Description
Book SynopsisWinner of the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography and a
New York Times bestseller: a prize-winning, critically acclaimed memoir on life and aging —“An honest joy to read” (Alice Munro).
Trade Review"Athill writes…with clarity, calm, and common sense." -- Barbara Fisher - Boston Globe
"Life, not death, is her preoccupation…Reflections on old age, rather than on a long life lived are rare…It is rarer still for a woman to write such a book: so Athill’s candor and economic prose on religion, regrets, and sex are invigorating." -- Emma Jacobs - Financial Times
"Jean Rhys said that literature was a lake, and what mattered was to contribute to it, even if only a trickle. She contributed a narrow boiling river. Diana Athill has contributed a cool clear burn." -- Carole Angier - Literary Review
"A great gift. . . . This is a warm, inspiring book." -- Susan Salter Reynolds - Los Angeles Times
"Bracingly frank…joyful rather than grim… she offers clear-eyed wisdom of the grandma-you-wish-you’d-had variety." -- People
"To paraphrase Shakespeare, wisdom is bred in neither the heart nor the head, but in the bones that carry us through the decades. A few very talented artists, like Diana Athill, may persuade their old bones to yield up a glimpse or two of what they’ve learned." -- Laura Miller - Salon
"There is something terrifically comforting about a nonagenarian writing with clarity, wit and verve about getting old and facing death. . . . [Athill] evokes another grande dame of British letters in her uninhibited lifestyle and no-holds-barred, clarion voice: last year’s Nobel Prize winner, Doris Lessing." -- N. Heller McAlpin - San Francisco Chronicle
"Welcome and original." -- Dwight Garner - The New York Times
"She writes as a person of wide-ranging learning, a generalist, a lover of men and animals and a garden enthusiast, a person intoxicated with life." -- Erica Jong - The New York Times Book Review
"A spry dispatch on the condition of being elderly." -- The New Yorker
"Unusually appealing. . . . To readers Athill delivers far more than modest pleasure: Her easy-going prose and startling honesty are riveting, for whither she has gone many of us will go as well." -- Michael Dirda - Washington Post Book World
"A perfect memoir of old age—candid, detailed, charming, totally lacking in self-pity or sentimentality and above all, beautifully, beautifully written." -- The Costa Award Judges
