Boomer at Midlife

About the Book

"Bold and bittersweet, a tragedy wrapped in a comedy. You can read it and laugh, or weep, but always with the shock of recognition."

-Landon Y. Jones, best-selling author and National Book Award nominee for
Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation

Walter "Boomer" Stapleton has good reason to believe that he is the ultimate stereotype: divorced, middle-aged, tired of his job, involved with a much younger woman, and soon to lose his only child to college. He is a Baby Boomer, one of an anonymous seventy-seven million Americans at or approaching midlife.

With his fiftieth birthday just around the corner, Boomer is finished being a poster child for his generation and determined to forge a new path despite his progressively shrinking set of life options. He quits his job and leaves friends and family behind to move to New Orleans to play zydeco on his accordion. But what he encounters in The Big Easy leads him even deeper into the realm of uncertainty about who he is and where he really belongs.

From the halls of corporate America to the sidewalks and clubs of New Orleans, Boomer at Midlife lampoons the self-conscious Baby Boomers in a story that is at once comic, nostalgic, and melancholy.

About the Author

Mark Cain, who holds degrees from Columbia University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Chicago, has spent a career in higher education. He and his wife live in Cincinnati; they have one adult child. Visit www.boomeratmidlife.com.