In her new novel All Fours, Miranda July romps where The Idea of You fears to tread.
Middle-age escapist fantasies involving a sexy older woman catching the attention and affection of a younger beau seem to be having something of a moment this summer. Anne Hathaway, playing 39-year-old Solène, runs off with her boy-band paramour for a tour across Europe in The Idea of You, adapted from the book of the same name by Robinne Lee. Nicole Kidman falls for her daughter's celebrity boss in Netflix's A Family Affair, set to be released later this month. Even in real life (or online, anyway), fans went gaga over photos of Natalie Portman taking a smoke break with Paul Mescal, and Demi Moore having a chic lunch in the South of France with Joe Jonas. It all prompted Vogue to wonder whether we’re heading into a “May-December summer.”The fantasy of a hot older woman and a handsome young man finding love together is a favorite trope of romance novels, where it’s considered a sexy subversion of the more common older man/younger woman love story. Yet for all that, it remains shockingly uncommon to find any of this pop culture paying sustained attention to the actual process of what it's like to live in a woman's body as you enter middle age. It sometimes feels as though age-gap romances are trying to will the problem of menopause away, catching their heroines right on the precipice of hormone changes, hot flashes, and fuzzy minds to say, “No, no, it’s still not too late” — for one last great romance, for sex, for being evaluated as a capable player on the sexual marketplace.
quotes“Women in our culture are taught to measure our self-worth in terms of how desirable men find us”
“I would never get what I wanted anymore, man-wise”
“Practicing oneness”