Putting midlife on the map

Marina Benjamin was a big reader as a child. But it wasn’t until university that she first felt a proper connection to writing. But still, she said, she didn’t have the confidence at that time to say she was going to be a writer.

“I was the first person in my family, really, the first of my generation to go to university. My parents didn’t go to university,” Benjamin recalled over Zoom ahead of her appearances at Melbourne Jewish Book Week and the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival. “Maybe it’s a typical immigrant story. It was very much ‘get a proper job, do the sciences … have a career that we can understand.’”

Benjamin explained that while being a writer wasn’t on the horizon, it was something that she just did in her 20s, until she “went all in” with journalism.

“Journalism looked like more of a job than any other kind of writing. I could say, ‘you see, I do this thing in newspapers,’” she laughed.

While Benjamin was at university, she did a Master of Philosophy in women’s history, but it took her a while to circle back to the idea that writing about women was something she was interested in.

A Little Give, which is the book Benjamin will largely be focusing on during her appearances in Melbourne and Sydney, completes a trilogy exploring midlife, following The Middlepause, published in 2016, and Insomnia, which followed in 2018.

According to Benjamin, A Little Give came about during the pandemic.

“We were all confined to our homes, so I was thinking very much about what home meant, how much of our lives were consumed by the home,” she recalled. “So it’s really a book about dailyness.” Benjamin is referring to what she describes as “dull, repetitive, clockwork-like roles that we – largely women – perform [in the house] that don’t have any kind of meaning or currency outside of the house”.

Benjamin recalled the topic being quite big at the time, with a lot of articles around how much of the mental load women actually carry. While it has been this way for centuries, the pandemic amplified what women had already been doing, and continue to do.

For Benjamin, A Little Give also became an exploration and revisiting of her early commitments to feminism.

“That second wave of feminism in the ’70s and ’80s was very much about women turning their back on everything to do with domestic, because we were going to be professional, we were going to compete with men in the world on our terms,” she said. “But I think that was kind of white, privileged feminism that didn’t ask who was going to look after the children if we were out at work? Who was going to clean the house? It became a whole intersectional dependence of free women on the labour of women who are not so free. It was bothering me a great deal in lockdown which, again, amplified social disparities and ethnic disparities, not just gendered ones.”

With her earlier books, Benjamin had already committed to writing about lived experience. So, when the pandemic hit, and her lived experience became a form of entrapment, it became a matter of writing about “issues of freedom, equality, women’s roles and the work/home divide”.

Benjamin is clear that she doesn’t want to be prescriptive; she’s not in the business of self-help. But she acknowledged that writing the three books helped her, so it’s a win if they help other people too. Her main goal with writing the books was to put midlife on the map in the way that it hadn’t been before.

“I wrote the books that I would have liked to have had available to me,” she said. “A Little Give had a very nice review in The Conversation, which pleased me because it noticed or remarked that the book was not looking for answers, but was often looking for what a better question might be.”

For Benjamin, that’s part of her process – if you can ask a better question, that might be the best you can do, and that might be enough.

“It might be better than having an answer. Answers close things down and questions open things up. I wanted to write in an open-ended way, so the searching is foregrounded.”

Benjamin describes midlife as a developmental period in women’s lives that is “every bit as directional and self-determining as adulthood is in your 30s” without the same roadmap that other periods of life seem to have. “How do you navigate when there’s no map?” she asked.

When asked what Benjamin is most looking forward to about her appearances in Melbourne and Sydney, she said that, as well as appearing alongside some brilliant authors, she’s excited about the audiences.

“I was in Australia five years ago for the Sydney Writers Festival, and I absolutely loved it, and I love the fact that so many people show up,” she recalled.

“My sense is that Australia is really hungry for this cultural production and intellectual engagement, and the audiences are just brilliant.”

Marina Benjamin is part of the line-up for Melbourne Jewish Book Week.

To see the full schedule, visit mjbw.com.au

A Little Give is published by Scribe, $29.99 rrp.

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