Crises of Queer Midlife in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Adult Onset

Abstract

This article analyses Ann-Marie MacDonald’s 2014 novel Adult Onset as a text that brings the developmental literature of middle age into conversation with queer theories of temporality, family, and adulthood. Specifically, the novel invokes the narrative of the “mid-life crisis” to interrogate the concepts of queer progress and successful aging that its protagonist, a married lesbian mother and celebrated author named Mary Rose MacKinnon, outwardly embodies. Linking Mary Rose’s mid-life crisis with Jack Halberstam’s theory of “queer failure,” I argue that the text articulates a critique of the It Gets Better Project as a queer progress narrative and betrays Mary Rose’s deep ambivalence toward how her life in middle age conforms to a homonormative developmental script. At the same time, the crises of Mary Rose’s mid-life motherhood unsettle the homonormativity that appears to define her and contributes to a queering of family temporalities. Drawing upon Kathryn Bond Stockton’s theory of “growing sideways” but shifting the focus from growing up to growing old, I argue that the text brings Mary Rose into lateral relationships with other aging and old mothers in the text, both human and non-human. These lateral relationships not only offer alternatives to the concepts of progress and decline, success, and succession, which are at the root of normative conceptions of individual aging and generational time, but also move the discussion of mid-life in literature beyond anthropocentric understandings of what it means to age well in contemporary culture.