On Being 40 (ish) Edited by Lindsey Mead

When they proposed me to read On Being 40 (ish) Edited by Lindsey Mead by Simon and Schuster I didn't hesitate for a second. This book will see the light next month and you can't lose the opportunity of buying it.

You can't avoid to read another masterpiece by this publishing house regarding a different section of our existential life as women. It would be a real sin. I read this book in a few hours yesterday night and it is simply amazing.

I particularly love this book because written with sincerity, open heart. These ones are candid and real confessions mainly written by established reporters or writers. They will give us the idea of an age where it's possible to start to define what it was done, what must yet to be done, what we love and what we hate, where we want to go, what we want to throw away, who we want to keep, who we are.
40ish is an age of balance although all decades, let me add, are.

In general at this age, children are in their teenage age; a lady experienced a divorce and the beauty of it ,was the fact that she re-discovered herself and her priorities.
The ability of saying no, a different respect for herself.

Another one was too busy for answer an e-mail because in life priorities change.

A lady close to the anniversary of her wedding, long and happy, fell sick and followed months and months of rehabilitation before to return to the normality. Facebook, she told, helped her because spreading the news, she received a lot of psychological support.

Someone else told that some of her main and most important problems started before the 40s with important illness she was affected by and that have been defeated; another one (I agree) thinks that the arrival of the 40s is just a number like another one.

Some of these ladies lived a tumultuous existence, going in the West Coast and back to the East one; other ones remember their existence and they think that being 40s means an opportunity, a point of arrival and new starts and maybe the age where mortality is more close to us. Some of our friends disappeared, maybe also a parent, or they start to fall sick; there is a more palpable  and visible sensation of our own mortality; we won't live forever as we thought in the past. The 20s in this sense are powerful. We thought we had the life and world in our hands, but it was just an impression isn't it true? Volatile.


This book contains also poems, quotes cartoons that you will see are hilarious or differently, will let you think.


Some contributors? Veronica Chambers, Meghan Daum, Kate Bolick, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Sloane Crosley, KJ Dell’Antonia, Julie Klam, Jessica Lahey, Catherine Newman, Sujean Rim, Jena Schwartz, Sophfronia Scott, Allison Winn Scotch, Lee Woodruff, Jill Kargman for a total of 15 authors who opened their heart telling to readers what it means to them to being in the 40ish.


This one is a book you will treasure. It is a perfect gift, if you want to share your 40ish experience with some friends contemporaries of you, for laughing, smiling, remembering the so-called "old times" what it was done, what it must yet to be done and what it will be.

I thank NetGalley and Simon&Schuster for this ebook.

Anna Maria Polidori