Part I. Graduate School. 1. A Job That Gets Old Fast: Age Studies, Academic Labor Criticism, and the Graduate Employee
2. Discourse of Aspiration: A Community of Nontraditional Women Students
3. The Accidental Academic, or How to Succeed in Academia through Failure and Doubt
4. Uses of My Anger: Negotiating Mothering, Feminism, and Graduate School
5. The Chaos of Kairos: Conflicting Discourses of Timing, Mothering, and Flexibility
Part II. Early Career (Including Pre-Tenure). 6. Working-Class Women on the Tenure Track
7. My Double Life in Academia, or Extreme Parenting on the Tenure Track
8. Solo on Stage: The Single Mother's Solitary Path to Tenure
9. Square Peg, Round Hole: My Journey toward Professor of Practice
10. Currency
11. Settling Down without Settling: Reflecting on Ambition, Agency, and Acquiescence
Part III. Midcareer (Including Post-Tenure). 12. Lives Like Mine: Notes at Midlife on Career Change
13. The Good Enough Academic Mother at Midcareer
14. Solitary in the South: Confessions of a Single Academic at Midlife
15. (In)Visibilities: A Woman Faculty of Color's Search for a Disabled Identity That Fits
16. Voicing Discontent: Gender, Working-Class Values, and Composition Studies
17. Staging Women's Lives on the "Altac" Track
18. Gratitude, Agency, and the Reformation of the Stage Approach
Part IV. Late Career and Retirement. 19. The Academic Slow Lane
20. Relentless Improvising: A Full Professor Struggles to Manage Work, Family, and Health
21. An Academic Evolution: From Chicanita to Mamá to Abuela
22. Love's Labors: Taking Care of Mother
23. A View of Her Own
24. The Work of Retirement
25. Retirement in Two Voices.