Act your age! From her mother's admonition in childhood, a middle-aged, twice-married mother of four and a product of the Deep South of the seventies makes her way through a meandering inner journey towards a quiet epiphany, revealing what her mother's words really mean. This rite of passage at the ungainly age of fifty unfolds through twelve memoir-like narratives that will evoke both laughter and tears. Each chapter is an independent reflection on the dozens of daily anecdotes that all people live each day in the course of growing up and growing older. Reading the narratives may be like going through a shoebox of old photographs found in the attic, not arranged in any seeming order but, in total, creating a logic of their own. Memorable characters rise from the narrator's Southern Gothic roots. The narrator, nameless Every Woman, prides herself in being an introspective and competent adult, but her naivete demonstrates that being an adult is really a state of mind. Coping with life's poignant struggles, like disease, old age, suicide, and murder, and its ordinary ones, like child-raising, teaching, pets, and churchgoing, she seeks sense in the nonsense with humor and with love.