We meet the novelists behind a new wave of stories exploring the sexual fantasies of midlife women
Female longing is having a cultural moment and midlife women are taking the limelight. Confounding societal expectations that older women should fade into sexual invisibility or conform to a selfless vision of motherhood, midlife women are unleashing their libidos and sharing their wild inner worlds. Even Cathy, the teenage heroine of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights has been recast as mid-30s Margot Robbie in a lust-fest fever dream directed by 40-year-old Emerald Fennell. Later this year the actress Gillian Anderson, in her mid-50s, will publish More, her second collection of letters submitted by anonymous women expressing their sexual fantasies, following the success of her debut collection Want. And there’s a buzz about the TV adaptation, now in development, of Miranda July’s explosive novel All Fours, which follows a perimenopausal woman taking time away from her husband and child to boldly indulge her most erratic desires.
To understand more about this wave of stories, I spoke to the authors of two new novels which explore longing and infidelity in arresting ways: The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers and Permanence by Sophie Mackintosh.
In Somers’ novel, there’s instant chemistry when Cora meets Sam at a baby group. Both are happily married, but as they spend more time together, a connection blooms and Cora starts imagining a fantasy life for them together which runs parallel to the mundanity of her real life: “As she boiled water for pasta, she walked with Sam through a rainstorm. She tripped and he caught her coming off a street corner while she put her children to bed. During the hour-long drama that she watched with [husband] Eliot, she was blowing Sam in the backseat of his car.” Whatever Cora’s doing, she’s always thinking of Sam. The affair lives inside her head.
In Permanence, Mackintosh takes the idea of a parallel life a step further, conjuring a whole world into being from the force of desire – “the city of impermanence”. Clara is having an affair with a married man, Francis, and for months they’ve been stealing time together in hotel rooms. Then one day they wake up in a bedroom in a dream city where adulterers can live together openly as couples with no consequence. Their secret life becomes a whole universe that they enter whenever they long for each other at the same time.
The appeal of escapism
Over a video chat with Somers, I ask where the spark for The Ten Year Affair came from. She explains that she was living in New York City, on parental leave, and whilst she loved her baby and liked her life, “The day-to-day was so gruelling in all these small ways that I sort of longed for escape. And I thought it must be more universal than just me, there must be a lot of new mums who feel this way and struggle with these feelings.”
The idea of escape inspires Mackintosh, too. When we talk, she likens the idea of an affair to a holiday from one’s own life. Whilst there is a romantic longing between Clara and Francis, “There’s also a kind of a longing for a life that’s maybe just up ahead, or a life that could have been different, or a life that’s just about to begin.”
“I am wilder and more anarchic on the inside”
The protagonists of both novels consider relinquishing their fantasies. Of Clara, Mackintosh writes, “She tried to settle inside her life. Tried to imagine how it would feel not to have one foot outside its outline, always dreaming of elsewhere.”
Of Cora, Somers writes, “A radical thought: to reside in a single timeline. To do only what she was doing and not a second activity as well. To respect the laws of time and space. She boldly imagined a future where she didn’t imagine anything.” When I ask Somers if she thinks it’s possible to fully reoccupy your own timeline, if you’re indulging a parallel fantasy life, she replies, “I don’t know. I don’t know that I’d even advocate for it. I think that the inner life is so sacred and so personal and should be protected at any cost. I’ve always felt that I am wilder and more anarchic on the inside, and I’ve never felt able to be that person. And it’s saved me many times that I’m allowed my thoughts that no one knows … No one can know what you’re thinking if you don’t tell them. And that belongs solely to you. I find that so freeing and so radical.”
Conscience and confessions
I ask Somers if many women have confessed their own fantasy lives to her since her novel was published. Are lots of us existing across alternative realities? She smiles and says, “They’re more oblique than that. They’re just like, ‘I really connected’, ‘it really touched a nerve’ … I think that people are very polite and wary of being too weird.”
Another question posed by both novels is: to what extent is an affair, or an infatuation, even about the person that’s consuming you? In Permanence, Clara tussles with her own conscience, which tells her, “You must cleave the desire from the object … You must understand it as hunger within yourself, and not an embodied urge.” Yet Clara argues back with herself that it’s Francis himself and his body that birthed her desire. Her conscience retorts, “A body is a body … It’s your desire that’s singular.”
Mackintosh tells me there’s a real tension for Clara between the sweeping “devotional quality” of her love for Francis and her rational mind wondering if she’s “projecting too much onto this person”. In Permanence she writes, “Love was a fiction that the other person interpreted differently.” This calls to mind the author Helen Garner’s diary, when she’s thinking about a man she loves obsessively and wonders, “What’s love? Do we know each other? Or is each of us only a screen for the other’s light show?” Garner wrote those words in 1987 but her collected diaries, How to End a Story, hit the zeitgeist last year and won the Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction.
Affairs, real or imagined, burn bright because moments become compressed and heightened and the absence of the person only births more longing. Mackintosh tells me that this is what “you would inevitably lose if you fell in love for real, because no one can love at that velocity for their entire lives, sadly.”
The letdown of reality
Somers is also interested in how fantasies don’t play out the way you might want or expect, so “the juicy thing that I wanted to dig into is the letdown of reality.” As an example, she tells me that she’s spent years chasing career success, and now it’s happening, she finds it has its own downsides, such as giving her less time with her kids. “These exalted moments are all around us, but you can’t really own them or make them last, and you can’t really make them your own in the way that you want to,” she says. Somers turns out to share my love of Sarah Polley’s film Take This Waltz (2011), in which a woman played by Michelle Williams falls for a neighbour, despite being married to a lovely man. One woman cautions her, “New things are shiny,” and another says, “Life has a gap in it. It just does.”
In The Ten Year Affair, Cora thinks everyone wants to be happy, but another mum says, “Happiness is for children.” She argues that children are “happy because the things they want are attainable”. They want a toy or an ice-cream and an adult gets it for them. “Adults are after something else. They’re after something interesting.”
“We should be allowed one year during perimenopause to be free”
Perhaps it’s unsurprising that midlife women are particularly attracted to novelty. When becoming mothers, or transitioning towards menopause, they’re undergoing a wild hormonal transformation which can feel as tumultuous as adolescence. Reflecting on recently turning 40, Somers tells me, “There’s something about reaching this stage of life, I think, where you feel the sand running out of the hourglass. Not really, because we’re still quite young, objectively, but you reach this age and you feel like it’s this symbolic, huge thing, even if you say to yourself, I’m not going to be one of these people that freaks out about this. There is the feeling of the ticking clock, and it’s like, what do I do with my life? I’m halfway through. What do I do in the second half? And how do I make it count?”
Somers tells me she was inspired by the “fearlessness” of Miranda July’s writing in All Fours, in which a 45-year-old female artist becomes infatuated with a young male dancer and embarks on a journey of wild sexual exploration before the end of her fertile years. As one woman tells the protagonist, “We should be allowed one year during perimenopause to be free, knowing the end is coming … It’s such a dangerous time, right before the window closes.”
The fear of fading into sexual redundancy post-menopause grips the lead character in Vladimir, Netflix’s glossy new eight-part adaptation of Julia May Jonas’s novel. Rachel Weisz plays a literary professor in her mid-50s who becomes infatuated with her younger male colleague, played by Leo Woodall. The TV show opens with her lamenting to camera: “It has recently come to my attention that I may never again have power over another human being … I may not be the cause of a spontaneous erection ever again.” Mourning her waning ability to captivate men, she sexually fantasises about Vladimir as she teaches, answers emails and attends faculty meetings.
Jonas seems most interested in desire itself and how it can be harnessed. Vladimir’s tagline is “A girl needs a muse” and Weisz’s professor finds that her lust inspires a new manuscript. I ask Mackintosh if our yearning can be useful and she seizes on this, saying, “I remember reading somewhere that desire’s energy is actually really precious, and even if maybe there are times when it feels like it’s just annoying or destructive or obstructive, actually it’s kind of like the life force, and it has to go somewhere, it can be channeled into something … It’s powering Clara, and to let that go completely would be sad.”
A refusal to age quietly
So where can we channel our desire? Somers reckons being a writer is a good “workaround” because she can “have the whole imagined life” by writing a novel. I suggest that for those who aren’t writers, reading may function as a similar safety valve. If we can explore our longings through literature, perhaps we can avoid upending our own lives in pursuit of an elusive passion that might not sustain contact with reality. That said, All Fours has inspired a wave of women to “blow up” their lives, as July’s protagonist did, or to follow their passions in other ways. After the novel’s publication, July set up a discussion group on Substack, where women could talk about these shifts – not only starting or ending romantic relationships and marriages, but also more general life changes like switching careers.
Desire can make life shimmer with excitement. It can enliven our experience of the world, charging moments with extra magic, gifting us surplus energy, electrifying our senses. It can open our hearts to new relationships, new loves and new versions of ourselves. July’s character describes herself as a “kaleidoscope”.
“All Fours inspired a wave of women to ‘blow up’ their lives”
There’s a Simone de Beauvoir quote that says, “You can’t have everything you want but you can want everything you want.” July’s protagonist disputes this, arguing that you can have it too. If that sounds selfish and immoral, the novels don’t dodge the emotional complexity of betrayal. Whilst July is striving for freer ways of relating to partners and lovers, in The Ten Year Affair Cora struggles with falling in her own esteem, feeling unmoored from her previous values, and mistreating her husband.
Behind all these paeans to female autonomy and freedom is a bold refusal to age quietly and accept a path of decline, and instead an assertion that ageing can be romantically enlivening. July’s novel celebrates the positives of a “life after bleeding”, such as sex emancipated from the possibility of impregnation, and describes a hormonal shift that makes some women less concerned with pleasing others and more connected to their true self.
In our current cultural moment, marked by the Epstein files and the rise of “manosphere” influencers who minimise and objectify women, these challenging female voices are a vital counterforce. Somers references the loss of abortion rights in the United States and tells me, “I hope that this is [part of] the pushback among women artists, to be like, look, we feel these things, and we’re not going to apologise. And we have sex and we have desires, and we have thoughts that are not always the approved moral thoughts.”
For women reaching midlife, and for women of all ages, asserting our complex and kaleidoscopic desires becomes an act of resistance.
