Barbara Bradley Hagerty joins us to talk about her new book “Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife” She says: “When I was in my early 50s, I became quite convinced I was having a midlife crisis. I was an on-air correspondent for National Public Radio -- with a partly paralyzed vocal cord that left me without a voice for days or weeks at a time and with chronic pain that dominated my every waking hour. I wondered if my career at NPR had reached its peak as I observed the new opportunities going, understandably, to younger journalists."
Her stepdaughter was in college, her marriage was stable, but their lives were weighed down with the responsibilities of college tuition and a mortgage, frail parents and high stress jobs. Too tired to have fun. Then her father died and her mother – her best friend – suffered a stroke. She saw with sudden clarity that her generation was the next to go. “I had a choice. I could stumble along at the edge of a midlife crisis, or I could reimagine my life."
There’s no such thing as an inevitable midlife crisis, Barbara Bradley Hagerty writes in this provocative, hopeful book. It’s a myth, an illusion. New scientific research explodes the fable that midlife is a time when things start to go downhill for everybody. In fact, midlife can be a great new adventure, when you can embrace fresh possibilities, purposes, and pleasures. In Life Reimagined, Hagerty explains that midlife is about renewal: It’s the time to renegotiate your purpose, refocus your relationships, and transform the way you think about the world and yourself. Drawing from emerging information in neurology, psychology, biology, genetics, and sociology—as well as her own story of midlife transformation—Hagerty redraws the map for people in midlife and plots a new course forward in understanding our health, our relationships, even our futures.
Barbara Bradley Hagerty is an award-winning journalist and spent nearly 20 years as a correspondent for NPR, covering law and religion. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling Fingerprints of God, a recipient of the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship in Science and Religion and a Knight Fellowship at Yale Law School. Before joining NPR, she was a reporter at The Christian Science Monitor. She lives in Washington, D.C.
