<blockquote> <p> A funny, fearless, no-holds-barred look at aging?hormone replacement therapy, online dating, eye lifts, and all </p> </blockquote> <p> As she approached her fiftieth birthday, Tracey Jackson found herself bombarded?at the gym, at parties, in conversations with friends?by a catchphrase on everyone's lips. "Fifty is the new thirty" and the endless magazine articles, photos, and T-shirts proclaiming the new aphorism had apparently bloomed out of a collective sense of denial, masking the true fears of a generation unwilling to relinquish their youth. </p> <p> With a comedy writer's training and a screenwriter's eye for detail, Jackson skewers the myth in <i>Between a Rock and a Hot Place</i>, a hilarious, bare-knuckled, and ultimately practical appraisal of what middle age <i>really</i> means today. Willing not only to face the elephant in the room, but to put him under a (large) microscope, Jackson confronts the truth about death, work, and sex in what the French call the "third age," using poignant, laugh-out-loud stories from her life. Jackson examines the changing roles of motherhood and wifehood; the necessity of planning a "career after your career"; the unvarnished reality of our aging bodies; and the generational shift in our perception of age ("<i>Tight abs</i> was not a phrase my grandmother had ever heard. And even if she had, her response would likely have been, <i>Who needs that when you have a girdle?</i>"). </p> <p> Turning fifty is a wake-up call?but one that can be greeted with a plan. Recounting the changes she went through, the things she learned (and things she didn't) en route to fifty, <i>Between a Rock and a Hot Place</i> navigates, with unsparing honesty and unerring wit, the confusion and uncertainty of the most significant uncharted transition in our lives. </p>