This Is Getting Old
In this intimate and funny collection of essays on the sometimes confusing, sometimes poignant, sometimes hilarious condition of being a woman over sixty, Susan Moon keeps her sense of humor and she keeps her reader fully engaged. Among the pieces she has included here are an essay on the gratitude she feels for her weakening bones; observations on finding herself both an orphan and a matriarch following the death of her mother; musings on her tendency to regret the past; thoughts on how not to be afraid of loneliness; appreciation for the inner tomboy; and celebratory advice on how to regard "senior moments" as opportunities to be in the here and now.
"Gentle essays . . . long on dignity. Moon uses detail vividly in her determination to make peace with the many failures of brain and body (from forgetting her Social Security number to wondering if she’ll ever have sex again). Her best writing occurs when memory, emotion, and spirit coalesce as she recovers parts of herself left behind in childhood or comes to terms with solitude." —Publishers Weekly
"This is a book about aging, but it’s not at all depressing. Susan Moon is a very funny lady. Moon shows us aging in a breathtakingly honest way. I found that I liked her more and more as the book unfolded. This Is Getting Old is beautiful, warm . . . existential." —Wildmind.org
"Moon’s stories are wonderful companions and guides as I go about my ordinary life." —Maxine Hong Kingston
"Aging is the biggest issue facing me and everyone I know. This book is poignant, funny, and spot-on, and I am tremendously grateful to Susan Moon for writing it. I love this book!" —Sylvia Boorstein, author of Happiness Is an Inside Job
"This is Getting Old is a sweet, mellow, funny, wise, sad, and deeply affecting book. Susan Moon's essays are so disarmingly honest, so personal and plain, that they will make you forget what an astonishingly rare and profound achievement this is." —Norman Fischer, author of Sailing Home and Taking Our Places
"This is one of those rare books that had me in tears one moment and laughing out loud the next. Susan Moon is a marvelous writer with a great sense of humor and deep insight into life. Moon’s writing has an intimacy, an aliveness, that I very much love." —Inquiring Mind