’s show, she’d left me a handwritten note that read, “Your book is a powerful reminder of what’s at stake—our lives!” Kelly Ripa talked about it on air. Busy Philipps did a series of Instagram stories about it. Sarah Michelle Geller posed reading the book while wearing a sexy oversized white shirt, drinking a glass of red wine, and reclining in an empty bathtub—the ultimate Gen-X pinup girl.

      Then Covid-19 hit the U.S. The rest of my tour was canceled. In quarantine, I started hearing from one woman after another who saw the pandemic as almost an inevitable next chapter for this generation. We’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop since childhood. Here it was, the other shoe. Everything that was bad suddenly got much, much worse: more caregiving, less job stability, more isolation, less financial security. Readers told me that they now saw the book as a kind of prequel to the pandemic horror—an explanation not just of why midlife can be rough for us but also for why our generation was at once so logistically vulnerable to and yet also so psychologically prepared for the devastation.

      Just like always, the crisis found us caught between Boomers and the younger generations. Our parents were right in the disease’s crosshairs; our Gen Z children were sent home for us to educate. Many seniors weren’t being as careful as we wanted them to be. A lot of younger people were still partying over spring break.

      But Generation X was almost trained for this emergency. Unlike many of our parents, we already knew how to use Zoom. Unlike many of our children, we already knew how to entertain ourselves without video games. We are a group of people that does not need to be told twice to prepare for the worst, to stay home, to watch a lot of TV.

      I asked a friend if when all this was over she thought we’d be considered the (at least a?) greatest generation.

      Her response: “Sure. Gather round, kids! I’ll tell you about the heroic year we snacked and watched Tiger King.”

      Touché.

      As I conducted book events virtually through the spring and summer of 2020, a surprising number of women told me that in the midst of the misery, there were some bright spots. One said that her older, by-the-book boss had finally realized that everyone didn’t have to be in the office all the time—and now that everyone had to do meetings with a dog barking or a baby on their lap, having a personal life became normalized. A woman who was laid off from a job she hated found that, thanks to the abundant, unexpected free time and extra unemployment assistance, she could finally stop for a second and figure out what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.

      At the national level, many women told me they saw the country having a long-overdue reckoning with racism and felt called to action. For as cynical as

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