If You're Over 35 Read This Book Right Now
I read this book in one sitting. Let’s start there. I sat down to read for awhile, as i try to do most days (i’m successful exactly half of days) and I didn’t stop until I hit the back cover. This book is Older, But Better, But Older by Caroline de Maigret and Sophie Mas. They’re also the authors of How To Be Parisian Wherever You Are (which I bought the second I finished this book). I found Older, But Better, But Older via the Everything Is Fine podcast’s Instagram account and it was one of those purchases you make so fast you don’t even question yourself—you just trust your own inner urgency. I adopted my cat in much the same fashion. Anyway, in my opinion, if you are over 35 years old and female or female identifying, you need to read this book, right now.
So like…why? Apart from being a masterpiece, this book accomplishes something magnificent. The authors found a way to connect and commiserate with an audience on the less-than lovely parts of age without demeaning them, and without demeaning female age as a status itself — at no point in time do they lower a woman’s market value. We live in a society that prioritizes youth and turns age into either tragedy or comedy, and always at the expense of those of getting older. When I say those of us getting older, I mean anyone over 35, despite the fact that every human being on earth is, in fact, getting older. Somehow it always seems to matter more for women—women of a “certain age,” which are my least two favorite words when used together. Our society can only see value in female age as it relates to comedy or caretaking, but this book indulges in the wisdom, confidence, and downright desirability of it. It weaves a magic you’ve never been given permission to believe in.
The book celebrates age, in a way that leaves you aching for your next birthday — a thought seldom fathomable in a woman’s world. And not just by comparing age to the naiveté of youth. There’s elegance in that, in celebrating something societally thought so horrific and shameful (singlefam, sound familiar?) without having to cut down the ones we’re jealous of in the process. The book doesn’t need to point out how young and dumb the youth can be in order to celebrate how fucking fantastic 40 year olds are.
The narratives were always bullshit. Age doesn’t end anything. Any shame or finality associated with age is and in my opinion always ways another way to control women, to get us to fight for and cling to youth at any cost in order to make us more desirable and fertile to men. A life spent in service of the desires of men is an exhausting and a wasted one. What fuels me more than how desirable we are to men is how much we desire and fully live our own age. I worry that when we don’t, we miss beautiful opportunities to live life at every age, and every moment in time, each with their own unique merits. You can’t appreciate what you are if you’re always longing for what you used to be. I think this book is an excellent effort in letting go of longing, and living more fully in the present.
I don’t know how I’ll feel as I progress down the calendar, but I do know that if there are more narratives like this one that validate and celebrate age so beautifully, I’ll feel a lot better than my societal upbringing ever wanted me to. What I know for sure is that right now, I’m 38 years old, and I fucking love this book.
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