Wise by Frank Tallis review – how to turn your midlife crisis into a hero’s journey

I’m proud of how mild-mannered my midlife crisis is. First, the author, a clinical psychologist named Frank Tallis, diagnoses the problem. When our relatives die, as my mother did two years ago, they die in a hospital rather than at home. Comparably, the opening of Dante’s Inferno is: “In the middle of life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood, unable to discover the path ahead.”A midlife crisis doesn’t seem so bad after learning that Odysseus and Dante had one. As the psychoanalyst and author Anthony Storr once remarked, a striking number of self-proclaimed messiahs found their calling while in the grip of a midlife crisis.