the middle of her life is not the background
When my character Maya is alone in her kitchen at thirty-nine, she is not waiting for a man to arrive and fix her. She is not waiting for a woman either.
She is holding a casserole dish, still hot through the oven mitts. She made it for a potluck she decided not to go to. The Cherokee Purples are on the counter, the ones she grew herself from seed, the ones she will slice and salt and eat over the sink tomorrow morning. Her mother's cross is in a drawer in the bedroom, tangled in old earrings and a museum ticket stub. She has not worn it since the divorce, but she has not thrown it away. The kitchen smells of onion and oregano. The window is fogged from the steam. Outside, the garden is dark.
That chapter, the one that opens Book 3, ends with her unfixed. She does not meet anyone. She does not have a revelation. She does not cry and then stand up and square her shoulders. She finishes the dish, puts it in the refrigerator, and goes to bed. The unfixedness is not a problem to be solved in the next scene. It is the condition of a woman in her middle.
Romance fiction has a habit of treating the middle of a woman's life as a prelude. The protagonist is twenty-something, still becoming, still forming the edges of who she will be. The older woman appears as the mentor, the obstacle, the one who has already done her becoming and now stands in the way, or the one who is left behind when the real love arrives. She is the background against which the younger woman comes into focus.
This is so common that I did not notice it for a long time. I absorbed it. I wrote it. I had a thirty-seven-year-old supporting character who made acerbic comments and had already given up on love, and I thought I was writing realism. I was writing the script I had been handed.
But the middle is not the prelude. It is the territory. Most of a woman's life is lived between twenty-five and fifty-five. Most of her becoming happens there too. The body changes. Desires deepen or shift or disappear entirely and return in a different shape. The self is not a finished thing at thirty-five. It is not a finished thing at forty-five. It is still under construction, still making choices, still being surprised.
Maya at thirty-nine has been married. She has a daughter who is not sure what to make of her. She has a job she does not hate and does not love. She has a garden where the Cherokee Purples climb a trellis she built herself. She has a cross in a drawer she has not touched in two years and has not thrown away. She has a casserole in the refrigerator that she will eat alone or freeze or throw away, and any of those is a complete action.
I am interested in the completeness of that moment. Not as a setup for a later transformation, not as the quiet before the storm of a love affair. That moment, in its specifics, is the story. The decision to make the casserole even though she did not go to the potluck. The decision to grow Cherokee Purples because her grandmother grew them. The decision to leave the cross in the drawer where it is neither worn nor discarded, because both actions would mean she had finished something. She has not finished.
There is a temptation in romance, even in the sapphic rooms I move through, to place the older woman as a prize or a problem. She is either the confident one who has already arrived and can now guide the younger protagonist into her own becoming, or she is the cautionary tale, the one who did not find love in time, the one who settled, the one whose story is already over. In both cases, the character is a function of someone else's arc. Her own desires are secondary. Her own interior is a room the reader never enters.
I have been thinking about what it would mean to center the woman in her middle not as a mentor, not as a caution, not as a stepping stone, but as the protagonist of her own falling and resurfacing. Not falling in love as a young woman's discovery, but falling in love as a woman who has already been in love, already been broken, already rebuilt herself once or twice, and is now standing in her own kitchen at thirty-nine with her own tomatoes and her own oven mitts and her own complicated relationship with a cross.
The love she might find, if she finds any, will not complete her. It will meet her in the middle, in the kitchen with the oven mitts, in the garden with the Cherokee Purples, in the drawer with the cross.
The novels I write are about women like her. Women who are not waiting. Women who are in their kitchens, in their gardens, in the rooms of their own lives, making decisions that are not about who they will become but about who they are becoming, right now, on a Tuesday night in February when nobody is coming over. The cross is in the drawer. The tomatoes are on the counter. The casserole is in the refrigerator. The chapter has already ended. The story is still moving.
