From the revered author of the bestselling The Hidden Life of Dogs, a witty, engaging, life-affirming account of the joy, strength, and wisdom that come with age.
“Hilarious, poignant, fascinating, and brutally honest. If you ever plan to grow old or know anyone else who’s already there, you’ll find insights here you’ll see nowhere else.”—Sy Montgomery, New York Times bestselling author of The Soul of an Octopus
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has spent a lifetime observing the natural world, chronicling the customs of precontact hunter-gatherers and the secret lives of deer and dogs. In Growing Old, the capstone of her long career, Thomas, now eighty-eight, turns her keen eye to her own life. The result is an account of growing old that is at once funny, charming, intimate, and profound—both a memoir and a life-affirming map all of us may follow to embrace our later years with grace and dignity.
Growing Old explores a wide range of issues connected with growing older, from stereotypes of the elderly as burdensome and burial methods humans have used throughout history, to dealing with a concerned neighbor who thinks you’re buying cat food to eat for dinner.
Written with the wit of Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck and the lyrical beauty and serene wisdom of When Breath Becomes Air, Growing Old is an expansive and deeply personal paean to the beauty and brevity of life that offers understanding for everyone, regardless of age.
