Why we need more novelists to come out of the "dark woods" and focus on menopause

“Midway in the journey of our life,” Dante’s Divine Comedy begins, “I found myself in a dark wood.”

Joseph Conrad puts it differently. “Forty-five,” he observes in Victory, “is the age of recklessness for many men.”

Recklessness of the type described by Hanif Kureishi in Intimacy, where a middle-aged man leaves his family for a girl who lets him eat strawberries and cream off her buttocks. There are some sexual encounters, Kureishi helpfully explains, “for which a person would watch their partner and children drown in a freezing sea”.



from Olivia W’s Blog Rss http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/books/96013043/Why-we-need-more-novelists-to-come-out-of-the-dark-woods-and-focus-on-menopause

from
https://oliviawhinham79.tumblr.com/post/164526565076