MIDLIFE womanhood is officially having a moment. There's a juggernaut movement that's been gathering pace for some time now. Among its poster girls – or rather accomplished women – are the TV presenter Gabby Logan and writer Caitlin Moran.
It is a premise best summed up by Kristin Scott Thomas's character in the cult BBC drama Fleabag, with a monologue about the freedom menopause brings and the unforgettable line: "No longer a slave, no longer a machine with parts. You're just a person."
For years, the adage has been that "life begins at 40". Yet rarely was it uttered without a tinge of pity or a conciliatory grimace. Rather it became a wry punchline on a birthday card, typically showing a wizened shrew with a sloshing martini glass or sitting knitting in an armchair.
Midlife is not a crisis. It's a time of celebration. This autumn has seen a raft of great books that lay bare the experiences of middle-aged women with the same unflinching honesty that has already been applied to once-taboo topics such as sex, motherhood, childbirth, abortion and menstruation.
Moran's bestseller More Than A Woman, a sequel to her 2011 hit How To Be A Woman, is a masterclass in wit, indefatigability and strength. Logan has just launched a podcast called The Mid-Point, self-billed as "middle-aged and unashamed".
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Meg Mathews, a former music PR who was at the beating heart of the Britpop scene in the 1990s, has penned The New Hot: Taking On The Menopause with Attitude and Style, while former magazine editor Sam Baker has written The Shift, a frank memoir about life after 40.
The former ladettes and indie chicks and all-round kick-ass women of Generation X are revelling in their (second) coming of age. In fact, they're owning it.
To that end, I'm no longer the woman in her late teens, running around town in ludicrously high platform boots, shouting "Girl Power!" in an attempt to emulate a certain band. Gone is the naive navel gazing of my twenties and the ridiculous over-thinking that marred much of my thirties.
But I'm glad I have lived through it and now feel comfortable in my own skin and headspace. Something that always stuck with me was being 22 and a newspaper colleague, who would have been around her mid-40s, telling me to make the most of my youth.
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One day, she warned, I would find myself suddenly going unnoticed, as if shrouded by a cloak I didn't remember putting on. Men's heads would no longer turn when I passed. They would instead glance over my shoulder at younger women. And it would be awful.
I wish we'd kept in touch. I would love to tell her that flying beneath the radar of superficial male judgement with a new superpower of invisibility is far from tragic. It is one of the things about midlife I most look forward to enjoying. I'm sure I'm not alone in that, either.
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