Cover Memoirs about ageing by Nell Irvin Painter, Deborah Levy, Donald Hall and others show later life as a time to begin again (Photo: Gustavo Fring/Pexels)
Memoirs about ageing by Nell Irvin Painter, Deborah Levy, Donald Hall and others show later life as a time to begin again (Photo: Gustavo Fring/Pexels)
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From a Princeton historian turned art student to a poet who traded verse for prose, these memoirs about ageing treat later life as a time to begin again
Popular culture often treats later life as a problem to be managed, with older people expected to protect their reputations, accept diminishing ambitions and ease gracefully out of the spotlight. These narratives assume that ageing is primarily a story of loss, leaving little room for appetite, reinvention or the freedom to get things wrong. The best memoirs about ageing challenge that assumption without resorting to easy optimism. Their authors surrender hard-won authority to become students again, question the portraits of older women they inherited or let declining stamina reshape their art rather than bring it to an end. None pretends the body stands still. Instead, these books make a more compelling case: that later life can bring fresh risks, unexpected pleasures and a willingness to explore that the years spent building a reputation rarely allowed.
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Nell Irvin Painter’s ‘Old in Art School’: what happens when a Princeton professor becomes a beginner?
Above Nell Irvin Painter swapped a Princeton chair for art school at 64 (Photo: Counterpoint)
Nell Irvin Painter swapped a Princeton chair for art school at 64 (Photo: Counterpoint)
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At 64, Nell Irvin Painter gave up her chair as Edwards Professor of American History at Princeton to enrol as an art undergraduate. She went on to earn a BFA at Rutgers and an MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her memoir is most interesting for what it refuses to flatter. An instructor told her she would never be an artist, and rather than retreat behind her academic reputation, she examined the aesthetic, racial and gendered assumptions behind the verdict.
She also notes how art schools equate genius with youth and swagger, sidelining the disciplined perspective an older Black scholar brings. The reward is a beginner’s freedom that no institution can withdraw, and a resilience her younger classmates, still anxious for approval, rarely have.
Deborah Levy’s ‘Real Estate’: how does a writer approach her 60s on her own terms?
Above Deborah Levy's acclaimed memoir, ‘Real Estate’, offers reflections on freedom and later life (Photo: Penguin UK)
Deborah Levy's acclaimed memoir, ‘Real Estate’, offers reflections on freedom and later life (Photo: Penguin UK)
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Approaching 60, with a long marriage over and her children grown, Deborah Levy asks what an older woman writer can claim as her own, in property and in ideas. Literature, she observes, tends to cast such women as keepers of domestic comfort, monitors of other people’s passions or lonely, tragic figures.
In this culmination of her “living autobiography” trilogy, she declines all three roles. Moving between London and Paris on literary fellowships, she writes with real appetite about solitude, architecture and work. Her quiet provocation is that turning 60 can end the performance of a self designed for others, so that a home becomes a structure built to shelter creative independence rather than to meet obligation.
Florida Scott-Maxwell’s ‘The Measure of My Days’: is old age really calm?
Above Jungian analyst and writer Florida Scott-Maxwell embraced varied experience in old age (Photo: Penguin)
Jungian analyst and writer Florida Scott-Maxwell embraced varied experience in old age (Photo: Penguin)
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Florida Scott-Maxwell, an American-born suffragist, playwright and Jungian analyst, kept the notebooks for this 1968 classic in her mid-80s while living in an English care setting. She rejects the image of serene, passive old age and insists that the old know it as far more than a disability: an intense, varied experience that stretches human capacity.
Anger and impatience, in this memoir about ageing, are not signs of decline but raw energy looking for an outlet as physical agency narrows, and the inner life grows more vivid as the outer one shrinks. Facing death, she skips both piety and dread. If an afterlife exists, she burns with interest; if not, she is ready to rest.
Donald Hall’s ‘A Carnival of Losses’: can failing stamina improve your writing?
Above Poet Donald Hall wrote candid late essays from his New Hampshire farm (Photo: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Poet Donald Hall wrote candid late essays from his New Hampshire farm (Photo: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
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On his family farm in New Hampshire, poet Donald Hall lived with neuropathy, cancer and orthopaedic limits. He no longer had the stamina that lyric verse demands, yet his prose grew sharper as he stripped away the ornament of his youth in favour of directness. He refuses to frame ageing as a triumph of will; the very old, he suggests, can seem a separate species from another galaxy.
His late essays also record how society infantilises the elderly, including a museum guard who crouched to speak slowly to him in his wheelchair. Hall answers with satire rather than despair, and the humour is what keeps the loss from turning into self-pity.
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Penelope Lively’s ‘Ammonites and Leaping Fish’: what can memory offer in your 80s?
Above Writer Penelope Lively on memory and perspective in later life (Photo: Fig Tree)
Writer Penelope Lively on memory and perspective in later life (Photo: Fig Tree)
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Writing in her 80s, Penelope Lively accepts that back problems and arthritis have curtailed her gardening. She does what small tasks she can and declines to weep over the rest, a stoicism that reads as realism rather than resignation.
Her larger argument concerns memory, which she treats not as a neurological weakness but as a vantage point. An older mind, she shows, occupies several time periods at once and can set today’s events against a century of lived history. Domestic objects become doorways into the past, and slowing down becomes a way of seeing more. It is a perspective that youth, however energetic, cannot duplicate.
Carolyn G Heilbrun’s ‘The Last Gift of Time’: why did she abandon her youthful plan to end her life?
Above Literary critic Carolyn G Heilbrun on the freedom of life beyond 60 (Photo: Random House Publishing Group)
Literary critic Carolyn G Heilbrun on the freedom of life beyond 60 (Photo: Random House Publishing Group)
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Repelled by portraits of old age, the young Carolyn G Heilbrun resolved to end her life at 70, convinced that everything after was an undignified epilogue. Then she passed 60 and found a freedom she had never known in youth or midlife. She discarded academic rivalries, resigned her post at Columbia University and stopped performing the politeness expected of women.
She also bought a small country house of her own, spending structured periods in solitude apart from her husband. Her most striking insight is that knowing each pleasure might be the last does not darken life but gives it depth, freeing her from long-term ambition to live fully in the present.
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After more than a decade in lifestyle media, Clifford has mastered the art of writing seriously about things that are fun—and writing fun things about people who take themselves very seriously. At Tatler Asia, he helped steer its flagship lists, Tatler’s Most Influential and Asia’s Most Stylish. And today, he leads T-Labs, Tatler Asia’s content innovation hub, where he continues the noble pursuit of lifestyle storytelling, spinning stories on wealth, entertainment, necessary style, Hallyu, Hollywood, beauty and more for audiences across Asia.
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