Publisher: 7th September 2022 by ABC Books & HarperCollins Australia
Pages: 266 pages
Genre: nonfiction, women, biography
My Rating: 5 cups
Synopsis:
A beautifully written, searing and powerful examination of women and ageing that you will not be able to put down: intense, compelling, poetic, raging.
Warning: this is not a self-help book. Or, a helpful book, necessarily. No one really needs 'help' with ageing. It will happen no matter what we do. Neither is it a book to guide you through these stages of ageing. This book will not ask you to love your lines. Or to post on social media that you feel privileged to age. This book is, instead, a howl of rage.
Grappling with ageing is one of the most confronting elements of being a woman. When we become invisible, when we lose our sexual currency, when we lose that elasticity in our skin, when our bodies soften and change, when our perceived 'value' to society dramatically falls, when our notion of self-worth takes a radical shift.
What do we do when our outside self doesn't match our inside self? That old woman staring back at her reflection in the mirror doesn't understand why she feels so young. So how do we adjust our perceptions of getting older? What does it mean to age as a woman? How do we adjust our thinking about being in the world? What is our currency now?
Jacinta believes that midlife is a crucial reckoning with despair and hope, a time when you are naked in the centre of the world and no-one notices or perhaps cares to look. Midlife is a time when you take stock – to look back and understand how you were made as a woman, and to look forward into the future, to see how you might unmake yourself to live the life that perhaps you should be living.
A Question of Age is incendiary, raging and raw, but also compassionate, insightful and powerfully energising. It is a book for every woman looking in the mirror thinking she no longer recognises herself. It is a book for our times.
My Thoughts
Something drew me to this book and it became the book I needed to read …. HAD to read. I cannot convey how much I needed to read these words. If I could buy a copy and place it into the hands of every woman I know I would - from my teenage daughter to my elderly mother. All I can say is that this is a MUST read. My review will not be able to do it justice, but here goes ….
This is a first person exploration of the many challenges that arise being female and, in particular, ageing in our society. It is honest - at times brutally so - yet so life affirming with words every woman NEEDS to hear. It’s about acknowledging and witnessing a change in one’s life into, not just another stage of phase, but something completely new. Ageing - something we are taught to be terrified of even though, as the years creep by, we really feel not that different on the inside than we did decades ago. It is SO confirming to feel a sense of positivity about entering this stage of life and looking back to reflect upon all that has come before that led you to this point in your life. For some it might be about undoing all that was done over a lifetime in order to finally live the life that is suited to you best.
Still we feel the need to go down with a fight, a rage almost. Yet this could be a rage based upon all we have been told about ageing. What if that line of thinking were to change?
‘Unlike the transition from girl to woman, moving into an older body is about the act of disrobing, undressing from the identity we had spent our lifetimes forming … This time is about removing a layer of skin so that you are rubbed raw in readiness to start the process of beginning again.’
This book challenges you to take the blinkers off and encourages you - No! - demands that you now see yourself in a new and better light. ‘There must be a middle point you can cross that changes the meaning of your journey’ so that it's not just a downhill run to the ultimate finishing line. Instead midlife should be a time of reflection and contemplation.
‘I understood that ageing and this moment of midlife would only be about renewal if I was prepared to lose it all so that I might find myself again. That the moments of firsts might return if I was prepared to see myself reflected back as something new.
To see myself again for the first time.
This book is not just about ageing - it is this and so much more. That is why I would give it to my teenage daughter to read so her journey could somehow be better, insightful and wishfully smoother. This book taught me to understand that ageing is not only a privilege but something that was really important and rejuvenating to do.
‘ Is time the element we need to combat if we hope to be free of our ageing? Do we need to spend more of our lives not looking, not counting, not assessing ourselves against the concepts that time imposes on our lives? … When we are finally forced to understand that our bodies will break, we can no longer hide from the truth-telling of our own mortality. What seems so horrifying is nothing but a beautiful twist, but at this point it is impossible to see it that way.’
This review is based on a complimentary copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own. The quoted material may have changed in the final release.
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