Now's the time to be bold.
Writers have striven to survey the landscape of old age since Shakespeare wrote King Lear. But the Bard’s iconic image of the dying and raging patriarch is hardly a contemporary portrait. Today, when writers, like all of us, are living and working into extra innings, a new literature is emerging to describe how life post-50 is a different beast than it was in our grandparents’ day.
Technology wouldn’t work identifying Amy, but Ephron consoled herself knowing that when she forgot many things, she could whip out her phone. Athill never married, but had a series of long affairs. The last liaison she writes about happened “on the frontier between late middle age and being old.” Her lover was a Caribbean man named Sam. Not having too much else in common, she admits, they did little else but have a pleasant supper and cavort in bed. His desire for her kept her interested for seven years and is likely to keep readers interested — and perhaps inspired — as well.
“I am much less involved with what are called the social amenities,” she wrote to a friend at 79. “If I want to excuse myself from almost any company I feel quite free to do so. And sometimes I feel impatient with the hedging and the hum-hawing that can so often go on about unimportant problems, and it is really a pleasure to simply cut them short…many people are affronted by it, no matter how discreetly and nicely it is done. Too bad.
“Out the Window,” the signature essay of the earlier collection, eloquently described Hall’s “chair life.” No longer driving or even walking unassisted, he spent hours in his blue chair staring outside at the seasons, plants, birds and ever-changing landscape.“Generation after generation, my family’s old people sat at this window to watch the year,” he wrote about the worn, beloved farmhouse he inherited.
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