Navigating the Messy Middle

Ann Douglas, author of the bestselling Mother of All Books series, is back with a fierce and unapologetic book for and about midlife women.

Roughly 68 million North American women currently grapple with the challenges of midlife, faced with a culture that tells them their “best-before date” has long passed. In Navigating the Messy Middle, Ann Douglas pushes back against this toxic narrative, providing Gen X women with evidence-based strategies for thriving at midlife.

In this deeply validating and encouraging book, Douglas interviews well over one hundred women of different backgrounds and identities, sharing their diverse conversations about the complex and intertwined issues that women must grapple with at midlife: from family responsibilities to career pivots, health concerns to building community. Readers will find a book that offers practical, evidence-based strategies for thriving at midlife, coupled with compelling first-person stories.

Offering purpose and meaning in a life stage that can otherwise feel out of control, Douglas pushes back against the message that middle-aged women are no longer relevant and needed, highlighting the far-reaching economic, political and social impacts of these messages and providing a refreshing counter-narrative that maps out a path forward for women at midlife.

Both a midlife love letter and a lament, Navigating the Messy Middle celebrates the beauty and rages at the many injustices of this life stage, and provides readers with the tools to chart their own course.