Thanks to "ongoing research of consumer needs and social trends," America's premier greeting-card company has discovered the truth that made M. Scott Peck rich: Life is difficult.

We human beings catch diseases, some of them incurable. We get downsized. We lose our minds or our parents to Alzheimer's. Some of us even die.

Well, thank goodness we now have one less worry—Hallmark's new Thinking of You greeting cards "account for more of life's relationships and complications, challenges and struggles, concerns and moods." And just in the nick of time. As one of the front-running lemmings rushing to the edge of 50, I've been needing those cards for several years now. The old "hope you'll soon be on your feet again" didn't quite convey the sentiments I wished to express to a friend facing permanent invalidism from a damaged heart, or to another friend who recently wrote that hospice has fitted her with a morphine pump. And when the twentysomething daughter of friends was brutally murdered in her Washington, D.C., apartment, the traditional "God will comfort you" seemed presumptuous.

A decade ago, when I worked for the American outpost of a British publisher, we used to have good-natured arguments about book titles. Faced with cancer, depression, illness, or loss, Brits coped. Americans, I tirelessly pointed out, triumphed. Brits lived with. Americans vanquished. When the U.K. office sent us a book titled Making Friends with Pain, we Yanks drew the line. No way, we said. We're not kinky.

Maybe we were just young. Alas, "some 3.89 million people will turn 50 this year," Hallmark announces. That's more people than live in Chicago, many of us now the elders of our families, all of us dealing with unexpected limitations and loss, most of us noticing for the first time that we are mortal. My turn comes next year, which may be why a friend of mine, just old enough to have missed the Boomer label, keeps sending me books with titles like The Alchemy of Illness and A Year to Live.

Of course, people have been turning 50 for some time now, and they've managed it without Hallmark's difficult-occasion cards. You have to tough it out when you're not part of a targeted market segment. Unlike graybeards of previous generations, though, we Boomers think we are inventing menopause, weight gain, and aging parents (and, yes, there are greeting cards that deal with all of the above), just as we once invented sex, natural childbirth, and Starbucks. It's all uncharted territory, and we will pay for anything that promises to show us the way.

This does not mean that we are ready to settle for coping with our problems or—heaven forbid—making friends with them. For every title like Living Posthumously: Confronting the Loss of Vital Powers, there are dozens that promise we can Live Better Longer or enjoy Spontaneous Healing. And the Thinking of You cards, for all their realism, still are "uplifting, humorous, or comforting," says Hallmark executive Steve Bellis.

Well, that's a relief. As Ernest Becker pointed out in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, culture is built on our need to repress our fear of death. Unfortunately, Becker died of cancer the year he received the prize, at age 49. It was comforting when we could still believe that death happened only to other people—folks who, because they neglected their Stairmasters or their vitamin E, somehow deserved to get old. It's alarming when the bell tolls for someone our age.

My daughter Heidi, 24, has a friend whose mother has cancer. It has invaded her brain and her bones. Chemotherapy is no longer effective; the only thing left for medicine to do is relieve pain. Heidi's friend, a soberly realistic Gen Xer, wrote: "The doctors say my mother is dying. Unlike you and me, of course."

With 50 in sight, it's getting harder and harder to believe that we will never die. The evidence is all to the contrary. But "dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return" is not a concept that sells books, or greeting cards. So we glance sidelong at death and crank out titles like the quintessentially American Dying Well: The Prospect for Growth at the End of Life. And we comfort one another with these words from Hallmark: "Choose your moment. Aim high. Believe in yourself. You can do it!"

LaVonne Neff is an acquisitions editor at Layola Press.

Stuck on Relationships

After watching both the television production of Pride and Prejudice and the movie Sense and Sensibility, a friend of mine, in the midst of selecting novels for his course on contemporary fiction, remarked that, however distant late-eighteenth-century notions of decorum may be from the remnants of manners in the late twentieth century, Jane Austen's material was essentially the same as Terry McMillan's in Waiting to Exhale. They both were concerned with how to secure an acceptable male. McMillan's Robin, Bernadine, Gloria, and Savannah may have criteria different from those of Austen's Elizabeth and Jane Bennett or Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, but all these characters are struggling to give reason at least some say over their libidos, which seem invariably to lead them astray.

My friend shook his head, remembering how his own daughters dismissed the prospective suitors he enthusiastically promoted—and unwittingly damned—by describing them as "nice boys." Nice boys, his daughters made it clear, are boring. What accounted for this self-destructive streak in women? he wanted to know. Did Calvin or Freud have the right explanation? Was it biology or sheer perversity that led women to prefer men like Willoughby and Russell?

Not wanting to provide my friend with more ammunition, I didn't bring up the spate of self-help books like Dr. Laura's Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives, all of which involve the decade's most nebulous noun—relationships. Instead, I attempted to steer the conversation toward the socioeconomic differences between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Wasn't there something poignant in the circumstances of the Dashwood girls, I asked, cast out of their childhood home and forced to market themselves to likely bachelors in order to save the other sisters and the widowed mother? Certainly, he agreed, but that merely fueled his vexation. After all, McMillan's protagonists are economically self-sufficient, upper-middle-class professionals. Likewise with Roz, Charis, and Tony, Margaret Atwood's threesome in The Robber Bride. So why, he rephrased the question, can't women, now that they're no longer dependent on men for economic survival, write about something besides getting a man—the just-right man?

Men write novels about "relationships" too, of course. Look at Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, much of Dickens, and even Henry James. But they also write about a whole universe of other topics, from Mississippi riverboats to murdering the landlady. They write epics on war, race, and politics. They find occupations fascinating and make even unlikely industries like whaling and meatpacking interesting. Can't women focus on any material other than their need of men?

Certainly women write as well as men and often better. No one is so deft at nailing down metaphysical nuances as Muriel Spark nor more stylistically daring than Toni Morrison. Skill is not in question here, only subject matter.

Nor do I discount the significance of their almost single subject. The attractions that pull men and women together and the aversions that push them apart account for a major and essential portion of life, one that needs exploring from the point of view of half the world's population. Barred from much of the world's business until recent decades, women have simply followed the dictum to write about what they know best—romance, marriage, sex, families, and cooking.

Of course, until relatively recently women didn't write—or at least publish—much of anything. Yes, there are the surviving lyrics of Sappho. A few medieval mystics. A handful of poems from the Renaissance, and Elizabeth I's translation of Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy. Marie de La Fayette wrote five novels about the romantic intrigues of the seventeenth-century French court of Henri II. But that's about it for fiction. Pretty slim pickings until the eve of the nineteenth century, when Fanny Burney burst upon the scene with Evelina, Cecillia, and Camilla, followed soon by Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen.

Almost two centuries later, women novelists are still locked into the same subject matter—romantic love. It often comes with a thick veneer of irony these days, but nevertheless, most women's fictional output appears to be little more than footnotes to Seinfeld. Are there no alternatives? Are "relationships" the only topic we find interesting? Is there no other repository where writing women can invest their passion?

Well, yes. Nature and God. Flannery O'Connor's stories and novels are about as unromantic a look at life as one could ask for. The few sexual situations in which her grotesque characters find themselves only serve to illustrate their pitiful penchant for self-delusion—Manley Pointer stealing Hulga's wooden leg, Tarwater's rape by the lavender-eyed devil. The only ecstasy ever depicted by O'Connor is spiritual—Ruby Turpin's culminating vision of heaven in "Revelation" being my favorite.

Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, takes both the natural world and God for its subject. None of her ensuing narratives concern themselves with women pining for men, or vice versa. Instead, they talk about trips to the North Pole, airplane acrobatics, moths, Ecuadorian deer, Chinese politicians. Even The Living, which purports to be a novel, treats the several marriages that occur within its pages primarily as historical artifacts. Not too many decades ago, Dillard would have been described as having a "masculine mind" because of her wide-ranging interests.

Curiously, women writers have also excelled since World War I at writing murder mysteries. Ever since Agatha Christie's name became synonymous with the genre, women have come near to dominating the field. Dorothy Sayers bumped up the intellectual content a notch with her Lord Peter Wimsey series. Ruth Rendell and P. D. James now reign as the current aristocracy of British detective fiction. In this country, Patricia Cornwell (Ruth Bell Graham's biographer) specializes in serial killers. Though lust sometimes provides the motivation in mysteries by women, the crime is just as likely to be precipitated by avarice, envy, or pride.

But such works are, for the most part, dismissed as genre fiction by the literary establishment. And when I used Dillard and O'Connor as examples to refute my friend's argument, he discounted them as anomalies. His point still holds true for most fiction written by women, he claimed. And I had to admit, if only silently, that I was hard-pressed to prove otherwise.

But my friend is nothing if not fair-minded, and he continued to ruminate. "On the other hand," he asked, "what do men today really write about? Okay, so women fixate on acquiring an adequate man, but men write about becoming an adequate man. First you get their bildungsromans, the coming-of-age novels—everything from Larry Watson to Cormac McCarthy to Mark Helprin. Then you get the midlife crisis stories—Updike and Roth and Bellow and Carver."

He threw up his hands. "So I guess you could say what men write about is—themselves."

I had to admit that, looked at this way, women's fiction didn't seem so limited after all. For all I know, the answer to how we—men and women—choose our fictional subjects lies in the third chapter of Genesis. Maybe it will always be the rare woman who writes a novel about whales or warfare. Perhaps as a tribe women are indeed driven more by the search for the ultimately adequate man than by the sweaty-browed struggle against thorns and thistles. I don't know if C. S. Lewis ever actually said the line given to him in the movie version of Shadowlands: "We read to know we're not alone." But if fiction is supposed to lift us from the confines of our isolation, women writers continue to pass on a variant of that aphorism, Eve's version learned back in Eden: it takes two to tango.

Virginia Stem Owens, a member of the editorial board of Books & Culture and a novelist, essayist, and poet, is the director of the Milton Center at Kansas Newman College.

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@booksandculture.com.

Nov/Dec 1997, Vol. 3, No. 6, Page 3