The fearful forties

In an early chapter of All Grown Up, the narrator Andrea says to her therapist: ‘Why is being single the only thing people think of when they think of me? I’m other things, too.’ ‘Tell me who you are, then,’ says the therapist. And so Andrea tells her that she’s a woman, a New Yorker, that she works in advertising as a designer, that she’s a daughter, a sister and an aunt. In her head, she adds: ‘I’m alone. I’m a drinker. I’m a former artist. I’m a shrieker in bed. I’m the captain of the sinking ship that is my flesh.’

We meet Andrea when she’s 39, asking herself, with increasing desperation, ‘What next?’ This is emphatically, refreshingly, not a novel about being single: it is a novel about not knowing what it is that you want. Often, Andrea finds this difficult:

People architect new lives all the time. I know this because I never see them again once they find these new lives… It happens constantly.