In fall 2017, writer Ada Calhoun described the “new” midlife crisis hitting Generation X in an Oprah essay. She wrote about women who were exhausted, overwhelmed, pounded by a unique combination of family and financial stress and widely overlooked by a country obsessed with baby boomers and millennials.

Now, Calhoun explores the issue in depth in her latest book, “Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis.”

She isn’t writing about the stereotypical male midlife crisis of sports cars and marital affairs, but a quieter, more frazzled one, involving sleepless nights and sudden rages behind closed doors. She weaves the personal stories of hundreds of Gen X women with history and statistics that show the particular predicament of women born between 1965 and 1980.

“Gen X has arrived in middle age to almost no notice, largely unaware, itself, of being a uniquely star-crossed cohort,” she writes, arguing that we grew up the first generation of women believing we should be able to “have it all” but instead faced historic obstacles and are the first likely to be downwardly mobile compared with our parents.

The book makes a powerful argument to Gen X women to stop saying to ourselves, like Calhoun once did, that we are “lucky and have no right to complain.” Instead, we should accept that “This is a bumpy stretch in life. We should not expect to feel fine,” she writes.

Calhoun speaks directly to her own generation, peppering the book with so many specific cultural touchstones, from the Challenger explosion to Koosh balls to the slime-filled TV show “Double Dare,” that I found reading “Why We Can’t Sleep” to be a singular experience — driving home her point that Gen X is so often overlooked.

“Why We Can’t Sleep,” Ada Calhoun; Grove (267 pages, $26).