Wow. I couldn’t be happier.

‘My Formerly Hot Life: Dispatches From Just the Other Side of Young’

Stephanie Dolgoff
213 pages | Buy This Book

A few years ago, all-around hot chick Stephanie Dolgoff started to notice that salespeople in trendy boutiques—the ones who “used to swirl around me like bees over a puddle of orange soda”—no longer bothered to pitch her their skinny jeans and spiky heels. What’s worse, guys on the subway—the very ones who had been hitting on her so relentlessly for the past two decades—barely glanced in her direction. Life was otherwise swell—good job, great husband, beautiful kids, loving friends—but she’d become, in her own estimation, “Formerly Hot.”

What’s the Big Deal?

It’s not like Dolgoff and her age-mates are the first people ever to hit 40—but for them, the Formerly transition is new and strange, the source of revelations both frustrating (“my upper arms have recently begun to flap in the breeze like Grand Opening flags”) and sublime (“When you’re younger, you feel so alienated, you try so hard to fit into a group … now my friendships give me community, but I don’t need them to give me my identity.”) Dolgoff soon finds that her pals are going through all sorts of Formerly shifts of their own—Formerly Wild, Formerly Arrogant, Formerly Fat, Formerly the Prodigy—and these inevitable changes might just be leading to new identities even more meaningful than the ones they left behind. READ THE WHOLE THING HERE