Safe at Last in the Middle Years: The Invention of the Midlife Progress Novel

"Discovering the midlife progress novel, Gullette finds in recent fiction a pervasive tension between decline and a new ideology of aging. Appropriately, she invites the reader to join the writers in their therapeutic discourse." -Rosemary Franklin, American Literature.

"[This] book certainly makes you think. What is it that can happen in middle age to make it, as it is for many people, the clearest and sweetest time of life?" -Frank Conroy, The New York Times