Crises of Queer Midlife in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Adult Onset.

This article examines Ann-Marie MacDonald’s 2014 novel *Adult Onset* as a critical engagement with the mid-life crisis narrative through the lens of queer theories of temporality, family, and adulthood. It focuses on the protagonist, Mary Rose MacKinnon, a married lesbian mother and author, whose mid-life crisis reveals ambivalence toward homonormative ideals of queer progress and successful aging, exemplified by her complicated relationship to the It Gets Better Project—a campaign promoting a linear narrative of queer youth overcoming adversity to achieve stable adulthood. The novel queers family temporalities by portraying Mary Rose’s simultaneous caregiving for young children and her elderly mother, whose memory loss unsettles normative generational succession, and by introducing multispecies kinship through the family dog, Daisy, which disrupts anthropocentric and heteronormative models of aging and legacy. Ultimately, *Adult Onset* offers alternative conceptions of mid-life as a lateral, non-linear process that challenges dominant cultural scripts of progress, decline, and futurity within both queer and heteronormative frameworks.