Lexington Books
Pages: 238
Trim: 6⅜ x 9
978-1-4985-8410-4 • Hardback • April 2019 • $117.00 • (£90.00)
978-1-4985-8411-1 • eBook • April 2019 • $111.00 • (£85.00)
Lori West Peterson is associate professor of communication at St. Edward’s University.
Christine Elizabeth Kiesingeris lead facilitator and curriculum developer for Leadership Wilkes-Barre.
Chapter 1: Echoes of Your Presence
Chapter 2: And Then There Were Two
Chapter 3: Solid as Cracked Granite: Living Alone at Mid-Life
Chapter 4: The Goal at the End of the American Dream: Talking about Work, Retirement, and Marriage
Chapter 5: Requium for My Fond Memories of My Son: An Autoethnographic Journey of My Empty Midlife as a Bicultural Diaspora
Chapter 6: Reframing Motherhood: The Therapeutic Value of Narrative
Chapter 7 Beginning Again: Diagnosis as Breach, Survival as a New Normal
Chapter 8 Ripping Off the Bandaid: Cancer at Midlife
Chapter 9 Failure at Forty: A Genealogy of an Unanticipated Midlife
Chapter 10 Sexuality as Spirituality: A Phenomenology of Synchronicity
Chapter 11 Reflections on a Mid-life Crisis: My Chang(ed)(ing) Life After Severe Traumatic Brain Injury
Chapter 12 The Midlife Experience: Thirty Years in the Making
Narrating Midlife: Crisis, Transition, and Transformation is a welcome and vital addition to the literature on interpersonal, family, health, and organizational communication. The contributors of the stories in the collection navigate their way through the confusion, challenges, and competing demands they experience as they move through midlife. This is a soulful collection of deeply personal, evocative, and vulnerable autoethnographic stories that will make readers more mindful of the necessity and difficulties of dealing effectively with the expected and the unforeseen.
— Carolyn Ellis, University of South Florida
Lori West Peterson and Christine Kiesinger have edited a collection of deeply personal narratives, inviting readers to join the authors as they open windows to an array of experiences of midlife. Of particular benefit to those wishing to find nuance in distinctions, is the organization of the book by those stories of lives “on track,” and others, “off the rails,” allowing readers and students of aging and life stages to reflect on the subtle ways we measure our lives while both celebrating and struggling with the circumstances we face.
— Sarah Amira de la Garza, Arizona State University
“This being human is a guest house,” wrote the Sufi poet Rumi. My guest house has been open 48 years. Thus the stories of Narrating Midlife came to me in—or, more likely, past—my own midlife. Opening the door, I recognized some of these guests: career crossroads, bodily deterioration, relational turmoil, penetrating loss. Other guests foretold of futures, possible and certain: aging, retirement, cancer, disability, death. How much more wholeheartedly human might we become if we open ourselves to greeting each story as Rumi instructs: like an honorable visitor, “a guide from beyond”?
— Lisa M. Tillmann, Rollins College