41-Love
A Memoir
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- € 13,99
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- € 13,99
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A darkly funny sports memoir about a mid-life crisis, exercise addiction, tennis, and how to grow up when you really, really don't want to
At forty-one, Scarlett Thomas was a successful novelist and a senior academic. She’d quit smoking, gotten healthier, settled down in a lovely house with a wonderful partner. She’d had all the therapy. Then her beloved dog died. Her parents started to get sick right around the time she realized she was never going to be a mother herself. For the first time in her life, maintaining her ideal weight had become nearly impossible. She was supposed to grow up, but she didn’t know how. So instead she decided to regress, to go back to the thing she’d loved best as a child but had inexplicably abandoned: tennis. Thomas knows she’s not the only person to have wondered whether throwing enough money and time and passion at something can make your dream come true. 41–Love is heartbreaking but frequently funny as Thomas finds she’ll do anything to win—almost anything.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Thomas (Oligarchy) serves an ace of a memoir with this trenchant account about the pains of getting older. When she gave herself a tennis lesson for her 41st birthday, she saw it as "my last chance to do the thing I love, the thing that I was always best at, as well as I can." She spiritedly recounts dedicating her sabbatical year to tennis and the matches she played against lithe younger women ("tall, slim, pert, slightly sulky young people"), the politics of coach-switching, and her fixation on optimizing her diet, exercise, and meditation routines. The obsessive present is informed by Thomas's past, which includes a rotating cast of father figures and a traumatic abortion in her young adulthood. As Thomas rose through the ranks of over-40 ladies' singles tournaments, her mental and physical health fractured, eventually causing her to step back from tennis entirely, but not before making it to Seniors' Wimbledon. Though her wit is entrancing, the most striking characteristic of Thomas's narrative is its refusal to end with "what I learned" enlightenment. Instead, she writes, "I have now pretty much made peace with the fact that I was a bit of an idiot in 2014." This window into midlife desire is cathartic, amusing reading for anyone who's wanted desperately to win.
