A wry look at aging
“When Did Everyone Else Get So Old” is ostensibly a memoir of middle-age, more specifically the arc of the author’s life between the ages of roughly 40 and 50, and yet it is far more than a predictable foray into sagging, eyeglasses and illness. I was bracing for the usual, lame mid-life jokes, (“Whoops, there goes the colonoscopy wand!”) and yet, to my great relief, Jennifer Grant does not succumb to the usual pitfalls and clichés of the topic. Rather, she takes us on her personal journey with unflinching honesty, teasing out universal wisdom along the way. This is a sometimes funny, sometimes painful book, but it is always radiant.
While Grant does indeed delve fearlessly into the “indignities, compromises and the unexpected grace of midlife,” she does much more. The terrain is deliciously unpredictable. There are the expected stopping-off points of marriage, motherhood, empty-nest syndrome, sickness and death, but also detours into art, flight attendants and the spiritual potential of time spent on jury duty. Grant moves between dark and light, the religious and the secular, the tragic and the hilarious (I laughed out loud in several places; I cried in two) and yet the shifts in gear are always smooth. On one page she segues seamlessly from sex to Karl Barth to paid employment. Grant is at her most compelling when she is tackling the most difficult topics. In the essay “Coyotes and Shadow Selves,” she muses on a shocking real-world event -- an incident of child abuse-- and, after some tortured self-reflection, comes out at a place of mercy, rooted in her baptismal covenant. Similarly, two essays that illuminate the troubled life and death of her sister manage to be shockingly honest, yet full of grace. Reading this book is like spending an evening in conversation with your most honest, witty and wise friend, whose wisdom and kindness is ultimately rooted in faith.
Ah yes, faith. Grant loves Ecclesiastes and references it often. Too often. Such a heavy reliance on that least “religious” of texts, which barely chafes against secular culture, feels like a cop out. Grant is a self-proclaimed practicing Episcopalian; I wanted the Gospels! And when she does dare to engage with the New Testament, as in the essay “The Bridesmaids and the Oil,” she may be slightly less sure-footed, but she still writes engagingly and convincingly on Scripture. I was left wishing she’d tethered her own narrative to the grander Christian narrative more often; the book as a whole would have been the richer for it.
“When Did Everybody Else Get So Old?” would make for a perfect book club selection -- and it’s not just for the gray and paunchy. It would be a waste if this book only reached the 40-to-50 set. It provides fertile ground for discussion on many themes. Plus, as Grant handily indexes a varied and robust group of writers and thinkers from David Sedaris to Jung, it provides a plethora of jumping-off points for further reading.
I hope Jennifer Grant continues to write on faith, as the church needs honest, intelligent, lay voices such as hers. Despite the title, what she brings to the table here is more than an entertaining memoir on aging; her voice and her wisdom are, in fact, ageless.