No One Tells You This 1. The Forecast Eight hours before my fortieth birthday, I sat alone at my desk on the seventeenth floor of an office building in downtown Manhattan, unable to shake the conviction that midnight was hanging over me like a guillotine. I was certain that come the stroke of twelve my life would be cleaved in two, a before and an after: all that was good and interesting about me, that made me a person worthy of attention, considered by the world to be full of potential, would be stripped away, and whatever remained would be thrust, unrecognizable, into the void that awaited. It was ridiculous. Deep down, I knew it was ridiculous. However, knowing this did not keep me from anxiously glancing at the clock out in the hallway as if the hands on it were actual blades. I thought of my mother, of course. Whether or not we actually resemble the image we see, our mothers are our first, and most lasting, reflection of ourselves: a mirror we gaze into from birth until death.

I was eight when my mother turned forty, and while I could no longer recall the exact details of that day, I did have a vague memory of it being surrounded by the sort of manic hysteria I associated with the Cathy cartoons that were sometimes clipped and taped to our fridge. My mother loved the comics; she found joy in their simple, two-dimensional humor. For most of her life she would try to hand the comic strip section of the newspaper to me over the breakfast table or read them aloud, so I could enjoy them too. I never did. I was baffled that anyone found them interesting; they were so bloodless. At age eight, the appeal of the Cathy cartoon, about a single woman with heavy thighs, who dimly battled with her weight, her dating life, and her job, all with pathetic aplomb, was especially confusing. My interest in those days was almost exclusively directed at Princess Leia and Laura Ingalls. This sad Cathy creature, so often pictured feverishly trying to shove herself into bathing suits in department store changing rooms, struck me as the exact version of life I would happily expend all my future energy avoiding.

Which is largely what I did. My strongest impression of my mother''s birthday, however, was that it was an ending. I sensed an abandon all hope, ye who enter here message woven into the colorful birthday cards that arrived in the mail for her. As if simply by turning forty, my mother had somehow failed at something. And now here I was so many years later, about to turn forty myself, gripped by those identical fears despite all my determination to be otherwise. Eight-year-old me would have been revolted. My desk faced north. Through the wall of windows that made up half of the corner office I was in, I had a panoramic view of the island.

Below me Manhattan stretched out like a toy city, all sharp angles, silver rectangles, and the unbroken lines of the avenues running north. Even from this height the city exuded purpose, like an engine exhaust. Right then it was shimmering in the late afternoon, early September sun. The light cast a golden hue on everything. It was the sort of light that caused even the most hell-bent New Yorker to look up with renewed awe. I pulled out my phone, automatically angled my head in a well-practiced tilt, and took a selfie. I contemplated the result with some satisfaction, but I didn''t need the picture evidence. I was aware that to the outside world I could not have appeared less like a woman who should be worried about her age, less like someone who was now spending the last hours before her birthday seized by the belief she was being marched to her demise.

In all likelihood, even my friends would have been surprised to hear it. I was not known as a person who tended to cower; I was a person who kept going, who took care of things, who always had the answer, who rarely asked for help. I had been on my own since I was eighteen years old. I had taken myself from waitress to well-paid writer to business owner and now back to writer without stopping to consider whether any of these things were plausible to anyone but me. I knew what I wanted, and what I liked, which was probably why most of my friends had taken me at my word when I said I didn''t want a birthday party; they were accustomed to me knowing my own mind. I wasn''t so sure anymore, however. Currently my mind felt split, as though there were two voices in my head debating the importance of my birthday, and like the pendulum on a grandfather clock I was swinging from one to the other. The rational voice kept pointing out that it was not only shameful, but also a waste of time, to cower before age.

Wouldn''t my energies be better spent contemplating how lucky I was? Lucky was too weak a word. Did I really need reminding that by nearly every metric available, there had never been a better time in history to be a woman? (Sometimes this voice merely noted how universally horrific it had been to be a woman up until very recently.) After all, I hadn''t been raised by a mother who responded to fifth grade homework questions, like "How many wives did Henry VIII have?" with a detailed explanation of the War of the Roses, only to arrive at this point in my life without a deeply ingrained sense of the larger picture. Who cares, said the other voice. Sure, fine, technically it might be true I was lucky. But this so-called luck was no more interesting to me than the meals I''d been commanded to finish as a child because "there are starving children in the world": knowing I was fortunate did not make the plate before me any more palatable. The only truth this increasingly feverish voice recognized was the sort that had been gleaned from stacks of literature, countless movies, and decades of magazine purchases I''d made: it was a truth universally acknowledged that by age forty I was supposed to have a certain kind of life, one that, whatever else it might involve, included a partner and babies. Having acquired neither of these, it was nearly impossible, no matter how smart, educated, or lucky I was, not to conclude that I had officially become the wrong answer to the question of what made a woman''s life worth living.

If this story wasn''t going to end with a marriage or a child, what then? Could it even be called a story? I very much wanted to muster a good fuck you to these voices. I reminded myself what the manager of the Greenwich Village tavern where I worked in my twenties as a waitress had once said to me (after listening to me lament my upcoming twenty-fifth birthday, no less): "You''ll never be younger than you are today." But instead I laid my head on my desk and closed my eyes. Bring on the blade, I thought. I was so tired of my own mind it would be a relief. My phone vibrated beside me and my heart leapt from long habit, like a dog that believes every noise of a package being opened holds the promise of food. But it was just my friend and now business partner, Rachel. Since leaving the office for a meeting a few hours ago, she had texted me some variation of PARTY? every fifteen minutes or so.

There''s still time! Party Party Party???? YES PARTY Rachel had been offering to throw me a party all week. Her fortieth birthday party, two years prior, had taken place in a vast loft with a liquor sponsor. I had no doubt that if I''d wanted the same she would have managed to provide it, probably in the next two hours if I really made a fuss. She''d already put together a gift bag for me from twenty friends. No Party, I wrote back. She wasn''t the only one. People had asked and offered. There were a half dozen friends I could text right now, who would meet me at any place I chose.

Whatever else it was, my birthday was not the story of a lonely woman. But I did not want a party. I couldn''t shake the feeling that the years ahead, if they were to be lived in a way that didn''t leave me feeling like I was standing in a corner watching the action but never living it, would require me to transform into a person I could not yet recognize and was not totally convinced even existed. A party felt like a delay tactic. A distraction. A weakness. If it was true that I was likely going to be alone for the rest of my life, let''s see how alone I could be. This little spark of defiance had brought me comfort in recent days, but now I could barely strike it before it faded away.

Not even the view could save me this time, it seemed. Right now, all it revealed was who I had been. I needed only to glance out the window to see my own history laid out before me. Live in the same place long enough and it eventually becomes a map to all your past lives: a different you waiting around every corner. And there had been plenty of versions of New York City me. From this vantage, I could practically trace my path beginning with my first heady year here, when I''d stumble out of after-hours clubs at 9:00 a.m. and be forced to walk home in the too-bright sun, having spent all the money I''d made the night before.

The diner, somehow still in business, where Maddy and I would scrounge together our change and split $1.50 egg sandwiches. The shadowy ridge of midtown buildings, where I''d had my first office job in publishing, at age thirty-one, after deciding it was time to get my professional act together. The subway stop that I had walked through every day for six months, hoping to "accidentally" bump into the man who''d told me the "timing just wasn''t right." And down there, too, was the office in SoHo where, after leaving publishing, I''d begun my mad charge up the media career.