Seventy

A Diary of My Seventy-first Year

De: Ian Brown

Ian Brown, author of the award-winning The Boy in the Moon, recounts his daily reckoning with the milestone age of seventy. Fearlessly candid, often funny and relentlessly real, Ian asks all the terrifying questions about growing old, even as he admits he doesn't know all the answers.

In Seventy, Ian Brown takes us on a brutally honest, darkly humorous journey through the realities of aging. After his candid reflections in Sixty, his last diary marking the decade in which he felt like an adolescent of the elder set, here Ian delves into the reflections, struggles and revelations of a generation facing the profound truth that their remaining years are now more about what they've experienced than what lies ahead.

At sixty, Brown felt sure aging was a manageable challenge. A decade later, he is anything but calm and certain. The depredations of the body have continued apace; decay is staging a house party. He has less hair and more cholesterol, less confidence and more fear, and is enveloped in a continuous crisis of being. How much time does he have left? Enough to take on new challenges? Can he still book a ski trip into the remote mountains, and if he does, will he remember to bring his skis? Given that taking a selfie that doesn’t make him look demented or furious is rare, is desire still possible—and if it isn’t possible, why does he miss it so much? What has replaced it? Anything? Brown is desperate to find aged heroes, examples of men and women who managed to make great work later and later in life, despite their infirmities. What is their secret? Is it a secret accessible to us mere mortals?

And while getting old—anything after seventy—has its liberations, it also has a newfound gravity: if there is something you want to say or do, you had better say it and do it. Even when that ticking clock quells the urge to do anything.