Product description

Around midlife, when the magical age of 5 inexorably approaches and you increasingly fail to recognize yourself in the mirror, the fundamental question arises once again: Going out late, drinking heavily, flirting intensely – everything that has proven to be a reliable mood booster for decades suddenly brings less pleasure than a headache. Hobbies aren't really your thing either. So what to do with the rest of your life? Give it all up and start over under a false name? Retrain as a detective or psychoanalyst? Move to Hawaii? No, none of that is necessary.

Andrea Gerk shows how many wonderful little things life has in store once you have the necessary maturity to even recognize them: searching for mushrooms, cultivating your own quirks and idiosyncrasies, watching birds, inviting exes over for dinner, baking sourdough bread, having a cigarette again, putting together a playlist for your own funeral, practicing headstands.

Biography (Andrea Gerk)

Andrea Gerk was born in Essen in 1967. After studying Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen, she has worked as a literary and theatre critic and as a presenter for public radio stations since 1995. She lives in Berlin.

Biography (Moni Port)

Moni Port, born in 1968, trained as a bookseller after graduating from high school, then studied communication design at the Mainz University of Applied Sciences, specializing in illustration and book design. Since 1998, she has worked as a graphic designer for a publishing house and as a freelance illustrator. In 1999, she founded the Ateliergemeinschaftlabor (studio collective) in Frankfurt am Main.