Why We Can't Sleep

Women's New Midlife Crisis

A New York Times bestseller!

Why we cant sleep paperback shadow

One of the Amazon Editors' best nonfiction books of 2020, a Goodreads Choice Award Finalist, and an Indie Next Pick, Why We Can’t Sleep was one of the biggest books of the season according to the New York Times, Parade, O magazine, Book Riot, Vogue.com, RealSimple.com, and Forbes.com.

When Ada Calhoun found herself in the throes of a midlife crisis, she thought that she had no right to complain. She was married with children and a good career. So why did she feel miserable? And why did it seem that other Generation X women were miserable, too?

Calhoun decided to find some answers. She looked into housing costs, HR trends, credit card debt averages, and divorce data. At every turn, she saw a pattern: sandwiched between the Boomers and the Millennials, Gen X women were facing new problems as they entered middle age, problems that were being largely overlooked.

Speaking with women across America about their experiences as the generation raised to “have it all,” Calhoun found that most were exhausted, terrified about money, under-employed, and overwhelmed. Instead of their issues being heard, they were told instead to lean in, take “me-time,” or make a chore chart to get their lives and homes in order.

This generation-defining exploration of the new midlife crisis facing Gen X women and the unique circumstances that have brought them to this point, Why We Can’t Sleep is a lively successor to Passages by Gail Sheehy and The Deadline Decade by Meg Jay.

In Why We Can’t Sleep, Calhoun opens up the cultural and political contexts of Gen X’s predicament and offers solutions for how to pull oneself out of the abyss—and keep the next generation of women from falling in. The result is reassuring, empowering, and essential reading for all middle-aged women, and anyone who hopes to understand them.

“Ada Calhoun's soulful investigation into the complex landscape women in midlife face today is downright stunning. Calhoun has captured the voices—some broken, some resilient, many barely staying afloat—of over 200 women from around the country and in doing so, shown us how much we share in divisive times. You will recognize yourself in these pages, breathe a sigh of relief, and think, I'm not alone.”

—Susannah Cahalan, author of the New York Times bestselling Brain on Fire

“Helping women realize that some difficulty, some confusion, is not just all in their mind is probably one of your more feminist acts, and the impressive amount of research Ada Calhoun did on the very specific forces, past and present, that are bedeviling Gen X women as they face the strange period that is midlife is just that kind of gift. But the other gift is that she writes with clear sight, compassion, and hope about our very specific talents and tenacity. Which means: this book is a thousand times more healing than a jadeite egg!”

—Carlene Bauer, author of Not That Kind of Girl and Frances and Bernard

“'Having it all' was the Baby Boomers’ rallying cry as, aided by new tools of reproductive control, we burst from the pink ghettoes of the secretarial pool and ceaseless childcare to seek fulfillment in workaholic professions. We sought to join career ascendance to the twin chimeras of egalitarian marriage and joint child-rearing but by the classic midlife reckoning, most boomer women reaped frustration. Two generations later, despairing Gen X women find the glass mountain of fulfillment still impossible to scale, and with deep perception, wit and incisive analysis, Ada Calhoun tells us why. In tracing the internal as well as the external forces that separate women from the peace they’ve spent their lives earning, Calhoun unveils the cleavage between our ideals of meritocracy and a reality haunted by employment bias, housing costs, divorce rates and a profound inattention to the real challenges facing the distaff side."

—Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid and A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind

“I love Ada Calhoun’s writing. Why We Can’t Sleep just took me to school, laughing all the way there.”

—Adam Horovitz of Beastie Boys

"Ada Calhoun provides a thoughtful, incisive account of the myriad challenges facing Generation X women."

—Shelf Awareness

"A funny, smart, compassionate narrator….taking women’s concerns seriously...Highly persuasive."

—Curtis Sittenfeld, New York Times Book Review

“Women are taught to not feel anything for ourselves and to not feel for one another. And our generation is the smallest generation. We are sandwiched in between the millennials and the boomers. And we are much smaller -- if you will, the middle child. The Jan Brady generation. [Why We Can’t Sleep] is a book that makes you feel less crazy. Like oh, it is not my imagination.”

—Kelly Ripa on Live with Kelly