by Jane Gassner
“I didn’t know what I was turning into, exactly. I didn’t act, look or feel what I’d imagine a middle-aged person would look, act or feel like, and I certainly wasn’t old. I just knew that I wasnt what I used to be. I had been unsubtly hot, and now, I supposed, I wasn’t. I began calling myself Formerly Hot. At least I had a name (albeit one I made up) for that strange, uneasy, dissonant feeling I was having, and why I was having it.” From My Formerly Hot Life: Dispatches From Just The Other Side of Young, by Stephanie Dolgoff
I wanted to post the entire first chapter of this book because it so perfectly sets up the premise and makes you laugh. And then you’d go buy it, which since part of MidLifeBloggers mission is to promote our writers, and Stephanie Dolgoff is a MLB writer–she wrote this post and this one–is a thing we do. But Self magazine, where she is/was an editor, has claimed the rights to first publication. So you will have to get your impulse to purchase from my mashup of some of my favorite bits from the book.
Consider that we’re hanging out together–at the beach, maybe, or if it’s raining, at Starbucks. You’re reading whatever you’re reading and I’m reading My Formerly Hot Life. And I’m laughing, snorting even, in that not-so-subtle way that demands you ask me, “what’s so funny?”
Here’s what: Steph has a personal stylist, named Restraint, who keeps firm control on the Formerly’s fashion faux pax. She advises that when you become a Formerly, you “can no longer wear wrist loads of bracelets and big hoop earrings and lots of rings without looking like a fortune-teller.” Restraint says no to the fishnets, platform pumps, bustier and MC jacket, but yes to black tights, a fitted blazer and flats. “Restraint says I can pretty much wear whatever I want, and no single item is off-limits. I just don’t want to look like I’m dressing up like a teenager for Halloween, and Restraint helps me make that determination.”
And this too: While the Top 40 or 20, or whatever it is, used to be so relevant to every moment of her life, now that Stephanie’s a Formerly, “it often seems as if the main purpose of popular culture is to remind me of my age.” But that’s okay, because life as a Formerly is relatively calm, peaceful even. “Stability and contentment don’t make for great lyrics….But you know what? I’d much rather turn on the radio and feel a wee bit left out than still be living the kind of life people write songs about, at least the songs that have to do with alienation and cheating and that deep-seating fucked-upness in a lover that can be mistaken for depth when you’re young and figuring it all out.”
Or consider the Big Metabolic Fuck You: that’s where your metabolism, once so agile it perked along without your thinking about it, is now flipping you the bird. “[I]f I lost myself in a can of chocolate-covered almonds and then ate my way back out, it was nothing that paying a little extra attention for the next few days couldn’t even out,” says Steph. “Then I became a Formerly, out came the middle finger and all of a sudden I couldn’t zip my pants.”
However, My Formerly Hot Life the book, which was first My Formerly Hot Life the blog, has a serious side as well. There is a solid backbone going through this book will be familiar to anyone who is aging out of whoever they thought they would always be. “Of Two Minds, One Body,” Dolgoff calls it, that schizophrenia that has you embracing in your best feminist voice the wrinkles and lines and creases and crepe that is your badge of a life well-lived versus the soul-sucking panic you feel when you raise your once-quite firm arm and see that it has been replaced by Aunt Tilly’s cellulite-ridden, flappy one.
Could you tell that when I’m saying ‘you’, that all-inclusive second person pronoun, I really mean I? This book did that to me: despite the fact that I’m older than Dolgoff and my Formerly years are further back than hers, its basic premise still holds. Somehow we need to find a way to marry our “two minds, the one that is grateful for the opportunity to get older, no matter how I look doing it, and the other that is terrified that looking old will marginalize me in the eyes of others to the point where no one will care what I have to say once they see me.”
This so resonates with me because it has been the impulse behind MidLifeBloggers. Of course, also resonating with me is the to Spanx or not to Spanx discussion, the urge to Closet Purge, and my new mantra: “It is the clothes’ job to fit you. It is not your job to fit the clothes.”
So the rain has cleared up and my latte’s all gone. I’m putting my well-thumbed copy of My Formerly Hot Life in my bag and going off to live my present life. And you? Have I whet your appetite? Have I made you think of all the places and times and situations where you’ve heard the Formerly call? If you answer yes to both these questions, then you’re in luck. We’re having a giveaway: two copies of My Formerly Hot Life: Dispatches From just The Other Side of Young are going to two lucky MidLifeBloggers readers. Here’s what you have to do to be one of them:
- Write a comment here telling us your Formerly moment of truth.
- You must include a valid email address (no exceptions, even if I know you).
- Entrants must be 40 or older. Okay, let’s make that 38 or older.
- You have one week in which to enter. This contest closes on the day Steph’s book is published: August 17, 2010. Entries will be accepted until 11.59pm on that date.
- Winner will be chosen from qualified entries using random.org.
- I will contact the two winners by email to get their snail mail addresses, and the publishers of My Formerly Hot Life will send the books.
If you can’t wait, hie thee to Amazon and order the book tout de suite. If you missed it above, here’s the link. And if you want to see what the New York Times said about Steph–and look at her shoe collection–go here.
UPDATE: The winners, thanks to the Random Line Picker from Text Mechanic are Mary Ward and Susan Smith. The rest of you–go buy the book!
1. 6. s2s2@comcast.net
2. 3. mryward@yahoo.com
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