Join me at Avid Reader Bookshop for a conversation with ABC radio broadcaster and writer Jacinta Parsons about her fascinating new book A Question of Age: Women, ageing and the forever self, published by HarperCollins/ABC Books.
Venue: Avid Reader Bookshop, 193 Boundary Street, West End, QLD 4101
Date: 30 September 2022
Time: 6:30 - 7:30pm
My thoughts about the book
A Question of Age is a book that readers could revisit every few years and they will find some new understanding about themselves and about the world they are ageing into. Because as this book shows us, there is nothing static about our bodies or our thinking or the society we live in, certainly as it relates to ageing.
The title would suggest it is a book of answers to the questions that undoubtedly many of us ask ourselves about our own ageing. But in some ways, it leaves us with more questions than answers.
What it does do though is make us think more deeply about the questions we do have. It makes us reconfigure them in our minds, and often in illuminating and more favourable ways. It makes us feel less alarmed by the things we grapple with as we age; those obsessions and preoccupations we’d do well to discard.
That it does this is one of the many strengths of the book, because often all the questions we do have about our ageing are ones that grow from frustration, anger or regret – and it certainly explores those feelings – but it also looks to the joys and wonders of ageing, something that is often overlooked.
It is a book that builds on the construct of ageing. And ageing does feel like a construct when you look at the forces Jacinta explores in her book; those things that decide the terms and perceptions of our ageing, things which are mostly out of our control.
It builds on our ageing from girlhood through to elders, and how those early years inform the latter ones.
And like life, it’s quite the ride.
You won’t always like the person you see reflected in its pages, but you will have a better understanding of where she comes from by the end of it.