Define Grownup

     

    This week AARP invited me and other members to watch an advanced screening of Book Club (due out May 18) as part of their Movies for Grownups program, which actually gives out awards for such films (last year they gave Helen Mirren a well-deserved lifetime achievement award). The screening was held at the Regal Park Place Stadium 16 in Pinellas Park. Let me say in advance that I am grateful to the AARP for offering the free showing at a theater with plushy seats complete with leg raises at the push of a button.

  

     Sadly, however, the movie made me feel embarrassed for the four veteran stars who starred in it. Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenbergen were, alas, not given grown-up roles and certainly not grown-up dialogue.

     Could the blame lie in the fact that the movie, touted to be one about women bonding over books, was co-written by a man and directed by him? No, I am not one of those women who believe that men cannot write fully textured women characters with realistic dialogue. What about Jorge Amado in Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands or Ian McEwan in Atonement?  Or Steven Rogers, whose previous work included the forgettable Stepmom, penning two unforgettable female characters in I, Tonya?  

     By contrast, Book Club never gets into the psyches of its main characters. The four women merely are pawns in a madcap series of improbable scenes. Slapstick trumps insight.

     The movie opens with the four main female characters getting together for their regular book club meeting. They have been discussing books together since college. Each is presented with a background that is entirely believable. Diane (Diane Keaton) is a recent widow whose two grown children treat her like an invalid. Vivian (Jane Fonda) is a hotel owner who seeks men for pleasure not intimacy and not, god forbid, for marriage. Carol (Mary Steenbergen)'s once steamy marriage has cooled since her husband's retirement. Sharon is a divorced federal judge whose bumbling ex-husband (played by Ed Begley, Jr.) is dating an airhead bombshell who could be his daughter (played by . 

     Well, the last bit is a bit of a stretch, but it could happen.

     Instead of exploring the very different pathways taken by these four friends, however, the movie plays their circumstances for laughs. In fact, Book Club seems to go out of its way to present these women in situations that strain credibility. The buttoned-up Sharon is shown staggering out of the back seat of her car at the end of her Bumble date. Vivian's husband (played by Craig T. Nelson) is also shown staggering around. He has a permanent boner. Vivian has secretly given him Viagra to spice up their sex life. 

     The most incredible scene, however, involves Diane: She literally stumbles over a man on her flight out to Arizona to see her kids. Played by Andy Garcia looking like "The Most Interesting Man in the World" from the Dos Equis commercials, he turns out to be a pilot and, of course, fabulously wealthy. But just when she slips away for a tryst at his desert spread, her kids track her down with the help of a policeman and cart her away. There is so much wrong with that scenario, it's hard to know where to begin. Where in the world did those kids find a cop who would track down a mom whose phone has gone to voicemail? What woman leaves The Most Interesting Man in the World to go live in her children's basement?

    And Vivian? You might at first mistake her for Grace, the character Fonda plays in the TV series Grace and Frankie. Like Grace, she is a successful businesswoman with issues. But the screenwriters of Book Club should have examined more closely why that TV series work: Yes, we laugh at Grace and Frankie, but we also are moved to tears as we witness their often difficult female bonding and their struggles with aging.  

      

   Rarely in Book Club is there a moment when I felt like I was looking at real people instead of  cardboard characters invented for wacko plot lines. One true moment is during that Bumble date when George (played by Richard Dreyfuss) awkwardly asks Sharon for a kiss. Another is the line uttered by The Most Interesting Man in the World as the kids are hauling their mom off:  "You have a right to be happy, Diane." And there are genuine moments between Vivian and her ex-boyfriend Arthur (played by Don Johnson who thankfully has lost his slick and is actually appealing). Here, the screenwriters offer up some quirky details (Vivian confesses, for example, that what she loves best is not sex but having her arm tickled) that flesh these characters out.

     These moments, however, are fleeting. Who are these women? We never really find out. The screenwriters insist on defining them primarily by their relationships with men. Whatever happened to Gloria Steinem's "Women need men like a fish needs a bicycle"? 

     For their Book Club, by the way, Vivian, Sharon, Diane and Carol are reading E.L. James' erotic s&m three-part series Fifty Shades of Grey -- an awesome product placement for any author.  Alas, alas, alas, they might have made a better choice.

A Brief Comeback: Am Too

   
     The last time I wrote on Creative Late Bloomers, dated 10/10/16, I entitled the post "The Last Book, The Last Lecture, The Last Chapter: Lessons in How to Live." I talked about three books: Oliver Sacks' last book called "On the Move: A Life," "The Last Lecture" by Randy Pausch, based on the final lecture given by a 47-year-old computer science professor who had metastatic pancreatic cancer and the then 98-year-old Diana Athill, author of "Somewhere Near the End," who miraculously had written another yet another book delightfully entitled "Alive, Alive Oh!" The authors of those first two books already had died when their books were published. Athill turned 100 last December.

     That last post was prompted by the fact that my eldest sister Joan had recently received her own diagnosis of matastatic pancreatic cancer, so lessons of life and death were very much on my mind.

     Just after my "last book, last lecture" post, I visited Joan in Milwaukee. I returned to visit her again in January, 2017. She died at the end of February, 2017.

    During my Christmas visit, Joan was lively and hopeful. With my two other sisters, we helped trim her Christmas tree, pawed through the final boxes left after my mother's death that Joan had stored in her attic, went to see "La Cage aux Folles," accompanied Joan to her chemo treatment, enjoyed an evening of cabaret music, had several dinners on the town and spent an afternoon pampering ourselves at a day spa at the Pfister Hotel. In between all this frenetic activity, I drove Joan to Marquette University where she was still work at the College of Education. She was the oldest of us four sisters, but the only one who hadn't retired. There she is, at right with the jazzy scarf, surrounded by her family, getting an award as a Marquette University Faculty All-Star in November, 2016.

     So why am I returning to this blog now?

     No one else has died (yet) or is dying (although, of course, we all are). I'm back because I've read another book about life and death that I want to recommend. It made me sad to think that Joan never made it into the category that author John Leland addresses -- the oldest old (people over 85) -- but that during her illness, she acted very much like the people Leland followed around for a year. They had nothing in common with the over-achievers I have heralded on this blog -- people, as Leland puts it, like the "remarkable old lady who seems to defy aging altogether, drinking martinis and running marathons in her nineties" nor do they dwell on the declines of their bodies and minds. They merely savor the little moments that are left in their lives, the days they can get out of bed despite their aches and pains, the days they win at mahjong, the days they hear once again a favorite opera recording.

     These elders that Leland, a reporter for the New York Times, spent time with, like the vast majority of older people, didn't fit the stereotypical story lines of the elderly as victim or the elderly as super hero. Like Joan did, they were living life as fully as they could, no matter what their circumstances.

    "They lived with loss and disability but did not define themselves by it," he writes of these oldest old, "and got up each morning with wants and needs, no less so because their knees hurt or they couldn't do the crossword puzzle like they used to. Old age wasn't something that hit them one day when they weren't careful. It also wasn't a problem to be fixed. It was a state of life like any other, one in which they were still making decisions about how they wanted to live, still learning about themselves and the world."

      I may still be inspired to post about an octogenarian marathon runner, but for now, I'm going with being happy I can finish the New York Times Saturday crossword puzzle.

      The title of this post, BTW,  is inspired by a clue I solved from the November 25, 2017 New York Times puzzle. Clue: Brief comeback. Answer: Are not.

The Last Book, The Last Lecture, The Last Chapter: Lessons in How to Live

   
     In an essay in the New York Times called "My Own Life," neurologist Oliver Sacks announced to the world with characteristic bluntness that he was "face to face with dying." An eye tumor whose treatment nine years earlier had cost him the lost of one eye had metastasized. The 81-year-old best-selling author was counting his life in days and months, not years.

     Three months later Sacks published his Last Book: On the Move: A Life. In reviewing the book for The New York Review of Books, Jerome Groopman of the Harvard Medical School admitted that Sacks' revelation changed the way he read the autobiography:

    "Reading On the Move and knowing that Sacks is facing a terminal illness heightens certain parts of the book."

      Even the title of Sacks' autobiography -- On the Move -- resonated differently when you realized that this would be Sacks' Last Book.

      Readers sense that authors writing "somewhere towards the end," to use the phrase that nonagenarian Diana Athill chose for her very late-in-life memoir, have a unique perspective to share. They aren't wrong.

     Remember Randy Pausch? He was the computer science professor who was scheduled to give a routine end-of-the- school-year speech at Carnegie Mellon entitled "Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" when he was disagnosed with metastatic pancreatic cancer. Professors commonly call these talks "Last Lectures," but this time the label took on a more poignant meaning: It really was going to be the last lecture for 47-year-old Pausch. Suddenly phrases that he uttered, phrases that we might have heard before and even thought of as cliches -- "time is all you have...and you may find one day that you have less than you think" -- took on a burning intensity. Pausch's Last Lecture, posted on the Internet, instantly went viral and was later published in book form.

    Those who measure their time in months -- either because of terminal illness or advanced age -- have a different take on what matters. They are no longer projecting far into the future. They are feeling the fierce urgency of now.

     In his New York Times essay, Sacks expressed that sense of exigency:  "I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can."

    Sacks said he took inspiration from the last words of philosopher David Hume who, upon learning of his terminal illness at age 65, wrote "My Own Life," a short autobiography in a single day in April of 1776: 

    “I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution. I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.”

     Life becomes more, not less, intense when we are aware of its shortening. What characterizes these Last Books and Last Lecture is not their focus on death, but their focus on life. With death in sight, life does not diminish but is augmented.  A life of striving to achieve some sort of recognition -- a job, a sale, a marriage proposal -- gives way to a life that concentrates on internal measures of success: "ardour in study...gaiety in company." No wonder the words of someone who is "somewhere towards the end" take on heightened meanings.

     I first wrote about Diana Athill and her memoir Somewhere Towards the End in 2013.  Back then I lauded her for her late blooming publishing successes: a memoir, chronicling her 50 years working as an editor, published at age 83; a second book about her English childhood published two year later, and, best of all, a National Book Critic Circle Award for Somewhere Towards the End, written when she was 91.

     "Success in old age, when things have stopped really mattering, has a frivolous sort of charm unlike anything one experiences in middle age," Athill said after receiving that award.

     In quoting Athill's reaction to all the attention she was receiving, I conveniently glossed over that phrase "when things have stopped really mattering." Now I realize that one of the "things that stopped really mattering" to Athill were all those pats on the back from others. Not that she didn't enjoy her late-in-life fame. I'm sure she did. But what really mattered to Athill ran far deeper than a search for celebrity.

      I should have been tipped off by Athill's choice of title. Calling her book Somewhere Towards the End reveals just how acutely aware she was that that memoir might be her Last Book. When facing such a formidable main event as death, success is a side show.

       Of course, even when we think death is in sight, we can never be certain just when that end will come. When best-selling author and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould was told at age 40 that he had a deadly cancer with a median mortality of only eight months, he reasoned that the median is a halfway point. That meant that 50 percent of those with his cancer would die in eight months, but another 50 percent could live longer, even a lot longer. He was determined to be on the latter side of that statistic. Gould lived another 20 years before dying of a totally unrelated cancer at age 60.

     As for Athill, Somewhere Towards the End wasn't her Last Book after all. Now 98 and living in a retirement home with others who are 90 and older, she is still writing and publishing. Last year she came out with her sixth memoir with a title that tells us she's as surprised as anyone that she is still Alive, Alive Oh!  

     In that memoir, subtitled And Other Things That Matter, Athill evokes French philosopher Michel de Montaigne who suggested that we think about our deaths every day in order to get used to it as a natural part of life. When my grandmother reached her late nineties, one of my sisters complained that all she talked about was death. "Well," her wry husband pointed out, "it is her next big event."

     In Alive, Alive Oh!, Athill devotes the Last Chapter to her "next big event." Calling death not an "end of life" but a "part of life," she writes about her own death -- and the death of her fellow residents -- in a stark, unsentimental way:

     "Death is no longer something in the distance, but might well be encountered any time now. You might suppose that this would make it more alarming, but judging from what I now see around me, the opposite happens. Being within sight, it has become something for which one ought to prepare."

     Oliver Sacks, who died six months after his New York Times essay appeared, also talked about preparation and about focusing on things that matter in the months that he had left:

     "Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life.

     On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight. This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world. But there will be time, too, for some fun (and even some silliness, as well.)"

     A good prescription for all our lives, don't you think?