Poisoned paradise

For Joanna Pocock, a midlife crisis is the moment in which ‘bored of the rhythm of our days, whatever those may be… we begin to realise that we have more past than future’. With the approach of her 50th birthday and the onset of the menopause, she is struck powerfully by this notion. Her response is to leave London and to relocate, with her husband and their six-year-old daughter, to the American West, a place where she hopes ‘the fabric of our lives and rhythm of our days would be different’.

It is an idyllic, optimistic premise that ties into the mythos of the American West as being a place where people can reinvent themselves. In the opening pages of Surrender — which won the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize — she describes the view from her bedroom window suddenly becoming dominated by ‘mountains and sky and deer looking in’. ‘Montana strikes the newcomer as a sort of Eden.