It's funny there is so little mention of family and especially of adult children in this piece about angst and aging women. One's role and one's situation is different, if one has followed the path of career over family and failed to have children. The role of the aging mother and grandmother is still preoccupied with others, just as it was when she had the choice between enriching herself or enriching children. She chose to be a mother when other women sought more glamorous roles. It was a brave choice, motherhood never having been easy, and she tended to make that kind of choice in facing every life situation, and thus learned very much, and  her resulting wisdom in a whole range of challenges, from plumbing to investing to cake frosting to spiritual life, really matters now more than ever, and can make the critical difference to the young families of her adult children. Rich are those that have fairy grandmothers, even richer if they have grandfathers, too. And rich are the grandmothers. There's a world of difference between the two kinds of aging women. One is truly a queen, the other is still pretending to have more fun, as in this revealingly sad portrait of their lives at sixty.

My eyes always glaze over when I hear about a book like this, because somehow they never get the point.

In the end, it all boils down to: in order to be interesting, be interested.