The Midlife Crisis Reading List

Last summer, I visited family in Seattle. Fresh off antidepressants, a few glasses of rosé, and a day at the Chihuly Museum pushing my beloved grandmother around in a wheelchair, I excused myself from dinner where I called my boyfriend and started crying while telling him how that I fear, in every moment, that I am losing what I love most, and that everything good will end. “Well,” he said, three hours wiser. “That is the human condition, babe.” (I neglected to tell him I was about to start my period.) I watched my family through the window, breathed, and tried to feel grateful to have something I was afraid of losing. That my condition, at the end of the day, was just plain human. My grandmother and I shared calamari at the museum cafe. She died four months later.