'Formerly Hot': Is This What Happens to Women After 40?

In the economically happy Clintonite 1990s, a distinctive sort of genre fiction called chick lit surged across the land, topping bestseller lists and inspiring TV shows and films.

It has yet to fade one bit.

Chick lit, a term that came to define a genre led by Helen Fielding's "Bridget Jones" in 1996, celebrates modern women in humorous and lighthearted eye-candy prose as professionally successful or inventive, youngish, independent, sexually avaricious, shopaholic, nipped-and-tucked, trendsetter, sexy and perky and totally self-involved. In other words, look at Carrie Bradshaw in "Sex and the City," the book and the hit HBO series, or "Waiting to Exhale," or, more recently, on a slightly more serious level, "Eat Pray Love."

One might think that by now there would be nothing new or different to say. And there probably isn't. But that will not stop the chick lit books from coming and the women from buying.

Into that mosh pit falls "My Formerly Hot Life: Dispatches From Just the Other Side of Young" (Ballantine Books) by Stephanie Dolgoff, a born-and-bred New Yorker and editor at Self magazine. The book comes out in late August but has already received the sort of publicity that such books tend to get in style magazines and the morning TV shows.

Goodie, I thought. Here's someone who has lived a full life telling it like it is to grow old when you are not Nora Ephron (69), Diane Sawyer (64), Hillary Clinton (62) or Martha Stewart (69) -- that is, when you are not rich and famous, or have good cheekbones to begin with.

I was wrong. "Formerly" is the passive label that the author sticks on herself and other women in their late 30s and early 40s. Early 40s! Formerly! Done away with! Kaput!

It seems that Dolgoff, despite a successful career, a husband and twin 7-year-old daughters and living well in Manhattan, came undone one day after her 40^th birthday when a "sexy stubbly man" on the subway leaned over to ask for the time and she braced herself for a pickup line. And she waited and waited and nothing happened. He went back to his book.

OMG! Catastrophe! The end of life as we know it!

But let her speak in her own words:

"Beginning a couple of years ago,'' she writes in her book, "salespeople in trendy boutiques, who used to swirl around me like bees over a puddle of orange soda, could no longer be bothered. Evidently they saw me as someone who wouldn't (or plain shouldn't) buy their skinny jeans, spiky heels or strappy little camis that are ideally worn without a bra."

It gets worse. This sort of incident -- the subway guy who won't flirt, the salespeople who won't hover around her -- led directly to the brilliant conclusion that she, formerly a hot chick who knew the cool restaurants and latest bars, who picked up trends a continent away, who had the world on a string, "had moved from the standard perfectly symmetrical, thin, perky-boobed female ideal.''

As these things tend to go, and she being savvy about what sells in women's magazines and all, she launched a web site, formerlyhot.com, in 2008. "I started Formerly Hot after my sudden realization that I was no longer who I'd always been -- a pretty girl who navigated the world partially aided by the advantage of her looks...I had crossed a line into strange, uncharted life territory, one in which I no longer felt like me. I joked to friends that I was 'formerly hot' and clearly I struck a nerve. There are many women like me, bitchslapped into a new category of person: adult 'tweens,' not quite middle-aged, but no longer our reckless, restless, gravity-defying selves."

In no time she had 30,000 site visitors a month and book offers. And presto! Here it is!

Of course, she has opened herself to critical assault. Salon.com ranked her book just above supermarket trash magazines and the site Jezebel said her message was defeatist. But Dolgoff fights back, saying she is "not dignifying certain posts with a response, and showing up at the authors' doors, chaining them to their radiators and having Kristin Chenoweth read aloud to them in her squeaky little voice until they swear that the next time they'll at least READ THE BOOK THEY'RE CRITIQUING (capital letters are hers) before they critique it."

Oh, no! Now the theater critics who love Chenoweth will go after Dolgoff, but I bet she figures that the female hoi polloi -- all those women who fret about their looks once they hit 40 or 30 -- will save her from her high-minded detractors. Judging by the amount and content of the online response her website gets, she's probably right.

The question remains: why would women in their 30s and 40s feel that the best years of their lives are past? Why do women identify themselves by their looks? Even those who are highly accomplished do so. It's a perennial issue that crosses generations and deserves yet another thoughtful and honest study. It doesn't have to be boring or academic or a polemic.

But it can't be "Formerly Hot." It's funny, not to say ridiculous, that such a superficial and opportunistic book can make it to the point that we are talking and writing about it. Maybe we are just playing to the crowd. So is Dolgoff.