Out of Time

From the hugely respected journalist Miranda Sawyer, a very modern look at the midlife crisis – delving into the truth, and lies, of the experience and how to survive it, with thoughtfulness, insight and humour.

‘You wake one day and everything is wrong. It's as though you went out one warm evening – an evening fizzing with delicious potential, so ripe and sticky-sweet you can taste it on the air – for just one drink … and woke up two days later in a skip. Except you're not in a skip, you're in an estate car, on the way to an out-of-town shopping mall to buy a balance bike, a roof rack and some stackable storage boxes.’

Miranda Sawyer’s midlife crisis began when she was 44. It wasn’t a traditional one. She didn’t run off with a Pilates teacher, or blow thousands on a trip to find herself. From the outside, all remained the same. Work, kids, marriage, mortgage, blah. Days, weeks and months whizzed past as she struggled with feeling – knowing – that she was over halfway through her life. It seemed only yesterday that she was 29, out and about.

Out of Time is not a self-help book. It’s an exploration of this sudden crisis, this jolt. It looks at how our tastes, and our bodies, change as we get older. It considers the unexpected new pleasures that the second half of life can offer, from learning to code to taking up running (slowly). Speaking to musicians and artists, friends and colleagues, Miranda asks how they too have confronted midlife, and the lessons, if any, that they’ve learned along the way.

Reviews

‘A straight-talking handbook for those of us who believe we're still at our peak in middle age but need a few honest signposts’ Viv Albertine

‘I spent a lot of time nodding along in agreement to this book as if it was my favourite record*’ Jeremy Deller

*‘Hallelujah’ by Happy Mondays (Weatherall & Oakenfold remix)

‘Sawyer is at her best articulating with honesty the angst many of this generation feel about getting older… the Morrissey of her journalistic generation’ Sunday Times

Praise for ‘Park and Ride’:

‘A great success … Such annihilation has been performed before. John Osborne did it. Sid Vicious was there. But this is prime stuff’ Independent On Sunday

‘Like Victoria Wood she has a talent for illuminating the absurdities of how ordinary people live their ordinary lives’ Observer

'Miranda Sawyer's suburban memoir ‘Park and Ride’ was as excellent as we expect’ Julie Burchill, Guardian (Books of the Year)

About the author

Miranda Sawyer is an English journalist and broadcaster. Besides her features and radio criticism for the ‘Observer’, her writing has appeared in ‘GQ’, ‘Vogue’ and the ‘Guardian’. She is a regular arts critic in print, on television and on radio.