My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor's Tale

Striving children, aging parents, job pressures, financial anxieties, physical ailments, generalized hope and dread—a memoir of middle age that is both literary and confessional

What is the most baffling period in our lives? Not childhood, not old age, but the decades of our forties and fifties, the period now generously known as middle age. Of all the challenges that face us in this time of reckoning, the effort to accept the limits of our character, the dwindling of possibilities, and the gap between our aspirations and reality is perhaps the most daunting. It’s both an occasion for regret and an opportunity for coming to terms, the moment when we come up against our limits and discover—for better and worse—who we are.

My Life in the Middle Ages is a portrait, in 12 chapters, of what that unnerving experience is like. A collection of unified essays about the pleasures and pathos that haunt us on the threshold of old age, it charts an original course between reportage and confession. Drawn from the author’s own life, from the testimony of parents, children, teachers, and friends, from the books he’s read and the life that he chose (and that chose him), My Life in the Middle Ages is a comic and poignant memoir that’s both personal and generational.

Part survival tale, part confessional, part meditation, part observation, James Atlas's funny and poignant memoir reveals the pleasures and pathos of the decades of our forties and fifties -- the time when we face, for better or worse, our limitations and discover who we are. Whether he is struggling with God or trying to find out if he believes in one, celebrating the books he's loved and regretting those he'll never read, or leafing through the snapshots in his family album and marveling at the passage of time, Atlas is always alert to the surprises of everyday life as he shows us how to flourish -- how to live.

“Skilled and accessible, with many compelling moments. Atlas writes feelingly about place, providing an exhilarating view of New York.” - Washington Post Book World

“Sometimes rueful, sometimes poignant, sometimes downright funny—and always revealing . . . carefully thought out and gracefully written.” - Hartford Courant

“Dry, wry, amused, bemused, occasionally plaintive . . . very likable.” - New York Observer