Narrating Midlife: Crisis, Transition, and Transformation is a welcome and vital addition to the literature on interpersonal, family, health, and organizational communication. The contributors of the stories in the collection navigate their way through the confusion, challenges, and competing demands they experience as they move through midlife. This is a soulful collection of deeply personal, evocative, and vulnerable autoethnographic stories that will make readers more mindful of the necessity and difficulties of dealing effectively with the expected and the unforeseen.

Carolyn Ellis, University of South Florida

Lori West Peterson and Christine Kiesinger have edited a collection of deeply personal narratives, inviting readers to join the authors as they open windows to an array of experiences of midlife. Of particular benefit to those wishing to find nuance in distinctions, is the organization of the book by those stories of lives “on track,” and others, “off the rails,” allowing readers and students of aging and life stages to reflect on the subtle ways we measure our lives while both celebrating and struggling with the circumstances we face.

Sarah Amira de la Garza, Arizona State University

“This being human is a guest house,” wrote the Sufi poet Rumi. My guest house has been open 48 years. Thus the stories of Narrating Midlife came to me in—or, more likely, past—my own midlife. Opening the door, I recognized some of these guests: career crossroads, bodily deterioration, relational turmoil, penetrating loss. Other guests foretold of futures, possible and certain: aging, retirement, cancer, disability, death. How much more wholeheartedly human might we become if we open ourselves to greeting each story as Rumi instructs: like an honorable visitor, “a guide from beyond”?

Lisa M. Tillmann, Rollins College