What this summer’s age-gap escapist fantasies are missing about romance and middle age

Middle-age escapist fantasies involving a sexy older woman catching the attention and affection of a younger beau seem to be having something of a moment this summer. Anne Hathaway, playing 39-year-old Solène, runs off with her boy-band paramour for a tour across Europe in The Idea of You, adapted from the book of the same name by Robinne Lee. Nicole Kidman falls for her daughter's celebrity boss in Netflix's A Family Affair, set to be released later this month. Even in real life (or online, anyway), fans went gaga over photos of Natalie Portman taking a smoke break with Paul Mescal, and Demi Moore having a chic lunch in the South of France with Joe Jonas. It all prompted Vogue to wonder whether we’re heading into a “May-December summer.”

The fantasy of a hot older woman and a handsome young man finding love together is a favorite trope of romance novels, where it’s considered a sexy subversion of the more common older man/younger woman love story. Yet for all that, it remains shockingly uncommon to find any of this pop culture paying sustained attention to the actual process of what it's like to live in a woman's body as you enter middle age. It sometimes feels as though age-gap romances are trying to will the problem of menopause away, catching their heroines right on the precipice of hormone changes, hot flashes, and fuzzy minds to say, “No, no, it’s still not too late” — for one last great romance, for sex, for being evaluated as a capable player on the sexual marketplace.

The heroine of The Idea of You, 39-year-old Solène, is caught just before perimenopause might be a concern. She can begin her affair with a younger man (20 in the book, 24 in the film) without fear of noticeable wrinkles or gray hairs. She’s more of an adult than her boyfriend, but the world has not yet begun to perceive her as middle-aged or as sexually irrelevant. Moreover, in the film, Hathaway doesn’t look all that much older now than she did in The Princess Diaries 23 years ago. Significantly, the action of the plot has to stop well before middle age becomes undeniable. Solène dumps her young boyfriend before she turns 41, leaving menopause to lurk in the shadows, the unspoken horror the whole book and movie are talking circles around.

In the literary landscape, at least, we’ve begun to see authors attempting various strategies to turn the lens of fiction onto menopause over the last few years. In 2019, Sarah Manguso, sent into early menopause by a hysterectomy, chronicled her search for menopause literature in the New Yorker. She found memoirs and essays and hoped for “a wave of work by and about women undergoing what is, quite literally, a once-in-a-lifetime experience.” In 2023, the Guardian hailed the rise of “hot-flush lit,” citing a new run of magical realist novels that aim to do for menopause what Stephen King did for menarche with Carrie, using horror and superpowers as a metaphor for the hormonal roller coaster.

Now, Miranda July has entered the chat with her new novel All Fours, already rejoicing in the title of the first great perimenopause novel. July, who is also a filmmaker and performance artist, is the kind of writer critics call “kooky” in a way that reads as part admiring, part condescending. She’s long been preoccupied with what sex is like for women, and now, at age 50, she’s taking on menopause.

In All Fours, an unnamed 44-year-old narrator tries to set off on a road trip from LA to New York City, only to decide instead to stop in a motel in a crummy suburb 20 minutes from her house, blow $20,000 on redecorating the room, and embark on a sexless affair with a younger man. Struggling to explain herself to her husband, the narrator comes up with the brilliant idea to tell him that she’s started menopause so he’ll stop asking questions. When she finds out that she wasn’t actually lying and that she has, in fact, begun perimenopause, she does not take the news well.

What makes All Fours feel so fresh and exciting is how brashly and confidently it handles the dilemma that The Idea of You and its ilk can only talk around: Women in our culture are taught to measure our self-worth in terms of how desirable men find us. We’re also taught that once we reach menopause, we’re no longer desirable. So what happens to us then?

Maybe, All Fours dares to suggest, we can have our escapist fantasy and also make it not so escapist.

At the outset of the novel, the narrator of All Fours considers older women to have forfeited their desirability. As such, she finds them beneath contempt, disgusting and hateable. When she sees an older woman at the gynecologist, she imagines “gray labia, long and loose, ball sacks emptied of her balls.” She marvels that the woman is “seemingly unbothered or unaware that she had nothing to look forward to, cunt-wise.”

For the narrator, the prospect of the loss of sexual currency feels like the loss of life itself. She’s got family history backing her up. Her grandmother and aunt both died by suicide at the age of 55, finding it unbearable to see their looks go.

So when the narrator realizes she is attracted to 31-year-old Davey, the second person she talked to in the LA suburb where she’s holed up, she is immediately struck by a horrible thought: she is too old for him. “This was my first experience of being too old,” she muses. “Suddenly my lust was uncouth, inappropriate.” She is old enough, at 44, that the idea of her desires become a joke rather than something she can expect to have reciprocated. What makes it worse is that she knows this won’t be the case only with younger men like Davey, but with men her own age, too. “I would never get what I wanted anymore, man-wise,” she realizes.

Yet instead of rejection, she learns that Davey is infatuated with her, too. For her, this could be interpreted in two ways: a sign that she is secretly still young, or a sign of something wrong with Davey. He seems inappropriately close to his mother; he lost his virginity to his mother’s best friend when she was in her 40s; perhaps that’s why he’s after the narrator?

Regardless, she is clinging to what feels like the last shreds of her youth, a last reprieve before she has to become grateful for the winks of 80-year-old men. She lives in fear that if she says the wrong thing to Davey, he will suddenly realize how much older she is, “like in a horror movie where the beautiful girl’s face crinkles into that of a wrinkled hag, then a skeleton, and finally a pile of dust.”

Yet when her relationship with Davey is functioning at its best, the narrator finds herself flourishing. In her crummy motel room, now lavishly decorated into a beautiful pink space scented with tonka beans, the narrator turns off all the lights and dances with Davey. They don’t have sex, but she feels a sexual power in herself, fully present and embodied, that’s vastly different from the “mind-rooted” dissociative sex she has with her husband. She becomes someone of no particular gender and no particular age, free as a baby in the lovely pink womb she has built for herself.

Eventually, inevitably, the narrator’s relationship with Davey ends. Shortly afterward, her doctor tells her that she has entered perimenopause. For the narrator, this is a double tragedy. She isn’t only losing her erotic capital, she fears, but also the sexual power she’s only recently found in herself, her access to “body-rooted fucking.” She becomes obsessed with a graphic she finds on the internet showing a “hormonal cliff,” with estrogen production dropping off abruptly in the early 40s.

“That’s it. It’s over,” she tells her best friend. She has officially entered the part of her life where age-gap romance heroines fear to tread.

The book is only halfway through at this point. It’s as though July is saying, “You don’t know over.”

In traditional age gap stories, the older woman’s redemption comes from the love of a younger man. In All Fours, the narrator’s redemption comes in two ways. The first is by having sex with Audra, the older woman to whom Davey lost his virginity.

Throughout the first half of the novel, the narrator pitied and detested Audra as someone who used to be a great beauty but is now clearly over the hill. Once in bed with her, however, the narrator comes to find Audra sexy, not in spite of her age, but because of it. “Her skin was beginning to thin with age, like a banana’s, but instead of being gross it felt incredible, velvety warm water,” the narrator muses.

By the end of their night together, the narrator has begun to let go of her horror at the idea of age. It has begun to seem possible, she realizes, to “not outpace oldness exactly, but match its weirdness, its flagrant specificity, with one’s own.” The idea is not to stop time before menopause has a chance to arrive, but to find what is strange and sexy and exciting in the experience of age: to neither deny age nor allow it to make one sexless, but to find sex and power in age itself.

The narrator’s second redemption comes from her decision to hold onto her motel room. Negotiating new boundaries for marriage with her husband, the narrator meets her friends and different lovers there every Wednesday night and interrogates them about how they feel about marriages, aging, and sex. The pink beauty of the room breaks down all barriers: her friends bathe and eat butter cookies and give her massages while they talk. The motel room is, the narrator comes to realize, a place where she can become a version of herself unburdened by age or gender, with or without lust running the show.

As the narrator “practices oneness,” her fears seem to vanish or reorganize themselves. She remakes her marriage, her motherhood, and her work so that she no longer feels trapped within them. The graphic of the hormonal cliff vanishes from the internet. She learns that the hormonal science of menopause isn’t really nailed down yet, but that what is clear is that women tend to experience the best mental health of their lives after menopause. Having been forced to face the passage of time in the face, she’s been able to build a life for herself where her power does not depend on the currency of youth.

For a long time, serious literary novels have held off on the question of how to handle menopause with the prudish disgust of a teenager. Meanwhile, pop culture has devoted its energies to pretending that menopause can simply be ignored or stopped in its tracks, as though with the right amount of plastic surgery, filler, or just blessed genetics, a woman can eternally stay 29 and therefore eternally win over a man young enough to validate her sexual power.

That’s part of the glee animating our current moment of celebrating older woman/younger man romances. When we get excited over these stories, we start talking about how Natalie Portman, Demi Moore, Anne Hathaway, Nicole Kidman, and all the rest have not aged. Of course they have, because all of us have. What we mean is that they retain the power our culture considers a woman’s most valuable power, which is the ability to pass as a youthful sexual object, one still capable of carrying a child.

The narrator of All Fours is in the process of losing her ability to carry a child. She fears she is losing her ability to attract men. She looks those problems straight in the face. Then she explodes them open with effervescent joy.