Q: There are many books about young adulthood, but far fewer about ageing. I am searching for stories that can help me reflect on the state of my body and mind.
Inna, aged 38, Berlin
A: Deborah Moggach, author and screenwriter, writes:
Your question made me think about novels and how richly they can explore ageing, dealing as they do with memories and the past, the interior world that grows more and more dense, the older one gets, although you don’t sound old at all. Plenty of novelists have reflected on this as they themselves grow old. Philip Roth and John Updike spring to mind, and in fact I’d recommend Updike’s Rabbit series, taking us, as it does, through a man’s life into his last years (though it’s rather a shock to find the hero banging on about being ancient when he’s only 65).
Another book I’d recommend is my favourite novel of all time, Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives Tale. This, too, leads us through the years, from the childhood of our heroines Sophia and Constance right up to their old age, a journey that begins and ends in the Potteries. Then there’s Paul Scott’s peerless Staying On, about an elderly couple stubbornly remaining in India, long after the Raj, simply because they have nowhere else to go.
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”: we all know the famous opening line of LP Hartley’s The Go-Between. When all we have are our memories, this wonderful novel explores a traumatic event, seen from the viewpoint of great age, and is suffused with the elegiac glow of a long-lost summer. It’s one of the few novels that was made into an equally successful film.
For nonfiction, there’s the invigorating Diana Athill, whose books give hope to us all, and the equally fabulous Nora Ephron, whose I Remember Nothing hilariously explores how memories can in fact entirely disintegrate. Simon Gray’s Coda, his diaries about the intemperate furies and frustrations of old age, will also reduce you to helpless laughter.
Finally, Virginia Ironside has written some very funny and salty reflections on ageing in several books, No! I Don’t Want to Join a Bookclub; No Thanks! I’m Quite Happy Standing and No! I Don’t Need Reading Glasses. The titles say it all. Happy reading – with or without glasses.
Deborah Moggach’s new novel, The Carer, is out on 8 July (Tinder, £16.99). Submit your question below or email bookclinic@observer.co.uk
