When I was writing Keep, I tried to enter the hearts and minds of my three main characters: Jacob, who’s 20-something and gay; Eleanor, a middle-aged mother of three; and Harriet, an octogenarian poet. I have different things in common with each of my subjects, but in terms of age, the only one whose experience was out of reach for me was Harriet. What is it like being old?
I read around the topic, looking at aging from various perspectives, and learned that the elderly are not so different from the rest of us, and that becoming old doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, in perimenopause, I actually have some insight into the process; like many seniors, I have chronic health problems, memory lapses, and a newfound feeling of being dismissed because of my age and gender—an often-described sense of invisibility in the world. (However, being invisible has its perks). Here are some book recommendations, about being old, that were not only helpful and enlightening, but are also wonderful reads.
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In her essay “On Aging Alone,” Sharon Butala notes that “the boundary between solitude and loneliness is permeable and unstable.” At the outset, she paints a picture of her eight-year-old self, sitting on the schoolyard steps while everyone else is playing softball. “Seventy years later,” she writes, “I still recall this moment, although without the shame I once associated with it—my peculiarities, my sullenness—as being when my status as a loner and a pursuer of solitude was cemented.” Observing a pleasure in aloneness, as well as the social stigma of it, Butala goes on to explore a more pernicious solitude; the pervasive loneliness of old age. At eighty—widowed, and physically separated from remaining friends and family (half are now ghosts)—she sometimes sees herself as having “outlived” or “overstayed” her life, her “soul … connected to the dead” while “the body is bereft.” This moving reflection is part of This Strange Visible Air, a larger collection of essays on aging and mortality.
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Alayna Munce’s When I Was Young and in My Prime is a poetic and tenderhearted novel that I read years ago and returned to recently. Told from multiple points of view, and in various ways, the book was surely ahead of its time when it was first published; it reads now a little like autofiction (particularly when it inhabits the writer-granddaughter’s perspective), and has a genre-bending panache, moving elliptically from section to section (and reminding me, at times, of the writing of Jenny Offill). Munce uses a wide range of voices to tell her story, including those of her elderly grandparents, whose present and former lives are poignantly imagined. In one especially memorable part—a scene in which the grandmother is being prepared for her move to a nursing home—a failure of memory leads to suspended resentments and a joyous mother-daughter greeting, caught in repeat. Witnessed by the granddaughter, and described as “a dish of candies too sweet for you to keep your hand from drifting back,” it encapsulates the generous nature of this book.
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In The Age of Creativity, Emily Urquhart chronicles her artist father’s decline in old age, his weakening body and failing memory, but juxtaposes this with his miraculous, late-life output, the persistence of his imagination, and an unflagging interest in the world and in art. If this is a chiaroscuro portrait, the effect is more light than dark; Urquhart marvels at a creativity that sustained the artist in challenging times, writing lovingly of her dad and their close relationship. For me, the brilliance of the memoir has something to do with the way it effortlessly toggles between the individual and the collective, examining the father’s work and the arc of his career against a larger canvas of art history.
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Elizabeth Hay’s All Things Consoled is another memoir told from a daughter’s perspective—but this time, by the difficult daughter, and thus, offers an altogether darker vision. It’s a masterful double portrait that’s at times unsparing, yet always compassionate, in which the author depicts her ambitious and menacing father, her blithe (and hilariously frugal) mother, detailing their marriage, work, and family life, as she remembers it. When her parents are moved to a nearby nursing home in Ottawa, Hay cares for them in their final days, proving her love and fortitude (both to them and herself). Unflinching in the face of death, she shows us her father’s rage against the dying of the light, and her mother’s grace and ultimate despair, sharing that sense Butala describes, that they’d “overstayed” their lives. It’s a truly absorbing read, low-toned and intimate, and one that I’ve revisited in need; a book that offers a peculiar kind of comfort as I—another difficult daughter—enter the trials and revelations of late life care.
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M. Travis Lane’s Ash Steps is her 14th collection of poetry and, arguably, one of her best. She was almost 80 when she published it, proving Emily Urquhart’s thesis that late life can be a remarkably creative and productive time. Following the death of her husband, Lane writes of widowhood, loneliness and mortality, and as readers, we are immersed in her uniquely haunted world; looking at reflections in dark windows, or on the face and flux of various planes of water. There is a sense the poet is stranded on this side of the glass, while her husband is on the other, but sending her regular transmissions from afar: a ripple in the rain barrel, those titular ash steps.
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A timely tale of ownership and loss, loneliness and connection, and a meditation on all the stuff in our lives.
Home staging is an art of erasure. But in some cases—no matter how much clutter you remove, or how many coats of white paint you apply—stains bleed through, and memories rise from the walls like ghosts. Harriet, an elderly poet whose eccentricities have been compounded by years of living alone, must sell her beloved house. Having been recently diagnosed with dementia, she is being moved into a care facility against her wishes. When stagers Eleanor and Jacob are hired for the job, they quickly find themselves immersed in Harriet’s brimming and mysterious world, but as they struggle to help her, their own lives are unravelling.
Keep is a meditation on all the stuff in our lives—from the singular, handcrafted artifact to indelible, mass-produced plastics. As Jenny Haysom excavates the material of our domestic spaces, she centres the people within them and celebrates the power of memory, even when it falters.