Q&A: Sue Shellenbarger

In The Breaking Point: How Female Midlife Crisis Is Transforming Today's Women (see review, LJ 3/1/05), acclaimed Wall Street Journal columnist Sue Shellenbarger introduces archetypes to explain the nature and expression of midlife crisis in women. An Adventurer herself, Shellenbarger makes sense of "the upheaval that has no name."

I was very surprised by both the volume and the emotional intensity of the response. The 100-plus emails that streamed in included some of the most impassioned stories I had seen in 14 years as a columnist. The emails continued to arrive, weeks after that edition of the Wall Street Journal had hit the recycling bins of America, suggesting to me that the story had "legs"—that readers were emailing it on to others. I had no intention at first of writing a book. I told my story in my column with a much smaller goal: to give my readers a brief, entertaining, informative essay that would help them avoid making the same midlife mistakes as I had.

In researching your book, you conducted numerous interviews. Did your contact with other women change your own experience of midlife crisis?

It changed not only my midlife crisis but also my life. Interviewing these 50 women was not work, it was a gift. I learned so much from their grace, wisdom, courage, and generosity. Their examples demonstrated how to expand my goals at midlife to encompass my most ambitious dreams. And seeing how so many of these women emerged from midlife crisis stronger and better renewed my hope and self-respect.

The Adventurer, the Lover, the Leader, the Artist, the Gardener, and the Seeker characterize various personality types as women undergo the experience of midlife crisis. Can you say more about these Jungian archetypes and how you came to identify them?

I have been in Jungian therapy myself and have done a great deal of reading about Jung's use of archetypes and the role of the collective unconscious. I have also thought a great deal in my work about the remarkable diversity of women's roles today, which our culture still tends to repress and reduce to stereotypes. At first, as I gathered the stories of the 50 women, each seemed unique. It was only after I distilled each story that a pattern began to emerge. I spent a weekend mapping common themes on a wall-sized sheet of poster board. The archetypes came to me in a sort of epiphany. I realized each woman had experienced one of a handful of driving forces that would be readily understandable to anyone living in our culture.

Are midlife crises for women predictable and inevitable? Do you envision a way for us to live integrally so that midlife crises are no longer necessary?

I believe midlife crises are predictable but not inevitable. Any woman who has set aside a significant part of her identity to play a role is at risk. If at age 40 you are not doing any part of the activities that gave you joy when you were a preteen or a teenager, you are susceptible. People with unsatisfying or all-consuming careers or stagnant marriages are prime candidates. Women long overloaded by juggling work and family are at risk. So are those who carry a lot of emotional baggage from childhood. In the presence of any or several of these circumstances, a woman's inborn drive toward wholeness can easily erupt into crisis. Eventually, I believe we as a society will evolve toward living more integrated lives. Playing a greater variety of life roles in one's twenties is a proven predictor of happiness and well-being in middle age.