Between a Rock and a Hot Place

When I saw the title Between a Rock and a Hot Place: Why Fifty is Not the New Thirty on a list of books that Harper was willing to send me, I said yes, send this one.  I thought it would be something different from the usual baby boomer books about how to stay in charge of the world forever, but, sadly, it's not. Tracey Jackson is somewhat more than fifty, as it turns out, putting her more squarely in the baby boomer generation than I would have suspected, and her attitudes are just not that different.

As you know, I am against baby boomers. So any book that starts out trying to lump me in with them is not going to get any sympathy--much less a sense of identification--from me. I am not the "us" she's speaking to when she says "the image most of us have of being over fifty...is our grandparents."  No, honey, it's you. It's ex-hippies who never grow up.

That Tracey is overly focused on appearance is hardly surprising, given what she tells us about her mother, a woman who put her on a reducing diet when she was only eight years old, spent an hour each day washing her face with beauty products, and once traveled to Transylvania to be injected with something called Gerovital H3 that she believed would make her look younger.  So Tracey's own obsessions with exercising and having substances injected into her face seem less crazy, by comparison.

I thought maybe I'd get some tips from this book about how to deal with menopause, but most of what I got was a rant about how essential hormone replacement therapy is (despite the horrible physical symptoms it gave Tracey--the most remarkable being lumps on her face).

To be fair, I read Between a Rock and a Hot Place the day after I saw Anna Deavere Smith's one-woman show Let Me Down Easy, and the depth of the ideas about mortality in the play made the book seem even more shallow than I think it would have, ordinarily.

The part where this book really "jumped the shark" for me was when the author revealed that she had sexual fantasies about Jack Nicholson . . . um, wasn't she just speaking of grandparents?  After that, it's impossible for me to take anything else she says quite seriously.  Her claim that women over fifty "don't come like we used to" seems to me complete nonsense.  Her advice about exercising every day is based on this quotation:  "every day your body makes a choice. It's either going to get a little older...or it will get a little stronger," which is a nice example of the "only two choices" logical fallacy, don't you think?  And I can think; I have other choices!

But there are two parts of the book I like.  One is based on a quotation that the author claims is  from Virginia Woolf (who killed herself at the age of 59, you know): "arrange whatever pieces come your way."  Tracey's advice about having a career after fifty is that you should "start thinking about and actually setting up some pieces that will be ready to arrange before you have to start scrambling around for them or find yourself left with difficult or unsatisfactory pieces." This makes a lot of sense to me right now, especially in light of the story about how her career as a screenwriter turned into a new career as a documentary film maker when she got to her fifties. Plus, she's written this book!

The other part I like is her chapter about sending your first child to college, entitled "The Biggest Pink Slip You Will Ever Get."  Tracey is typically over the top about the experience, so my answer is "yes" to her question:
"Are we needy, clingy women who are unable to acknowledge that time is marching on and our kids are at the front of the parade and we are at the back?"
But it's fun to measure yourself against a hysteric; you come off so much better.  And she reassures me that I will be able to sleep next year when my daughter is off at college, something I've actually wondered about recently, and out loud.

So reading this book wasn't a complete loss, despite the fact that telling me that "all the female Supreme Court justices dye their hair" doesn't convince me that all women over fifty ought to have surgery on their faces.

Who would like this book? Some baby boomers.  Maybe a few stay-at-home mothers who thought they'd go back to work when their kids were grown up and now find themselves aged out of the workforce.  Anyone who wants tips about how to go to great lengths to look younger.