The Most Interesting Part of Your Life

Reinvention can often seem like an inevitable part of getting older. The midlife crisis is practically baked into the American life cycle, at least in popular culture—a moment that can yield a new career, a new marriage, or, at the very least, a flashy new car. The 1960s radical Jerry Rubin wrote in his memoir Growing (Up) at 37 that he needed a completely new belief system to bring him back from a crisis so deep that, as he put it, “I felt dead at 34.” For him, as for many, the idea of a clean break with the past felt not only appealing but necessary.

But for those alarmed by the turbulence of midlife, the writer Valeria Luiselli’s novels offer a refreshingly different perspective. “I once read in a book by Saul Bellow that the difference between being alive and dead is just a matter of viewpoint,” the narrator of Luiselli’s debut novel, Faces in the Crowd, recalls. She goes on to explain that the “living look from the center outward, the dead from the periphery to some kind of center.” According to this worldview, the middle of life, far from a time to reset yourself, is the crux of human existence. And in Luiselli’s new novel, Beginning Middle End, it’s also where the messiest, most interesting, and most exciting parts of a story occur.