Title: Somewhere Towards the End Pdf A Memoir
Author: Diana Athill
Published Date: 2009-12-07
Page: 182
“Athill writes…with clarity, calm, and common sense.” - Barbara Fisher, Boston Globe“Life, not death, is her preoccupation…Reflections on old age, rather than on a long life lived are rare…It is rarer still for a woman to write such a book: so Athill’s candor and economic prose on religion, regrets, and sex are invigorating.” - Emma Jacobs, Financial Times“Jean Rhys said that literature was a lake, and what mattered was to contribute to it, even if only a trickle. She contributed a narrow boiling river. Diana Athill has contributed a cool clear burn.” - Carole Angier, Literary Review“A great gift. . . . This is a warm, inspiring book.” - Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times“Bracingly frank…joyful rather than grim… she offers clear-eyed wisdom of the grandma-you-wish-you’d-had variety.” - People“To paraphrase Shakespeare, wisdom is bred in neither the heart nor the head, but in the bones that carry us through the decades. A few very talented artists, like Diana Athill, may persuade their old bones to yield up a glimpse or two of what they’ve learned.” - Laura Miller, Salon“There is something terrifically comforting about a nonagenarian writing with clarity, wit and verve about getting old and facing death. . . . [Athill] evokes another grande dame of British letters in her uninhibited lifestyle and no-holds-barred, clarion voice: last year’s Nobel Prize winner, Doris Lessing.” - N. Heller McAlpin, San Francisco Chronicle“Welcome and original.” - Dwight Garner, The New York Times“She writes as a person of wide-ranging learning, a generalist, a lover of men and animals and a garden enthusiast, a person intoxicated with life.” - Erica Jong, The New York Times Book Review“A spry dispatch on the condition of being elderly.” - The New Yorker After a distinguished career as a book editor, Diana Athill (1917―2019) won the National Book Critics Circle and Costa Biography Awards for her New York Times best-selling memoir Somewhere Towards the End. In January 2009, she was presented with an Order of the British Empire.
Winner of the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography and a New York Times bestseller: a prize-winning, critically acclaimed memoir on life and aging ―“An honest joy to read” (Alice Munro).
Hailed as “a virtuoso exercise” (Sunday Telegraph), this book reflects candidly, sometimes with great humor, on the condition of being old. Charming readers, writers, and critics alike, the memoir won the Costa Award for Biography and made Athill, now ninety-one, a surprising literary star.Diana Athill is one of the great editors in British publishing. For more than five decades she edited the likes of V. S. Naipaul and Jean Rhys, for whom she was a confidante and caretaker. As a writer, Athill has made her reputation for the frankness and precisely expressed wisdom of her memoirs. Now in her ninety-first year, "entirely untamed about both old and new conventions" (Literary Review) and freed from any of the inhibitions that even she may have once had, Athill reflects candidly, and sometimes with great humor, on the condition of being old―the losses and occasionally the gains that age brings, the wisdom and fortitude required to face death. Distinguished by "remarkable intelligence...[and the] easy elegance of her prose" (Daily Telegraph), this short, well-crafted book, hailed as "a virtuoso exercise" (Sunday Telegraph) presents an inspiring work for those hoping to flourish in their later years.
Woman of substance at peace with aging A terrifically talented British publishing professional looks at life as she is living it in her 80s, and moves from subject to subject with great honesty, almost no sentimentality and absolutely no "humble bragging.". She's forthcoming and clear about her past loves, unflinching about her future and what age takes away, and manages to be uplifting and reassuring about life without dispensing easy advice. She lights the reader's way into their own advanced maturity by simply telling her particular life and being an individual of perception. So this collection of essays is a rarity. Athill has published more since, so her look here at one's prospects for one's dwindling days is happily not "the end" of her reflections.Surprisingly refreshing Near the end of her life, Diana Athill has written an entertaining and thoughtful record of living and of the experience of growing older. The physical incapacities that every human being faces, the change in focus after retirement, and the refreshing feeling of "letting go" of many things that occupied her in earlier years. Her frankness about both her lack of faith and lack of desire for children, her fears about having a "nub" of selfishness deep inside her, and her delight in becoming an author so much later in life that it didn't turn her head but proved to be a delight are views that we aren't often privy to.Award-winning/ For the life of me, I can't understand why this book won an award. I, too, am "somewhere towards the end," although not quite as far as Athill [of course, one never knows]. To me, this is a very ordinary account of the thoughts and experiences of an older woman, some of them mildly interesting. I suppose the anal retentive part of my personality led me to finish it, but certainly not the pleasure-seeking one.
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