Something that Happens to Other People

📖 The Scoop

STORIES OF WOMEN AND AGEING BY GLENDA ADAMS, LILY BRETT, SARA DOWSE, ELIZABETH JOLLEY, JOANNA MURRAY-SMITH, GEORGIA SAVAGE, ROBERTA SYKES AND ELISABETH WYNHAUSEN. Eight of Australia's most celebrated women writers tackle the difficult subject of ageing, and why we as a society find it an awkward subject to broach. Each of the three editors who put this collection together share an interest in writing, gender and ageing, and two of the editors actively work in the area, one teaching creative writing to women aged 60-85, the other as Project Director at the Alma Unit on Women and Ageing at Melbourne University. The editors invited the eight eminent contributors to write about their experiences of ageing, asking them to reflect on what ageing means to them and to explore how their own stories challenge cultural understandings of women and ageing. They felt that, when it came to ageing, there were few storylines available to women outside the traditional stories of lost youth and physical deterioration. Powerful and positive images of older women in contemporary Australian literature and culture are rare. What we need, and what this collection gives us, are stories of ageing which give us more authentic, complex and diverse representations of what it means to grow old. After all, it will happen to all of us if we're lucky.

Genre: Family & Relationships / Life Stages / Later Years (fancy, right?)