Ada Calhoun

Listen to "Ada Calhoun Releases The Book Why We Can't Sleep" on Spreaker. WHY WE CAN’T SLEEP (Grove Hardcover) began as award-winning journalist and best-selling memoirist Ada Calhoun’s attempt to discover for herself why, at 40, despite having achieved many of the outward markers of success and personal fulfillment, she felt lousy!! In her search for answers, Calhoun embarked on the project that eventually became the groundbreaking and deftly researched WHY WE CAN’T SLEEP. In the process, she consulted with generational research and data experts and interviewed hundreds of middle-class, Generation X American women. The biggest discovery Calhoun made along the way was that she wasn’t alone. Moreover, she found that many of the pervasive struggles felt by women her age—with money, relationships, work, and existential despair—were unique to Gen X women. She investigated housing costs, workplace trends, credit card debt averages, and divorce data and at every turn, Calhoun recognized familiar patterns. Speaking with a diverse array of hundreds of women across America—single and partnered, mothers and childless, black, white, Asian, Latina, gay, straight, liberal, conservative, evangelical and atheist—Calhoun found that this generation of women raised to “have it all” were and are, by and large, exhausted, anxious, terrified about money, under-employed, overwhelmed, and in doubt of many of the major life choices they had already made. Instead of being heard, these women have been told their issues don’t qualify as a true crisis—that they should file their feelings under the hashtag #FirstWorldProblems, and instead of complaining, to lean in, take “me time,” or make a chore chart to get their lives and homes in order. As Calhoun herself noted in “The New Midlife Crisis: Why (and How) it’s Hitting Gen X Women,” her October 2017 Oprah.com article that went viral and evolved into WHY WE CAN’T SLEEP, “The flood of advice can send the message that if you're unhappy, it's your own fault.” The research compiled in WHY WE CAN’T SLEEP says otherwise. The more she investigated, the more Calhoun discovered that Gen X women have long been subject to major historic, socioeconomic forces that limited their adult prospects and offered few to no support systems, even as expectations for their success in life remained sky high in comparison to previous generations of women. In middle age, the contradictions and chasms between what their lives were supposed to look like if they “did everything right” and the way they are actually living have come home to roost for Gen X women—and it’s making them sleepless and miserable. That sounds like a grim prognosis, but Calhoun assures readers “there is cause for hope,” suggesting that the “way out of the crisis” is by shattering the “having it all” myth, illuminating the unique cultural challenges facing Gen X women, and in doing so, “facing up to our lives as they really are.” WHY WE CAN’T SLEEP doesn’t stop at shedding light on these problems; it also offers solutions for how to emerge from the abyss―and keep the next generation of women from falling into it. Ada surmises that Gen X women should reframe the story of their lives and mistakes and learn to see themselves as “heroines worth rooting for.” This book is reassuring, empowering, and essential reading for all middle-aged women, and anyone who hopes to understand them.