Full Description
Narrating Midlife: Crisis, Transition, and Transformation is rooted in a discussion about why it is important to address the midlife years in ways that challenge and interrogate the myths that surround this phase of life. Although readers are free to construct their own meaning after reading each narrative, they are encouraged to attend to the ways in which each narrative reveals how the author grapples with their particular issues communicatively. More important, readers are invited to see the power of narrative re-framing as authors seek to understand, interpret and "live" midlife change(s) in ways that are empowering and life affirming. In this book, contributors spin compelling and meaningful narratives about change at midlife. The empty nest, the surprise discovery of cancer, re-defining one's life at midlife and re-imagining long term commitment after divorce are just some of the topics explored in this book. Auto-ethnographically crafted, the narratives presented throughout the book aim to show how managing and living through change at midlife is very much a communicative endeavor.
Contents
Chapter 1: Echoes of Your Presence
Chapter 2: And Then There Were Two
Chapter 3: Solid as Cracked Granite: Living Alone at Mid-Life
Chapter 4: The Goal at the End of the American Dream: Talking about Work, Retirement, and Marriage
Chapter 5: Requium for My Fond Memories of My Son: An Autoethnographic Journey of My Empty Midlife as a Bicultural Diaspora
Chapter 6: Reframing Motherhood: The Therapeutic Value of Narrative
Chapter 7 Beginning Again: Diagnosis as Breach, Survival as a New Normal
Chapter 8 Ripping Off the Bandaid: Cancer at Midlife
Chapter 9 Failure at Forty: A Genealogy of an Unanticipated Midlife
Chapter 10 Sexuality as Spirituality: A Phenomenology of Synchronicity
Chapter 11 Reflections on a Mid-life Crisis: My Chang(ed)(ing) Life After Severe Traumatic Brain Injury
Chapter 12 The Midlife Experience: Thirty Years in the Making
