Growing old gracefully

Ninety may be the new 70, but it is also seriously old, and no picnic. In her short, sharp, disconcerting new book, Diana Athill, the renowned editor turned writer who has just reached her 90th birthday, does not try to pretend otherwise; pretending is not, and never has been, her style. Here, she contemplates her own experience of growing older, compares it with some others, and offers a few tips to the rest of us, as we, or people we love, advance towards the minefield.

In many ways, she acknowledges, she has been, and still is, lucky. Born into a confident upper-middle-class family, imbued with what she now regards as ‘tribal smugness,’ she went to Oxford before the war and soon found the work she loved. She takes after her female relations, who have tended to remain healthy and retain their marbles. She still lives independently, in a flat at the top of a cousin’s house in north London, and drives herself up and down to Norfolk, her childhood home, despite a narrow miss on the motorway recently (not her fault, she points out). She takes full advantage of the fact that old women nowadays can wear nice clothes and flattering makeup, though she urges caution; too much red lipstick produces the effect of ‘a vampire bat disturbed in mid dinner.’

Nevertheless, getting old has meant giving up many pleasures, most of all sex. Diana Athill has touched on this deprivation before, but here she goes into more detail about her sexual history, and how (with regret) and when (in her mid-sixties) she realised that it had come to an end. After being painfully jilted before she was 20, she discovered that women, as well as men, could be ‘cheered up by sex without love’ and had a series of affairs, several of them with married men, before settling down, in her forties, with Barry, a West Indian playwright who has shared her life ever since.