Ageing

The Gift of Years

Joan Chittister · 2008

Chittister is a Benedictine nun, a theologian, and one of the wisest voices writing about the interior life. In this book she turns her attention to the spiritual territory of growing older — not as a problem to be managed but as a distinct and valuable phase of human development with its own gifts. Each short chapter takes a theme: rest, time, memories, wisdom, limitations, purpose — and considers it with a clarity and depth that is rare in writing about ageing. This is not a cheerful book about positive thinking. It is an honest book about what later life demands and what it offers. For anyone who has arrived at the second half of life wondering what it is for, Chittister offers some of the most intelligent companionship available.

Olive Kitteridge

Elizabeth Strout · 2008

Olive Kitteridge is difficult, opinionated, frequently wrong, and completely, gloriously alive. Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in stories follows Olive through her middle and later years in a small coastal town in Maine — her marriage, her grief, her failures of kindness and her moments of unexpected tenderness. What is so remarkable about the book is that Olive is allowed to be fully human in the way that older women in fiction rarely are: unglamorous, uncompromising, capable of great love and great damage, still changing at seventy. For readers who are tired of being offered either graceful decline or improbable radiance as the only models for later life, Olive Kitteridge is a revelation.

Being Mortal

Atul Gawande · 2014

Gawande is a surgeon who became troubled by the way medicine handles ageing and dying — treating both as problems to be solved rather than experiences to be navigated with dignity and care. This book is the result of his thinking: part medical journalism, part philosophy, part deeply personal reckoning with what it means to grow old and what it means to die well. He is not morbid. He is clear-eyed, compassionate, and full of stories of real people that stay with you. Being Mortal is for anyone who wants to think honestly about the later chapters of life — their own, or someone they love — without the usual evasions. It may be the most useful book about ageing written in the last twenty years.

At Seventy: A Journal

May Sarton · 1984

May Sarton kept journals throughout her life, and they are among the most honest records of a woman’s interior life in the twentieth century. At Seventy, written in her seventieth year, is perhaps the finest of them — a daily account of what it actually feels like to inhabit a seventy-year-old body and mind, to be creative and passionate and sometimes furious, to deal with the losses of age while refusing to become smaller. Sarton is not sentimental. She is direct, and sometimes impatient, and very funny. She writes about friendship, about flowers, about the difficulty of finishing books, about what it costs to be a woman who has lived on her own terms. For any woman navigating her later decades and wondering if she is alone in the complexity of what she feels, Sarton is magnificent company.

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand

Helen Simonson · 2010

A widowed, retired major in his late sixties finds an unexpected late-life romance and, along with it, the courage to question the rigid rules he has lived by for decades. Simonson writes about ageing with real warmth and gentle humour, making the case that a life can still open up in genuinely surprising ways well past the point most stories consider someone’s “story” to be over.

Still Alice

Lisa Genova · 2007

A Harvard professor at the height of her career begins losing her memory to early-onset Alzheimer’s, forcing her, and everyone who loves her, to reckon with what remains of a person when memory starts to go. Genova, a neuroscientist, writes with clinical precision and deep compassion about one of ageing’s most frightening possibilities, without ever losing sight of Alice’s humanity and humour along the way.