171 of 173 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Athill's observations are for anybody, of any age, who wants to peer into the further corners of life, January 26, 2009
I want to make it clear that this memoir is not only for those euphemistically known as "seniors" (an appellation I despise). Although it was written by a woman now 91, and it is about aging, it is not just about that; it also journeys through reading, writing, religion (or the lack thereof), children (or the absence thereof), death, sex, luck and friendship.
For Diana Athill's contemporaries, the book must be immediately relevant. For me, almost 30 years younger (and thus, according to her, "still within hailing distance of middle age"), it is a reassuring dispatch from my all-too-near future. I can't speak for younger generations, but I think that they too will find more meaning and sustenance in this slim (183-page) volume than in a hundred self-help books.
Athill was for 50 years a brilliant London book editor; among her writers were Jean Rhys, V.S. Naipaul and Margaret Atwood. She wrote about all this in STET, an amazing memoir of her publishing days that she produced at 80. Although she had written other memoirs and a novel before that, her discovery of herself as a full-fledged writer came relatively late. Athill is emphatic that the ability to "make things" --- art, music, books --- is a crucial factor in having a lively and resilient old age, yet for most of her long career (she retired at 75), she seems to have been content to let others do the making, while she remained a behind-the-scenes figure.
Athill, in fact, was brought up with a very British horror of attention-seeking or boastfulness: "YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY PEBBLE ON THE BEACH might have been inscribed above the nursery door," she writes, "and I know several people...who still feel its truth so acutely that only with difficulty (if at all) can they forgive a book written in the first person about that person's life." This may be one reason that SOMEWHERE TOWARDS THE END is so un-narcissistic and so devoid of self-pity. Athill does express modest delight in her own accomplishments, and she does complain a bit about her deafness (mentioned so fleetingly I almost missed it) and her bad legs (making her grateful for the perfect vision that still allows her to drive). But she never strikes a smug or dismal note. You don't think Who cares? Or Poor soul! What you think is: Me, too! And: Could we have lunch together if I took a plane to London? She is that smart, honest, unpretentious and funny.
Reading her book, I realize how much first-person writing (including my own) is flashy, self-conscious, more about showing off than saying something useful. With Athill you always register a quiet intelligence at work. You can sense her mind figuring out the most eloquent and accurate way to get at the truth. And, good lord, does she ever take on tough subjects!
She starts off briskly and frankly with sex, the topic most often mentioned by reviewers (the book has already appeared in England, where it won the 2008 Costa Biography Award). In her 70s, she says, "she ceased to be a sexual being." It's a fact, not a tragedy; indeed, with the ebbing of biological forces, Athill reports, a certain clarity arrived about other things, such as the non-existence of God. A lifelong atheist, she finds her beliefs (that the universe is mysterious and unfathomable) vastly preferable to religion, which she compares to "fairy stories." This despite the imminence of death, which she comes to see, in her sensible way, as quite ordinary. That doesn't mean she is unaffected by her mother's passing; the poem she wrote on that occasion captures exactly a child's ambivalence about a parent's death. An excerpt:
"What did I feel? Like Siamese twins, one wanting her never to die,
the other dismayed at the thought of renewed life,
of having to go on dreading pain for her, go on foreseeing
her increasing helplessness and my guilt
at not giving up my life to be with her all the time."
SOMEWHERE TOWARDS THE END isn't all Big Issues. It also touches on topics like intergenerational friendship ("One should never, never expect [the young] to want one's company, or make the kind of claims on them that one makes on a friend of one's own age"); adult-education classes in sewing and drawing; gardening ("Getting one's hands into the earth, spreading roots, making a plant comfortable [is] a totally absorbing occupation"); and how her reading habits have changed (less fiction, more nonfiction, especially the kind of book that lets you "take a holiday from oneself"). By the way, she has never watched TV. Perhaps that, too, accounts for her graceful aging (in which case I am doomed).
Refreshingly, Athill does not have many regrets: primarily the narrowness of her life (she claims to have lacked the courage and energy to take risks) and what she calls "a stubborn nub of selfishness" (however, judging from her unstinting care of a former lover and longtime friend who has been bedridden for years, this diagnosis may not be entirely accurate). What she has achieved, she attributes partly to temperament, largely to luck. Granted, certain crucial things went right for her (a fortunate childhood, a place to live, good health), but I suspect she doesn't always give herself enough credit for how well she manages.
An inspiring book that is blessedly free of homilies is a rare thing. SOMEWHERE TOWARDS THE END is about a life being lived right now, vibrantly and enthusiastically, not about a slow descent into night. Paradoxically, by writing about old age, Athill seems almost to transcend it. At any rate, she eludes easy categories ("For oldies only"). Her observations are for anybody, of any age, who wants to peer into the further corners of life.
--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman
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59 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A NICE OLD LADY, January 30, 2009
I bought this book specifically with the hope that I, nearing 60, might glean what it really is like to be much, much older and how I might cope with myself and with life. Granted I'm the sex opposite the author's own, but I still had hopes that I might understand better about aging and debility (since sporty John Jerome's "On Turning Sixty-Five" wasn't interesting to me and Gore Vidal, who is only 82, isn't likely to write such a helpful book at all), and I'm glad to report that my hopes were fulfilled. What I gleaned cannot be summarized with details, but what was conveyed in the reading was and is an existential self-confidence in being able to deal with life's limitations.
As the earliest reviewer reported, Diana Athill hits all the tough subjects: sex, death, losing one's parents, broken hearts, disabilities, losing interest in books and activities, unions and disunions. Yet all these tough subjects are considered intelligently while also being personable and non-despairing.
The one exception, for me, was the chapter discussing gardening. While gardening is one of the author's joys, here, I felt I was a nephew being forced to listen to an aging aunt nattering on heedlessly about plants, as any aging aunt might. But this was a brief experience, the only "boring old trout" (her words) part; the memoir is only 182 pages long besides.
One might assume that being a famous editor for decades, Diane Athill's first topics easily might be around books or authors or writing. Not so. She doesn't come around to discuss literary matters till Chapter 13 of this 16-chapter memoir. Quite astonishingly, she informs her readers that in her late years she no longer reads fiction; it doesn't interest her just as her body, at 70, was no longer interested in sex. She does, however, admire the life of novelist Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell as it's revealed by her biographer. (The woman has never developed an interest in watching television!) And she lets you know she began to write late in life and she thoroughly enjoys writing for its healing and liberating effects.
With no trace of sentimentality or self-absorption in this memoir, it ends on an upbeat note. Diane Athill at 92, "selfish" and independent though she's always been, likes life, and doesn't want to see it end.
I found it refreshing to find a woman of her years being able, so intelligently, to be frank about sex, black men as lovers, and atheism (my kind of friend) while writing in a style that is full of grace, economy and intimacy. Oh, and what a perfect and touching title for this book!
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