At 63 years old, Susan Kanoff, founder of the Lawrence-based nonprofit Uncommon Threads, is different from many women her age of previous generations. While her own mother was “wearing a housecoat and cleaning the house all day long” at 63, Kanoff herself is busier and happier than ever. She not only runs an impactful nonprofit that styles and clothes low-income women, but is the influencer behind the popular social media presence, The Midlife Fashionista.
Now, she’s also among the published essayists whose work is featured in the new book, Midlife Private Parts, a collection of essays written by women navigating this complicated, misunderstood, and dynamic part of life.
“Women are different now. We’re powerful. We have a voice. We can use our voice,” Kanoff says. “I think the book really showcases that.”
Through deeply personal, candid, funny, heartbreaking, and inspiring essays by women in their 40s, 50s, and beyond, Midlife Private Parts dives into midlife experiences that often are spoken of in whispers, if at all, tackling topics like perimenopause and menopause, beauty, sexuality, reinvention, empty nesting, friendship, fashion, loss, and that peculiar feeling of suddenly being “invisible.”
Midlife Friendship Sparks a Book
Fittingly, the book was born through female friendship. Its editors, Dina Aronson and Dina Alvarez (affectionately known as “The Dinas”) met through a “midlife friendship blind date” with mutual friends and immediately hit it off, says Alvarez.
“When we met that night, it was just an instant connection,” she says.
Eventually, that connection evolved into wanting to work together creatively. They found that midlife changes can be lonely, frustrating, confusing, and painful, but also “shrouded in silence,” Aronson says.
“I think we had a shared sense that our stories weren’t being told, and to the extent that they were being told, weren’t representative of the midlife experience,” she says, adding that midlife is “so much more” than just menopause.
“There’s still so much fear and shame wrapped around age, and there’s so much that we don’t talk about,” Aronson says.
That’s when the idea for the book came to life.
“Women have so many great stories,” Alvarez says. “Wouldn’t it be great to ask these women about different themes in their life related to their midlife experience and pull these stories together?”
Powerful, Authentic Essays
The essays are at once incredibly personal and universal.
“We really wanted women to see themselves in these stories, to feel not alone, and to feel seen and heard and understood,” Aronson says.
The memoirist Laura Friedman Williams writes about rediscovering her sexuality after three kids and the end of her marriage in “Please Please Me,” an essay that feels as frothy and fun as a rom-com and as real and raw as a diary entry.
“I am a woman in transition: no longer ripe and young, but not quite past my expiration date either,” she writes. “Who am I beneath the surface, what can I be aside from a wife and a mother?”
The funny essay “Toxic Rage” begins with podcaster Katie Fogarty asking her husband for a divorce and ends with them doubled over laughing in the produce aisle, while in between she navigates the “infuriating” experience of perimenopause, writing, “I navigated three pregnancies with What to Expect When You’re Expecting clutched in hand. Where the hell was What to Expect When Your Estrogen Is Exiting?”
Kanoff’s essay, “I Wasn’t Always a Butterfly,” tells the story of how she overcame crippling anxiety, sexual assault, being married to the wrong person, and battling cancer, before emerging as what her second husband calls a “butterfly.”
“I am stronger and more powerful now at sixty-one than I was when I was young. I’ve broken out of my cocoon, spread my wings, and flown into new territories,” she writes.
Aronson says what makes the essays so powerful is the writers’ willingness to “go there” and be vulnerable, which she calls a “superpower.”
“So many people think of vulnerability and they think weakness,” she says. “I think it’s one of our greatest strengths. Because when we allow ourselves to be truly seen, we are able to show up and connect as we are.”
Aronson and Alvarez hope that women come away from the book feeling less alone, more understood, and filled with the understanding that midlife comes with as many gifts as it does challenges.
“It’s never too late,” Aronson says. “And they’re not too old.”
Kanoff is Offering People the Chance to Connect Over the Book in Real Life, Too.
Uncommon Threads is hosting a “Midlife Private Parts” event at its store at 60 Island Street in Lawrence on October 18 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. The event will include a panel discussion and book signing; private shopping at Uncommon Closet with 30 percent off to benefit Uncommon Threads; a trunk show with The Freshwater Pearl Company; and light bites from Rapscallion. Tickets cost $25 and are available at uncommonthreads.org.