What interested me, as I was turning 60, as I contemplated something resembling if not the end of my life, the end of my career – the end of the narrative of becoming anything besides old – was to see how much my life had in common with other women of my generation, or at least with the stories they had published as memoirs. An avid reader of autobiography, as Carolyn was of biographies, I was looking for my own life in the stories of others – feminist stories for the most part.
I discovered that I could have more sympathy for my younger self – my mistakes – when I started to see myself more as a generic girl true to her time than as “myself.” Or rather a certain kind of girl, mostly middle-class American but sometimes also English, an adventurous girl on a quest. Reading Sheila Rowbotham’s memoir, Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties, I discover that in 1961 we might have sat through the same boring Cours de Civilisation at the Sorbonne – French culture packaged for foreigners. Her memories of the crowds of students “spilling out over the pavements of the Boulevard St Michel” sent me hunting for a photograph taken that year by the roving photographers who would snap your picture without asking – and sell it to you for a small sum. Rowbotham describes un-chic English students in duffel coats and there I am in my American boyfriend’s dark blue duffel coat strolling down the Boul Mich with a girlfriend. True, not up to the standards of Parisiennes who in winter like spring would wear thin suede jackets, straight skirts, and heels (often without stockings) and not seem to feel the cold (“Circa 1959,” 67-69).
I had come to Paris inspired by the images of intellectuals as seen in the pages of Life magazine, not to mention our French classes at Barnard. My friend Rachel Brownstein put it best in Becoming a Heroine:
Ideally, one would be Simone de Beauvoir, smoking with Sartre at the Deux Magots, making an eccentric domestic arrangement that was secondary to important things and in their service. One would be poised, brilliant, equipped with a past, above the fray, beyond it, foreign not domestic. (And ideally [as she put it in a throwaway parenthesis] Sartre would look like Albert Camus.)
(“Decades,” 27)
In But Enough About Me, I wanted to tell not just the story of my generation’s literary girls’ coming of age, I wanted to think about that same generation’s coming into age, turning 60, dealing with loss. I turned, in the chapter about generational aging, to The Last Gift of Time.
The title to Heilbrun’s recent book The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty is a provocation to acknowledge that there actually is life after 60 and that it might have something to offer. Her most moving chapter, entitled “Time,” concludes with a metaphor about time’s gift. Commenting on a diary entry of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s about spontaneously dancing (at age 69) for joy to a piece of music, Heilbrun writes: “The greatest oddity of one’s sixties is that, if one dances for joy, one always supposes it is for the last time. Yet this supposition provides the rarest and most exquisite flavor to one’s later years. The piercing sense of ‘last time’ adds intensity, while the possibility of ‘again’ is never quite effaced” (55).
When I was making the final revisions for the book in the fall of 2001, I had to add a parenthesis to account for my own changing sense of time, as I moved from my fifties to my sixties.
(It’s only in one’s sixties, I think, that it becomes possible to see the anxiety about appearances that haunts one’s fifties as a way of displacing – or postponing – the crisis of mortality. Far easier to obsess about the signs of aging – the cosmetics of time’s passage – than to reflect upon death. Recently, my most intimate friend [Naomi Schor, though I did not name her in the book], my contemporary, and the one with whom for many years my life unfolded in an always complicated dialogue, died at age 58 of a cerebral hemorrhage. We liked to tape our important conversations when we were apart, living on different continents, and called ourselves “les parleuses” in honor of Marguerite Duras’s book by that name. Looking at her life from the decade of my sixties, it now seems to me that dying in one’s fifties is dying young.)
