Crazy Age: Thoughts on Being Old

 

 

Like Diana Athill's Somewhere Towards the End, this series of perceptive and warm-hearted essays is an incisive look at aging. Jane Miller dips back and forth easily between the personal and the literary, discussing the deep sustaining joys of friendship; the treatment of old age in literature from Tolstoy to Updike, Wharton to de Beauvoir; the loss of interest in such once-central preoccupation as fashion and sex; physical ailments; and exactly how age changes others' perceptions of one, including within one's own family. This reflective, intimate memoir beautifully examines and rethinks what it means to be old in a culture which prides youth and views old age as a slow decline towards the end of life.