Lately a lot of what I’ve been doing is driving around in the psychedelic late fall splendor of upstate New York thinking about Lily Allen’s song about discovering her exes’ purported sex toys in a Duane Reade bag.
It’s one of the most tabloidy details in Ms. Allen’s breakup record, “West End Girl.” Many have speculated that the lyrics on the album refer to her former partner, the actor David Harbour, although she has said in interviews that the songs on “West End Girl” blend truth and fiction.
But even if that discovery didn’t happen in real life, to me and my friends, all now in our forties, like Ms. Allen, the Duane Reade bag has become a kind of totem, a symbol of the lesson we’ve taken from this record: Vivid, raw, defiant honesty is the only way to deal with the often comical indignities of early middle age.
“West End Girl” came out at the end of October, in time for fans to dress up as the Duane Reade bag for Halloween. Ms. Allen herself went as the titular character of Ludwig Bemelmans’s children’s book “Madeline,” a nod to a song on the album that includes texts the narrator exchanges with her husband’s mistress, pseudonym “Madeline.”
Since then, Ms. Allen has been in the throes of a kind of promotional tour of her own indomitable 40-year-old hotness: She appeared, new breasts prominently on display, in a Colleen Allen bralette and skirt at the CFDA awards, and in a vintage see-through John Galliano for Dior dress at the premiere of the stage version of “The Hunger Games” in London.
And she’s ridden the Madeline mentions for all they’re worth. Even her Thanksgiving weekend, spent here in New York with Lena Dunham, included a Madeline reference, this time via an Instagrammed tray of actual madeleines from the Midtown bistro Benoit. It was Proustian catnip for the fans scrolling at home, who’ve been breathlessly chronicling every one of Ms. Allen’s theatrical moves since “West End Girl” was released.
And there have been many. Few celebrities are as gifted at manipulating the social media landscape as Ms. Allen, who came of age in the first wave of blog culture, just as my friends and I did. We’ve been narrating our lives on one social platform or another since Friendster. (And if you know what that is, hi, you are one of us.)
Turning 40, as Ms. Allen did this past May, is famously unsettling, but when it arrives it’s still somehow shocking how unglamorous your problems become. Your parents are suddenly old. Your kids are likely still very young, if you have them — many my age are exchanging fertility doctor recs the way we used to hype new bands. Or, like Ms. Allen, maybe you’re newly separated. Next up: exploring the glories of online dating. I used to joke that all my older friends who had kids had moved out of the city and developed drinking problems, and now I see the same thing happening to members of my former New York-or-die contingent.
Unless you got sober, as Ms. Allen has (and, of course, some of my friends have). It’s on “Relapse,” a track that appears six songs into “West End Girl,” that the album’s tone begins to shift from compelling but merely voyeuristic catastrophe porn to subtle, incisive commentary on the woes of early middle age. On “Relapse,” Ms. Allen describes the ache of longing for beloved former methods of anesthetization while trying to keep it together for the sake of the children. On “Dallas Major,” she sings about the humiliation of getting back on the dating apps (she and Mr. Harbour, met on one such app, Raya). “I’m almost nearly 40, I’m just shy of 5-foot-2 / I’m a mum to teenage children, does that sound like fun to you?” The chorus is “I hate it here.”
The rest of the record is filled with moments that, underneath the drama, speak to the cost of mistakes being higher now and of loss landing harder than it used to. This is not about the deliciously seedy, telenovela-ish details of “West End Girl,” but the sense of looking back at your old life, knowing it’s gone, and finding this new one full of horrors that your younger self couldn’t even have imagined but that are also sort of mesmerizing and hilarious.
You first listen to “West End Girl” for the gory details, like reading a romance novel for the hot sex. But a few spins in, you start to hear the sadness underneath it all, and then suddenly, you find yourself just wanting to be her — this emotionally wrecked badass with the guts to say she feels old and heartbroken and destroyed.
Like the rest of us elder millennials, Ms. Allen was taught to view everything as potential fodder for an unending documentary of our own lives, and she’s been masterful at leveraging her pain for maximum personal gain. She has said the album poured out of her in 10 short days when she sat down to write it just after the split, reportedly in late 2024. But she announced it was coming only four days before its release in late October. Two days later, the fairy-tale Brooklyn brownstone she shared with Mr. Harbour, believed to be the one discussed in the opening scenes of “West End Girl,” went on the market for nearly $8 million. (OK, admittedly, not all of the album is entirely relatable in its specifics.)
I suppose there’s a chance that “West End Girl” may soon be reduced to an exercise in tabloid rubbernecking, which these days is also how to keep the public’s attention. Conveniently, in a way, “Stranger Things,” the show starring Mr. Harbour, returned over Thanksgiving weekend. Meanwhile, she’s on “Saturday Night Live” as the musical guest on Dec. 13.
But Ms. Allen’s explicitness, her brazen extra-ness, feels to me more like an offering, a suggestion from someone inside the eye of my generation’s new midlife storm about how to deal with all of our own big messes when it’s no longer cute to be messy.
At dinner with some of my girlfriends recently, we covered the usual subjects — career, money, fertility, sex, good vintage stores upstate, and now, more and more often, mortality. As the waiter brought over a second bottle of wine, one friend joked that fixing our faces should solve most of these problems.
A few days later, hearing Ms. Allen sing, on a track called “Just Enough,” “Look at my reflection / I feel so drawn, so old / I booked myself a face-lift / Wondering how long it might hold,” I laughed out loud, alone with only the dogs in the car on our way to doggy day camp, the most peak middle-age vibe possible. It felt as if she had overheard our conversation before we even had it.
Lizzy Goodman, a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, is the author of “Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011.”
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