The Most Interesting Part of Your Life
The Atlantic · LC · trust 37/100
Forget starting over. In Valeria Luiselli’s new novel, it’s the messy middle of life that counts.
Illustration by María Medem July 28, 2026, 7 AM ET Share Save Reinvention can often seem like an inevitable part of getting older. The midlife crisis is practically baked into the American life cycle, at least in popular culture—a moment that can yield a new career, a new marriage, or, at the very least, a flashy new car. The 1960s radical Jerry Rubin wrote in his memoir Growing (Up) at 37 that he needed a completely new belief system to bring him back from a crisis so deep that, as he put it, “I felt dead at 34.” For him, as for many, the idea of a clean break with the past felt not only appealing but necessary.
But for those alarmed by the turbulence of midlife, the writer Valeria Luiselli’s novels offer a refreshingly different perspective. “I once read in a book by Saul Bellow that the difference between being alive and dead is just a matter of viewpoint,” the narrator of Luiselli’s debut novel, Faces in the Crowd , recalls. She goes on to explain that the “living look from the center outward, the dead from the periphery to some kind of center.” According to this worldview, the middle of life, far from a time to reset yourself, is the crux of human existence. And in Luiselli’s new novel, Beginning Middle End , it’s also where the messiest, most interesting, and most exciting parts of a story occur.
Creatively speaking, Luiselli is a bit of a chameleon, one who could herself be mistaken for a serial reinventor. The daughter of a Mexican diplomat, she was educated in both English and Spanish. At the start of her career, she wrote in Spanish, but after settling in New York, she switched to English with Tell Me How It Ends , a 2017 book-length essay about her experience as a volunteer court interpreter for undocumented Central American children . She hasn’t published a book of nonfiction since, but she recently told El País that it took her years to determine whether Beginning Middle End would be a novel or an essay. The fineness of the line between the two genres indicates that in her work overall, change is a matter of gradations. The same is certainly true of this book.
Beginning Middle End: A Novel By Luiselli, Valeria Buy Book Beginning Middle End starts with its nameless, newly single narrator, a Mexican writer living in New York, embarking on a monthslong European trip with her preteen daughter. In theory, this is a fresh beginning post-divorce, but in truth, she’s still in the thick of things: busy worrying about her career, her aging mother, the fact that her daughter will never see her ex-stepbrother again. Luiselli describes her narrator’s age as a time when “what one sees on one side is one’s children walking into life, and then, on the other side, one’s parents on their way out. The middle, then, is a difficult vantage point, where life and death meet.”
Still, the novel is an ode to middles. The narrator thinks longingly of starting anew, but in practice, she’s eager for her existence as a mother and writer to get dull and stable again. Her interest in ordinariness (she dreams of a new “routine, a sustained everydayness”) separates Beginning Middle End from other recent divorce novels, such as Miranda July’s All Fours or Claire Vaye Watkins’s I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness , in which a female protagonist stages an irrevocable break with their marriage and married self.
Luiselli’s heroine, by contrast, likes continuity. It’s telling that her trip turns out not to include much wandering, though that was her original plan. But after only a few pages of country-hopping, she and her daughter arrive in Sicily, where an acquaintance has offered to lend them an apartment and where the protagonist’s grandmother was originally from. The narrator reports that “as soon as we stepped off the airplane I felt a deep sense of home—past or future, I’m not sure.” Regardless, she decides to remain in Sicily, and what seemed like a road novel reveals itself to be about settling down. Luiselli’s narrator still wants to make a calm life with her daughter, and maybe with a man as well: The acquaintance is an occasional lover of hers, and she awaits his return with rising sexual anticipation. Rather than give up on romance or motherhood, she grabs on to them both.
Yet the narrator still wants some change, even after she gives up on her vision of a summer spent bouncing from place to place. Once in Sicily, she and her daughter discuss reinvention often. They read Ovid’s Metamorphoses , and much of the novel is devoted to their quest to return a mosaic of the shape-shifting god Proteus that the narrator’s Sicilian grandmother stole from an archaeological site before immigrating to Mexico. While food shopping, they fixate on a sign on a fishmonger’s stall: Cu nasci tunnu un po’moriri pisci spada , it reads in Sicilian, which the narrator glosses as “if you are born being a tuna fish you can’t die a swordfish.” Both characters seem to bristle at this motto. The daughter’s reaction, in particular, suggests an impressively mature desire to embrace change rather than loathe it—no small feat for a girl who just lost her stepfather and stepbrother to a tough divorce.
As for the narrator, believing that a person can change is even more psychologically important in the aftermath of her marriage, which degraded into a brutality that she recalls as banal in its awfulness. To underscore this reality, Luiselli describes the abuse her character endured in vague, universal language, an attention-grabbing choice given that her prose is otherwise very precise. Her narrator doesn’t even mention her own ex-husband but alludes to “the men who caught us off guard, who escalated so slowly that we didn’t notice at first, because we trusted them, married them, spent a life with them.”
What comes next, though the narrator continues to use us rather than I , is clearly an account of frequent marital rape. After her…
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