Add One Mid-life Crisis To A Media Hate Narrative: The Inspiration for PRECIOUS YOU

Add one mid-life crisis to a media hate narrative: the inspiration for Precious You

By Helen Monks Takhar

In my twenties, I deeply resented how going for a jog involved running the gauntlet with street harassers. Before leaving my flat, I’d have to ready myself for those men who feel entitled to call at women from their cars, beep the horns of their vans, and those many male passersby who feel compelled to attempt to intimidate women based on appearance or performance.

That sense of every bit of me being assessed and graded as I tried to exercise sometimes meant I couldn’t face running at all. I despised the way the male gaze inhibited my freedom to move about the world how I wanted to.

Then, one day, I realised the catcallers had fallen silent. I was approaching forty and it felt like my body no longer registered. For a beat or two, I was indignant. Hey, I’m not old! Then, I gave my head a shake. How and when had my self-worth been coaxed into such a warped shape? I couldn’t possibly be wishing for the return of street harassment and yet I couldn’t deny I’d felt a peculiar sadness when I felt I was no longer being ‘seen’ as I once had. 

I became fascinated by the confusion and contradictions I’d experienced and began to imagine a woman living her middle years with the absolute sense of losses accumulating, including her desirability to wider society. How would she relate to a younger woman, one at height of her visibility and promise? The story that would become Precious You began to emerge.

Generation gaps are not new, but the current chasm between unfairly maligned millennials, of all genders, and resentful mid-lifers, represents something uniquely unnerving.

Forty-somethings like me—who have enjoyed free university education, cheap housing, and the luxury of establishing our identities in boom times—are widely making our lot even better by exploiting the generation directly underneath us, all the while actively belittling their efforts to shape a world that’s fairer, more inclusive, and sober (in all senses of the word).

At the sharp end of the housing crisis, Generation Rent provides extra income for their elders while they themselves remain mired deep in debt. Their working lives are often spent propping up diverse sectors through unpaid internships or exploitative contracts, but this doesn’t stop their near-daily pillorying in the mainstream media as thin-skinned, avocado-munching, precious ‘Snowflakes.’

Yesterday’s ravers mock today’s young adults for being ‘woke,’ for their ‘triggers,’ ‘safe spaces,’ and sobriety. As for Generation X, we somehow feel as hard-done-by as millennials. We’re not rich enough, not successful enough, not sexy enough for our liking. And although we still feel it inside, we are, in fact, no longer young. Little wonder we drink even more now than we did in our twenties.

As well as transitioning from hyper-visibility to invisibility, many middle-aged women find themselves being sidelined at work and often paid significantly less than male counterparts. Such symptoms can make female midlife feel like a condition in need of a cure. In this context, it can prove too easy to assume another woman has it easier than you, particularly if that woman is deemed at the height of her appeal. 

Men block women’s paths to career progression and self-worth, but women can stand in each other’s way too. We aspire to taking better care of each other, but too often we experience the distance to go: from pulling the ladder up behind us if we reach seniority at work, to ‘flaming’ posters on parenting forums, to bile-filled weekly columns by female writers about other women. Pretending that women always default to gentleness toward each other won’t plug these damaging empathy gaps.

In Precious You, two women of adjacent cohorts think and do the very worst to each other, believing the other party deserves it. I was recently asked by a journalist whether I think women are ‘naturally bitchy’. I don’t think we are and this certainly isn’t the point I’m trying to make with Precious You. If anything comes naturally to many women, it’s the brilliance and precision we display when we observe each other; the minutiae of how we each dress, what we say, what we are trying to communicate to others without words and what we are trying to hide.

Women don’t always channel this intimate monitoring for good; there’s no denying some women extract a dark power, sometimes pleasure, in finding a woman they dislike, analysing every bit of her and bringing their friends and allies at work in on this vision. 

The problem is, of course, that the readiness of some women to default to sabotage over support means they’re doing patriarchy’s work for it. Too many workplaces are not fair to women, with gender pay gaps, poor representation at senior levels and women being treated as disposable, particularly as they age. All of this can create toxic environments that are liable to encourage an unhealthy level of competition between women. The Covid Crisis seems to be making the situation even worse, with evidence suggesting more women have been furloughed or laid off than men. 

Arguably, it’s never been more urgent for women to reach across generation divides and beyond to find our common ground and shared targets for righting the injustices we face, instead of dividing the world along enemy lines. I hope Precious You makes some small contribution to that conversation. 

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Helen Monks Takhar worked as a journalist, copywriter and magazine editor having graduated from Cambridge in 1997. She began her career writing for financial trade newspapers in 1999 before contributing to UK national newspapers including The Times and The Observer. Born in Southport, Merseyside in 1976, she lives in North London with her husband and two daughters. Precious You is her first novel.

Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/HelenMTakhar

Find out more about her on her website https://www.helenmonkstakhar.co.uk/

PRECIOUS YOU

Enthralling… you may be reminded of Villanelle by Lily, the possibly psychopathic antiheroine’ THE SUNDAY TIMES
‘A dark, addictive page-turner’ ALICE FEENEY
‘Supremely twisted and completely riveting’ KATIE LOWE
‘A breathtaking debut’ SAMANTHA DOWNING
She’s got your job. She wants your life…

When Katherine first meets her new intern Lily, she’s captivated. Young, beautiful and confident, Lily reminds Katherine of everything she once was – and it’s not long before she develops a dark fascination with her new colleague.

But is Lily as perfect as she seems, or does she have a sinister hidden agenda? As Katherine is drawn into an obsessive power struggle with the intern, a disturbing picture emerges of two women hiding dark secrets – and who are desperate enough to do anything to come out on top…

Breathlessly addictive and deeply unsettling, Precious You is a thriller like no other. Taut, terrifying and with shocking twists at every turn, it will keep you guessing until the very last page.
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Perfect for anyone who loved Lucy Foley’sThe Hunting Party, Harriet Tyce’s Blood Orange and Samantha Downing’s My Lovely Wife.

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