"Discovering the midlife progress novel, Gullette finds in recent fiction a pervasive tension between decline and a new ideology of aging. Appropriately, she invites the reader to join the writers in their therapeutic discourse." --Rosemary Franklin,
American Literature
. "[This] book certainly makes you think. What is it that can happen in middle age to make it, as it is for many people, the clearest and sweetest time of life?" --Frank Conroy,
The New York Times