Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler

Rebecca is fifty-three. Her children are grown. Her career is borrowed from her late husband. She wonders if this was not meant to be her life at all. Once she was in college living out the life of the intellectual she fondly remembers. But when she tries to reconnect with the man she thought her soul mate then, he has turned into a rigid, unhappy professor. Maybe her life is what it was meant to be after all. Of course if I were Rebecca, I would find something far more interesting to do.