Somewhere Towards the End A Memoir [Paperback]

Athill writes&with clarity, calm, and common sense.Life, not death, is her preoccupation&Reflections on old age, rather than on a long life lived are rare&It is rarer still for a woman to write such a book: so Athills candor and economic prose on religion, regrets, and sex are invigorating.Jean Rhys said that literature was a lake, and what mattered was to contribute to it, even if only a trickle. She contributed a narrow boiling river. Diana Athill has contributed a cool clear burn.A great gift. . . . This is a warm, inspiring book.Bracingly frank&joyful rather than grim& she offers clear-eyed wisdom of the grandma-you-wish-youd-had variety.To paraphrase Shakespeare, wisdom is bred in neither the heart nor the head, but in the bones that carry us through the decades. A few very talented artists, like Diana Athill, may persuade their old bones to yield up a glimpse or two of what theyve learned.There is something terrifically comforting about a nonagenarian writing with clarity, wit and verve about getting old and facing death. . . . [Athill] evokes another grande dame of British letters in her uninhibited lifestyle and no-holds-barred, clarion voice: last years Nobel Prize winner, Doris Lessing.Welcome and original.She writes as a person of wide-ranging learning, a generalist, a lover of men and animals and a garden enthusiast, a person intoxicated with life.A spry dispatch on the condition of being elderly.Unusually appealing. . . . To readers Athill delivers far more than modest pleasure: Her easy-going prose and startling honesty are riveting, for whither she has gone many of us will go as well.A perfect memoir of old agecandid, detailed, charming, totally lacking in self-pity or sentimentality and above all, beautifully, beautifully written.Winner of the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography and a