4/30/2023 0 Comments Stuck in the middle rachel“The Rachel character gave us permission to feel bad for ourselves for a minute,” says my friend, after laying out for the second time that she expects no sympathy. Late last month, the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote that Rachel, in comparison with her ex-husband, Toby, “is much more in tune with the deeper and darker ethos of meritocracy: the abiding insecurity that comes with being trained for constant competition and then raised to a position where you’re incredibly privileged and yet your social milieu makes you feel like you’re running and running just to stay in place.” Long after people have shut up about the second season of The White Lotus, Fleishman persists among this specific group of women who are both well off and strung out. My friend, whom I’m not naming because nobody wants her midlife crisis publicized in a magazine (in fact, all names here have been changed), is one of more than a dozen women I’ve spoken with recently who have found themselves talking about the themes of Fleishman - which on its surface is about divorce but is really about aging, ambition, class, and identity - in group chats and out for drinks and at playground playdates. For them, watching Claire Danes (who plays Rachel, a high-earning talent agent desperate to be accepted by Manhattan’s private-school set) mentally break under the pressures of her career, marriage, motherhood, and childhood trauma and Lizzy Caplan (who plays Libby, a magazine writer who hasn’t written in two years and moved to suburban New Jersey with her family) long for the possibilities of her youth and search for the pieces of herself she can still recognize, has set off an internal alarm that sounds a lot like the voice-over in the show: Is all this really worth it? Am I spending these years, maybe the best years, focused on the right things? When does it get easier? Or as Libby put it, “ How did I get here?” Many of them read the book years ago and watched the show because it was there and why not - only to find themselves turned as upside down as the opening sequence, a dizzying view of the city flipped on its head. Then came Fleishman Is in Trouble, the TV series and book by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, which now, more than a month after its on-air finale, is still the subject of rumination for a certain set of New York women - the ones who didn’t need a narrator to explain that the 92nd Street Y is as much community center as status symbol (just try getting into its $40,700-a-year pre-K). There’s no appropriate audience for this privileged angst beyond a therapist’s office, which is why she’s never talked about it before. “If you find yourself in your 40s still living in New York, still hustling, still striving, there’s a part of you that is completely beat down and a little bit unwell,” she says. She is happy, yet she is undeniably worn out from trying to stay that way in a city where exorbitant wealth - two-nannies-and-a-chauffeur wealth, spring-break-in-St.-Barts wealth - is everywhere. The crazy thing is that this friend, at 45, has not only an apartment in the city but a weekend house outside it - one that she bought with earnings from her successful career and enjoys with her partner and kids. “There’s this very subtle heartbreak that perhaps people made better life choices than you and their houses are bigger and they are happier.” “It’s so crazy how rich you have to be in New York to live comfortably, just comfortably,” she tells me, slightly out of breath, while she runs to a meeting. They still have to bring their laundry to the basement where there are probably mice. But then she remembers: They still have to lug a stroller up the front stairs every time they come home. In her version, most of them went to Harvard and made life choices better than hers, which have rewarded them with original pocket doors and Gaggenau appliances. There’s a game a friend of mine likes to play in her affluent Brooklyn neighborhood: When she’s walking down Henry Street, she looks up at the multimillion-dollar brownstones and imagines the lives of the people inside.
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