Aging through Precarious Time: Maintenance and Milling in The Cost of Living and Weather

Abstract

Changes to working life and retirement are reshaping temporalities of aging. This essay identifies a growing interest by women writers in the narrative possibilities these changes present. Examining the relation between narrative form, aging, and precarious work in Deborah Levy's The Cost of Living (2018) and Jenny Offill's Weather (2020), this essay argues that contemporary narratives of midlife aging offer evidence of new and different conceptions and representations of time, whereby time is shaped by the elongated precarity of care and work. The argument builds on work by Lauren Berlant (2011), Elizabeth Povinelli (2011), and Lisa Baraitser (2017) that claims that the challenges of the twenty-first century demand that we reimagine future time through the lens of endurance and finds a model for endurance in the time frames of maintenance and milling proposed in The Cost of Living and Weather.