The Stranger in the Mirror: A Memoir of Middle Age

(Paperback)

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Description

A remarkable and poignant memoir about one woman's attempt to understand middle age. Middle age took Jane Shilling by surprise. She hadn't seen it coming, and she certainly wasn't ready for it. Living a flawed, bittersweet version of the idyll she dreamed of in her twenties, in a tumbledown urban cottage by the Thames, with a son, a cat and a horse in a livery fifty miles away, she wondered whether middle age was the beginning of the end. Or was there one last great adventure to be had The Stranger in the Mirror is one woman's attempt to understand what middle age means for her and whether, as a new generation of women turns fifty, a revolution is under way. It definitely won't reverse the signs of ageing - but it will make you laugh, it will make you think and it could just make you look in the mirror in a slightly different way...

Reviews

"Shilling's thoughts on love and ageing are so wise and so memorably expressed that they would grace a literary novel... Shilling's mild obsession with control and with the delicate, the exquisite and the theatrically miniature almost makes her into a latter day Jane Austen" New Statesman "I loved this book so much I gulped it down in just two sittings... Jane Shilling is a peerlessly elegant and evocative writer" -- Libby Purves Mail on Sunday "Shilling is a gorgeous writer and there are chunks of this book that I would happily steal... If this woman wrote a novel I would buy it in a heartbeat... Shilling puts the ageing process under the microscope and, as we read, we squirm" -- Jenny Eclair Observer "Jane Shilling is an outstandingly good writer...she also has emotional and intellectual courage" Spectator "Wry, quietly fuming and often moving memoir of a midlife cri de couer... exceptionally companionable, occasionally bejewelled and richly sustaining broth of a book" Sunday Telegraph

Author Bio

Jane Shilling writes on books for the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and Daily Mail, and on television for the Evening Standard. Her first book was The Fox in the Cupboard, a critically acclaimed memoir about her mid-life love affair with fox-hunting. She lives in Greenwich with her son.