“Growing old,” said Bette Davis, “is not for sissies.”
As 91-year-old Diana Athill, never a sissy, travels the roads taken, she reports on how it is from SOMEWHERE TOWARD THE END (wherever the end may be). Although my mother said, “The golden years are 14-Karat brass,” Athill’s journey is actually golden.
This is important. For Athill is not the only one on that road. We’re all growing older. Well, maybe not growing. More like getting there.
With 78 million American boomers hitting 60 with a bang, writers increasingly focus on the dilemmas of older characters. Reviewers and readers grow older by the minute. As writers get gray—and grayer, they write about what it’s like. Or not to like.
Lately, many writers in their 70s and yes, their 80s, have turned their magnifying glasses onto what happens or doesn’t happen with age. Philip Roth’s EVERYMAN and EXIT GHOST, Margaret Drabble’s THE SEA LADY: A LATE ROMANCE, Jose Saramago’s DEATH WITHOUT INTERRUPTIONS. Larry McMurtry’s WHEN THE LIGHT GOES all focus on the failures of flesh and spirit, the losses accompanying too many candles on a birthday cake.
Athill’s story of what it’s like now and how it’s been doesn’t focus on losses or the failures of flesh and spirit. Yet she doesn’t scant these. The epigraph to her dispatches from the age front is from Edgar Leslie: “It ain’t no sin, To take off your skin, And dance about, In your bones.”
The bones she dances in are alive and well. Even though she lost interest in sex in her 70s (she never says why), the many men in her life fill her memories. She always preferred black men--who always preferred her because she is white. Some were married, some not. Except for Paul, an early lover whose jilting remained painful after 20 years, her affairs petered out to companionship.
For Barry, her lover in her 40s, she saved – and 50 years later is still saving his life. Despite the string of younger lovers he brought into the home they shared even after their romance died, she cared for all his medical problems. Bedridden, he still remains in her care. Not only did Diana invite Sally, the most important of these women, to live with them but she dedicates her “memoir” to Sally, her husband, and their children.
When Athill “ceased to be a sexual being,” she concentrated more sharply on her belief that God does not exist, that the nature of the world cannot be grasped, that religion is composed of “fairy stories.”
She says she is lucky. She is. Always looking on the bright side , she has few regrets about her life. Still able to drive, not incontinent, enjoying her garden, and most of all, able to find surcease in examining her life and writing about it, Athill is still young. She could give lessons to us all.
My bumper sticker announces, “Inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.” Diana Athill's book--and life-- tells you what happened and how to keep that young person alive no matter where you are on that road.
She may be at the hill, but she still can climb it. Wherever readers are in their own journeys, SOMEWHERE TOWARDS THE END is a must for all of us who need to follow that road.
