You know the saying that happy families are all alike? I’m thinking there should be an addendum: Midlife crisis stories are inherently boring. Vague unease and ennui do not make for compelling drama.

Latest case in point: “The Slippery Year,” by Melanie Gideon. I so wanted to like the book, which got a write-up in today’s NYT in advance of its arrival next week, that I plowed my way through it waiting for the revelation or wisdom that would make reading it seem worthwhile. Sadly, it never came.

Gideon, no doubt a nice person if you know her, makes much too much ado about mundane domestic details and disappointments. Her husband buys a big motor home; she hates it. Her son needs a new Halloween costume; she’s a bad mother for talking him into trick-or-treating as wrongly incarcerated fallen angel. The dog dies. She and her husband can’t find a new bed they can both sleep upon. And so on.

Will this marriage last? Can she shake out of her funk? Do we really care? Gideon certainly isn’t interesting or insightful enough to make me care about her particular blues.

To add insult to injury, Gideon compressed the timeline of her angst to make it more compelling, the NYT reports. Apparently she and her editor came up with “The Slippery Year’s” slippery structure.

“I feel like I’m actually still in this three-year period of slippery transformation,” Gideon told the paper.

So maybe she should have waited until she made it through and actually had gained some wisdom or insight from the process.

Sandra Tsing Loh also recently wrote about her midlife crisis for The Atlantic, but she moved beyond her own marital ennui to question the state of marriage with the zeal of the newly disenchanted. The actual details about the breakup didn’t seem that compelling but her attempts to come to grip with it were: Loh directed her gaze beyond her own hearth, and her writing was stronger for it. Agree or disagree with her conclusions, at least it made for a compelling read.