A Baby Boomer Confronts Mid-Life Reality

“Mid-life: Notes From the Halfway Mark” (Addison-Wesley, $18)

These are the times that are starting to try our baby boomer souls, times of aches and angst and aging. Death is taking our parents, if it hasn’t already. The passing of friends is no longer shocking as it once was. And the jobs we have the jobs we are probably lucky to have are starting to seem like the last jobs we may ever have before retirement, a truly nightmarish notion for many of us.

So we seek reassurance from exercise machines and anti-aging creams and the latest rage over-the-counter (vitamin E one week, melatonin the next). And we listen, with sudden interest, when some expert or author proclaims that the 50s have never been a better age to be alive and the 60s, too, hold remarkable promise.

Elizabeth Kaye doubts it. The 50-year-old contributing editor of Esquire counters such sunny notions in a small memoir replete with big truths - “Mid-life: Notes From the Halfway Mark.”

Kaye provides a highly personal, hauntingly elegiac reprise of our generation’s defining moments, written with the precise observations and delicious ironies reminiscent of Joan Didion, Kaye’s favorite author. “Mid-life” is the sort of book that, page after page, prompts electroshocks of recognition, followed by intense reflection - which makes it a perfect choice for book group discussion.

“Aging is the last taboo,” Kaye says. “You can talk about anything in this country, talk about sexual abuse at breakfast, but not about aging.

“Yet here we are, almost nobody living the life they thought they should live, and being bent by life. The whole way that life and time and age operate - we weren’t told the truth about how hard it is. No one is really prepared for it - I know I wasn’t. I felt a tremendous sadness.”

“Mid-life” is one of the first of what is sure to be an increasing salvo of books targeted at baby boomers entering their 50s, books employing all sorts of unusual plot devices. Ann Linnea of Whidbey Island, Wash., takes a kayak across Lake Superior for her recent “Deep Water Passage: A Spiritual Journey at Mid-life” (Little, Brown, $22.95), while Charles Gaines hand-builds a home in Nova Scotia in “A Family Place: A Man Returns to the Center of His Life” (Berkley, $6.99).

Kaye, though, travels inward, guided only by her heart, intellect and voluminous notes on her experiences.

“I’ve been taking notes on my life for years,” she says. “But they have always seemed like footprints in the sand. As I got into my 40s, I wanted to feel that what had happened to me meant something.”

Kaye ponders her failed first marriage; the period of loneliness and hanging out in stores for comfort afterward; the passing of friends and family; the time when she was pregnant, at age 37, and decided to have an abortion instead, despite a doctor’s warning that this could well be her last chance to ever have a child.

“I didn’t believe him,” Kaye writes, “because I still believed that opportunity is infinite.”

But it is not, of course, and the doctor was right. Although “Mid-life” is rife with universal experiences of our generation, Kaye’s not having children provides a definite line of demarcation between her and those boomers who became parents.

Having children does seem to leaven questions of “what was it all for?” with the sense of sacrifice for others. But as Kaye responds, “What I’m writing about is that life is full of loss. You can have children, but your parents still die and you still die.”

Kaye has moved on from the point in her life captured in “Mid-life.” She is soon to be married for a second time (to New York drama critic Clive Barnes), and she has settled in to the role of stepmother. Her earlier anger and grief have given way to forgiveness and acceptance. As Kaye emphasizes, “I have let go of the idea of having everything I wanted, or that I could only be happy if I got that. And I have also let go of the idea of having too many ideas.”