Apparently once you reach your late thirties you lose your sense of humour. Or at least that is what I get from this book, which targets my demographic with a surgical precision that is almost embarrassing.
It focuses on three women in their late thirties in London, and is in some cases uncomfortably close to the bone. One of them is a struggling actress, one is a successful but personally unfulfilled businesswoman, and one is some kind of flake who gets pregnant by mistake and moves to the provinces (or, as I like to call it, that place where they voted for Brexit and now I hope get to experience the full consequences they so richly deserve).
You can tell it is a book about London from the very first page, that builds up a picture of a house on the edge of a park in which the women live. Outside is a gorgeous summer’s day with lots of picnickers:
Every so often one of those people will look up towards the house. They know what the person is thinking – how do you get to live in a house like that?
Yes, house prices are indeed the main thing you do think about at such a moment, I can myself confirm.
These ladies go through various ups and downs, and I did enjoy the great specificity of a moment and a place that I know well. But for me it had an over-arching sense of sadness and compromise (no, you can’t be an actress, no, you can’t be pregnant, etc), that I can’t say I recognize as part of middle age. I also was mystified by the great emphasis put on the achievements of women of the previous generation. One older woman (apparently un-ironically) asks:
We fought for you. We fought for you to be extraordinary. We changed the world for you and what have you done with it?
I would have thought the case against the baby boomer fat cats was well established. Mostly what we are doing is cleaning up the mess they made.
Lastly, there was lots of stuff like this.
Bitter red leaves mixed in amongst the green, walnuts and goat’s cheese crumbled on the top. There is olive oil in a separate bowl, with a pool of balsamic at the bottom. Good, chewy bread with salty butter.
It made me want to beat them to death with their own Waitrose bags.