How Did I Get to Be Forty: And Other Atrocities (Judith Viorst's Decades)

And so you’ve reached that time in life when you’re starting to “pick investments over adventure, / And clean over scenic, and comfortable over intense”; when, even though in your heart of hearts you’re much younger, the rest of you is (how did it happen?) forty.

Judith Viorst, the wise and witty lady of It’s Hard to Be Hip Over 30 and Other Tragedies of Married Life, is here to guide you through these forty-ish years with poems that reflect the highs, the lows, and the everything-in-betweens of midlife. Viorst playfully considers the prospects of sagging kneecaps, awkward college reunions, and fantasies of love in the afternoon; being baffled by one’s Buddhist bisexual vegetarian Maoist offspring; cholesterol counts, adult-education courses and other atrocities of midlife—which somehow aren’t as painful when you can laugh at them.

Filled with warmth, humor, and insight, How Did I Get to Be 40 & Other Atrocities is Judith Viorst at her best.

• I'm Too Young To Be Seventy: And Other Delusions (Judith Viorst's Decades)
• Nearing Ninety: And Other Comedies of Late Life (Judith Viorst's Decades)
• Unexpectedly Eighty: And Other Adaptations (Judith Viorst's Decades)
• Suddenly Sixty: And Other Shocks of Later Life (Judith Viorst's Decades)
• Forever Fifty (Judith Viorst's Decades)
• It's Hard to Be Hip Over Thirty: And Other Tragedies of Married Life (Judith Viorst's Decades)
• Necessary Losses: The Loves, Illusions, Dependencies, and Impossible Expectations That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Grow
• When Did I Stop Being 20 and Other Injustices
• Wait for Me: And Other Poems About the Irritations and Consolations of a Long Marriage
• Grown-Up Marriage: What We Know, Wish We Had Known, and Still Need to Know About Being Married