The 40 Questions Every Woman Should Answer

Call it a midlife crisis.  Call it anything you like, but I have always wanted to write a book.  I wanted to write a book that people would read, that they could come away from with a greater sense of self and self worth.  More importantly I wanted to write a book that women would read.  I decided to write a book for women, about women and by a woman.

I have clung to my dream of writing a book since high school.  I was sort of the class poet.  I wrote poems about broken hearts.  As a teenage girl I considered myself an expert on this matter.  Whenever one of my friends got ceremoniously “dumped” I was ready and waiting with a poem.  Of course I wrote other types of poetry, but falling in love, unrequited love and love gone wrong seemed to fill most of my pages.  I fully intended to publish a book of poetry.  I was going to go to college and study Creative Writing.  I thought maybe I would write for a newspaper, have a column like my idol, Erma Bombeck.  She was the greatest.  I remember an assignment in 11^th Grade Journalism to write 10 questions you would ask a famous person whom you admire.  I chose Erma.  I liked her sarcastic wit, and the fact that she wrote as if she were talking.  I have probably been influenced by her writing style quite a bit.  I wanted to ask Erma the following questions:  How does your family feel about being the subject of so many of your books and articles?  How does your husband deal with having a famous wife who earns much more than he does?  Being a career woman, what is your opinion of the ERA?  See, even way back in high school I was asking questions.  Somehow in college I got a little sidetracked.  I fell in love with a small Catholic college in Loudonville called Siena.  They had no creative writing program, so I became an English major.  I decided I would be an English teacher.  I student taught a religion class and promptly decided teaching was not for me.  I would go into Advertising and do Copywriting.  I made it to Advertising, landing my first job at BBDO, home of Pepsi, “the best creative department on the street”.  That’s what I always said anyway.  I did actually work in the creative department now and then, but as a “floater” doing mostly administrative work.  Advertising was long hours and very little pay.  I stood that for about a year and a half before deciding to give up the glamour and my ½ days on Fridays (in the summer) for computers on the Paine Webber trading floor.  I never looked back.  Go figure.  Yet I never really let go the idea of writing a book.  Over the years I have had several ideas for novels etc-- but never actually put “pen to paper” so to speak.  I guess the impetus for this book was obvious, turning 40.  They say you should write about what you know, and I am getting to know 40.  I am getting to know it through the eyes of 15 different women, myself included.  I chose the girls that I interviewed based primarily on their age, and the fact that I knew none of them would laugh in my face when told about my aspirations to write a book.  You will notice that I constantly refer to them as “girls”.  I do not care if this is politically incorrect.  It is how I think of them, as my “girls”.  I do not mean this in a derogatory manner.  It’s just the way I am.  Anyway, I thought I should mention that.  I think I began with well over twenty women, but a few just weren’t interested and a few others just took too long to get their responses back to me (some people still hadn’t given me their responses after six months, and I was already writing the book at that point).  Though all the women interviewed are between the ages of 38 and 41, all are in different stages in their lives.  I have interviewed a few stay-at-home Moms, a few working Moms, and a couple of single, working girls.  Two of the women have careers in the military.  Some of the women have children, some don’t.  Some are divorced and some re-married.  I think it all makes for some pretty interesting reading.  Somewhere in the sea of responses I think most women will find themselves.

In the process of conducting the interviews, I, or I guess I should really say “we” have discovered adjectives for 40 that had never occurred to us before.  Forty can be fun, freeing (that word came up a lot in the responses) educating, and liberating, annoying, maturing and just plain frustrating.  OK, we have discovered that 40 can indeed be Fabulous.

The process of writing the book was simple some days and complicated on others.  I began by concocting “The 40 questions”.  This number was in fact intentional as was the pun.  This in itself took several weeks as I constantly revised the question list.  I wanted most of the questions to be thought provoking, but I wanted some to be strictly for fun.  I did most of this work in two very strange, and somewhat dangerous places, on my treadmill and in my car.  OK, it’s a m