My blog space has been closed for a few days, and I was surprised this morning to find it open. This platform has a whole new look and I'm not quite familiar with it, but I'll find my way.
Gerlinde delivered a book to my porch last week: Life Class/The Selected Memoirs of Diana Athill.
This is an extraordinary collection of four memoirs by Athill, all written during her eighties. I'm reading the first one this week and thoroughly enjoying it.
From the introduction by Ian Jack:
"...While the memoir genre abounded in accounts of youth--the 'coming-of-age narrative' is a literary cliché of our times--very few books have let us know about life at the other end of the road....Writers have been shy of the subject of just being old, as if shame and indignity had replaced wisdom and experience as the best-known qualities of great age."
and this:
After Diana called herself an "amateur" writer, Ian Jacks reflects:
"I thought of her self-description--'amateur'--as I went down the stairs, and began to walk across Primrose Hill. Really, we should have more of them. More people who write only when they feel they have something to tell us; more writers driven by the scrupulous need to make us see clearly and exactly what they have witnessed and felt."
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