I used to think that when somebody said, “well, you don’t look it”, they meant it.
I truly believed the observation — proffered to me by a variety of people of all hues over the years — was a sincere comment based on my mixture of good genes, dedication to chickpea chana masala, seaweed exfoliators and age-inappropriate thoughts and pronouncements.
So, how do you think I felt when I was asked to contribute to a book with the very same aphorism as its title?
Edited by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne and Michaela Schrage-Früh, Well You Don’t Look It, is an Irish anthology of creative writing on that inevitable process of getting older.
I Am Not an Alcoholic: ‘When I stopped drinking, others were not as excited as I was to finally escape the box’
All Together Now 2024 highs and lows: Barry Can’t Swim ends up bowled over, a Glastonbury bad habit creeps in
‘I never slept in a cardboard anti-sex bed before’: diary of first-time Irish Olympian
Laura Whitmore: ‘It’s all coming out now, the stuff I tried to speak about eight years ago’
Through the medium of essays, stories and poems, 41 women writers explore the experience of ageing, humorously, probingly and poetically.
Writer and former Labour Party minister Liz McManus takes a practical look at the many variations in her life’s narrative, from her days as a student of architecture, the challenges and exhaustion of young motherhood, to her feminist-inspired journey to the Dáil in 1992.
She tells this little story in her essay, called Ageing, which underpins the many positive changes which have occurred for women over the last three decades. “At my first clinic in rural Wicklow, a woman I had never met before was waiting for me when I arrived. She sat down and told me that she had a contraceptive coil fitted in the Well Woman Centre in Dublin and she wanted to know if she needed to have it checked.”
Continuing, McManus writes: “Here was a woman who had nobody else to turn to. She couldn’t go to her doctor (too religious) for a consultation. She couldn’t go to her local family planning centre because there was none.”
On the other hand, among the many thoughtful and philosophical issues, Mary O’Donnell raises in her essay, The Growing Button, is a perennial issue that resonates for many of us and exposes the nuances and subtleties of another form of inequality. “Those of us with men in our lives know all too well that, in different circumstances, the guys aged 65+ could probably find a partner at least 20 years younger than they, but the corollary doesn’t apply. An older woman with a 30- or 40-something man? Rarely. Maybe never, apart from Brigitte Macron.”
[ The value of age: ‘l am still me with wisdom gained. My goal is to stay curious’Opens in new window ]
Meanwhile, my contribution, entitled, Out there on the island, mined the ironies and anarchism offered by old age. I recalled some of the yarns I told in these Irish Times pages some years ago about my late rascal of a father George’s shenanigans, as his growing dementia left him incarcerated in a nursing home far from his Dublin apartment. I compared George’s last years to my father-in-law Austy Bob’s last days. He died out there on the island in a cottage where he had lived for more than 80 years.
Isn’t it no wonder I have given the following advice to my daughters? “When the time comes to put me out to grass, dispatch me back across the bay, out to the island, where I can wander the byways and boreens, talking to myself there I can wear my red or pink beret and smoke Gitanes cigarettes, just like I did when I was a student in the hallowed halls of Maynooth.”
In her essay, Invisibility: The New Super Power, Catherine Dunne introduces her argument with a scene from the hilarious television series, Grace and Frankie, played by Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. While these two famous actors certainly make ageing feel like fun, after their husbands leave them to start a relationship with each other, Dunne explores the serious side of “invisibility” too. She concludes from some cursory research on the internet, that 50 is the watershed year for women.
She writes: “Statista.com, in a survey released in May 2023 shows that in 2021 the average life expectancy for women in Ireland is 84.1 years. That implies the possibility of more than three decades after the watershed birthday of 50 — if we’re lucky — all filled to the brim with the potential to ‘persist’ to keep on being, or even beginning to be, ‘bloody difficult’.”
She also quoted Simone de Beauvoir, from her 1970 book, La vieillesse (The Coming of Age): “In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves.”
That is encapsulated in Katie Donovan’s poem, Dancing Queens, which perfectly distils into verse the pervading girlishness of us ageing women Yay!
We shimmy, gyrate
shake and spin
our mysterious bodies
that have crawled, sailed,
birthed and mourned,
yet in many ways
fell the same