Ada Calhoun on Women's Midlife Crisis

Gennev: Let's talk about menopause

Ada Calhoun's Book Why Can't We Sleep? was an instant New York Times bestseller.

Gen X women are finding it hauntingly and painfully and upliftingly familiar.

Gen X women are ... unhappy. Not all of them, not all of the time, but certainly there is more of a cloud over this generation than others. Sandwiched eternally between the much larger, much louder Boomer and Millennial cohorts, Gen X has been overlooked and ignored like the latchkey kids we so essentially are.

And that's doubly true of the women of Gen X, who are now aging into "invisibility" - those supposedly unsexy years after 40.

Ada Calhoun wanted to know why we're such a miserable bunch, so she started asking. Two hundred interviews with Gen X women later, she's got answers, and she shared them in this fabulous podcast with Gen Xer (and what an irony that my computer's spellcheck doesn't recognize "Xer"), Gennev CEO Jill Angelo.

Hear their conversation about the price of trying to have it all, what it's like to be the first generation not to do better than our parents did, and why perimenopause and menopause are making it even harder on the women of the forgotten generation.

Spoiler: it's not all bad news. But there is some.