Sixty: A Diary: My Year of Aging Semi-Gracefully - Softcover

Brown, Ian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1615193960 ISBN 13: 9781615193967

Publisher: The Experiment, 2017

Synopsis

“This is the thing, you see: I am on my way to being an old man. But at sixty, I am still the youngest of old men.”

As acclaimed journalist and author Ian Brown’s sixtieth birthday loomed, every moment seemed to present a choice: Confront, or deny, the biological fact that the end was now closer than the beginning. Brown chose instead to notice every moment—to try to capture precisely what he was experiencing, without panicking. Sixty is the result: an uncensored, seriocomic report, a slalom of day-to-day dramas (as husband, father, brother, friend, and neighbor), inquisitive reporting, and acute insights from the line between middle-aged and soon-to-be-elderly.

About this title

About the Author:

An acclaimed feature reporter for the Globe and Mail, Ian Brown is also the award-winning author of The Boy in the Moon: A Father’s Search for His Disabled Son, one of The New York Times’ 10 best books of the year. He lives in Toronto.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

February 4, 2014

I’m sixty today. My Facebook page (Facebook is celebrating its tenth anniversary) is full of kind wishes from Facebook friends, that is, from people I know, sometimes well, but also from people I don’t know at all. I’m not sure how I feel about Facebook friends, but thank you all for the birthday wishes. I begin my sixty-first year underslept, with a brewing chest infection, and to be frank I am not looking forward to the day—standing as I am on the threshold of the no man’s land beyond sixty. Sixty! I mean—if you’ll pardon the expression—fuck me dead! How did I get to be this old? The answer is by not paying attention. 
   Downstairs, I discover that Johanna, my wife, has left a card on the kitchen table. It contains two photographs of me walking my daughter, Hayley, in her stroller in Los Angeles, when Hayley was an infant and I was . . . thirty-nine? Forty? And of course, we all know what that looks like: it looks thinner. Your hair is ill-advised, but you have so much more of it you don’t really care. At forty, I looked like someone who thought he was twenty-one. 
   And just like that, standing there in the darkened kitchen at sixty, having been that sort of person—the kind who thought he was twenty-one when he was forty—strikes me as a terrible error. O you fool, I think, you did not realize upon what quiet foot The End approacheth. (My mental cadence takes on the rhythms of the Book of Common Prayer when I get anxious.) I mean, it’s easy to forget, amid the pleasures and terrors and gentle draining sounds of everyday life, how it all goes by much too fast. Even if you pay attention all the time—and who, really, manages to do that? 
   And then, inevitably—this always happens—the litany of my failures rushes into the vacuum left by all that speeding time—except that now, at sixty, those failures seem especially irreversible: not enough money, no retirement possibilities, no lush vacation home, no fast cars, no novels or plays or Broadway musicals or HBO series written, the rest of the usual roster of regrets. As well as all the moments I could have been more human, and less afraid. And in the place of those lost accomplishments, there’s just the clock ticking on the wall, making its sound, which, as Tennessee Williams said, is loss, loss, loss. 
   This is the problem with turning sixty: it’s so goddamn melodramatic.

About this edition

• Publisher: The Experiment
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1615193960
• ISBN 13: 9781615193967
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320