I’ve Been Reading About Old Ladies

I’ve been reading fiction about old ladies lately.

Not by accident.

I made a deliberate decision to sit in proximity to full lives—lives lived in all their glory and suffering—before I get there myself. To accustom myself to the territory, the way you’d prepare for a climate you’re about to move into, or a mountain you’re readying to climb. To recognize myself in these women. And to remember my privilege: most of them lived through harrowing times with far less than I’ve had.

The books I’ve chosen have old women at their center. Or women who become old women by the final page. Or women whose stories end there entirely, and inevitably.

I have a whole lineup.

The pull is stronger than my explanation for it. But this isn’t the first time I’ve read my way toward something I didn’t yet have words for.

The Year We Ran Out of Narrative

From early 2025 through February 2026, I led The Long View—a longevity book club I designed around a single animating question: what does it actually mean to age well? Twenty books. Twenty-three sessions. A community of women reading and exploring together for a full year.

The research showed up. The biology, the epigenetics, the evidence. The data on sleep and movement and what connection does to mortality. Balance and bacteria. Muscles and memory. Germs and gums. The cells and the supplements, the science and the sales—all vying for our anti-aging attention and obsession.

But somewhere around session seven, many of us stopped asking: How do we extend life?

And started asking: What are we extending life toward?

The books shifted. The conversation shifted with them.

Joseph Coughlin, who directs the MIT AgeLab and was one of our authors that year, put it plainly: after about age sixty-five, we run out of narrative.

The world is built for a default adult—younger, faster, more legible to the systems that made it. Older adults, especially older women, find themselves living inside a story that was never written for them. It’s not because they’ve stopped mattering, but because nobody thought to picture the future with them in it. That’s Coughlin’s thesis, and it landed hard for me.

We are not building the future we want to age into.

We haven’t designed it, funded it, or legislated it.

But the more uncomfortable truth—the one that keeps working on me—is that we haven’t imagined it.

We don’t have the stories to spark our imaginations. And without the stories, we don’t know what to build, what to tend, or how to care.

The scholar Margaret Morganroth Gullette calls this being aged by culture. The body changes, sure. But so does the script the culture is willing to write for the body that changes. The script for older women has been thin for a long time. We’ve polished the rearview mirror to find the unwrinkled skin, the body we should have appreciated when we had it, the flux of hormones that kept us supple and agreeable and still bleeding. The road ahead, we have not looked at.

A Thousand Miles Away

The longevity economy—the anti-aging creams, the supplement stacks, the age reversal protocols, the tests that measure your decline to the decimal—has a clear strategy.

It keeps us facing backward—lamenting the food we ate in our twenties, the habits we should have started earlier, the damage we might still reverse—because a woman mourning the body she used to have is a far better customer than one curious about the body she’s becoming. There are few products for the future. What does exist—the walker, the alert button—arrive wrapped in apology, or get sold as the punchline. There’s an entire industry built on grief for the past, and almost nothing that meets the future without flinching. As it’s sold, optimization is a project aimed at the life we’ve already lived—not the one we’re actively aging into.

My husband Isamu died at thirty-four. July 2002. He didn’t get to become old. He didn’t get the decades that are the subject of my current fascination—the accumulation, the gravity, the long view. The future was taken from him in a way that was not optional and was not fair.

I am now aging for two.

That’s not a burden I carry with the same grief I once did. It’s more like a clarifying weight. A reason to take seriously the years I’ve been given that he was not. Ikigai, as they say in Japanese—a reason to get out of bed in the morning, a reason for being. A reason to look forward rather than back. To ask not just how long, but toward what and why—and whether the world I’m aging into is one I’ve helped to nurture, or one that I’ve simply inherited and accepted as unappealing and inconsequential.

My mother is living those decades. She’s eighty-seven. She lives in San Diego. I live in Portland. The distance between us is a thousand miles up or down the coast, depending on your vantage point, and a phone call.

My year in The Long View changed how I pay attention to her. Not in the logistics-of-care sense—though that’s always quietly calculated as I listen to her aches and pains, review her lab work, and help her weigh next steps—but in a different register entirely. I started watching more carefully. Listening for what her life is actually like from the inside. What she has access to. What has become harder without becoming impossible. Where the world fits or meets her and where it doesn’t. Which stories bubble up and which fade to the background. And where my own mindset about aging—and about being an aging adult with an aging parent—needs to shift.

She is living the future I’m aging into, largely without a map. Because the map was never drawn—and the only people who could draw it are the ones already out there. The travelers. We keep building the conversation about age without asking the aged.

Back to the Books

Which brings me back to the books.

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. Honey in the Wound by Jiyoung Han. The Red Address Book by Sofia Lundberg. Violetta by Isabel Allende.

Each one different. Each one asking me to sit with a life I haven’t lived and find something familiar in it anyway. None of them offer protocols. What they offer is more rare: the texture of a full life, seen from inside it. The accumulation of decades. The gravity of grief and stubbornness and grace that arrives in a woman who has been paying attention for eighty or so years.

This isn’t about doing more, or doing it better. We’ve been handed a version of aging that treats the body as a problem to manage—something to monitor, correct, amend against its own unfolding. But attention isn’t the same as intervention. Caring for ourselves doesn’t have to mean living in constant critique of the body’s own changing.

The pull is to look back—to fixate on the stages already trodden, to grasp for what once was. But more and more I find I want to look ahead. I have more books on my list to help me do that.

So here’s what I’m wondering: is anyone else reading this way? Choosing stories that put you in proximity to the lives you’re aging toward rather than the ones you’ve already lived?

I’m not announcing a book club. I’ve done that—a whole year of it—and I may do it again someday. But first I’m curious. I’m planting a seed and watching what grows.

If you’re reading something that fits—an old woman at the center, a full life on the page, an ending that doesn’t look away—tell me in the comments. I’m building the list, and I’d rather build it with you. And if part of you wants more than a list—to read some of these alongside each other and talk about what they stir up—please do say so. I’m listening for whether the appetite is there.

Because what I’m really after is this: to read and write my way into a future that’s richer, stranger, and more fully human than the one we’re being handed.

That’s the book I’m looking for. Maybe you’re looking for it too.

Further reading:

Joseph Coughlin’s The Longevity Economy: Inside the World’s Fastest Growing, Most Misunderstood Market (PublicAffairs, 2017) is the book we read in The Long View. He directs the MIT AgeLab.

Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s Aged by Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2004) is the foundational work; her more recent Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People (Rutgers University Press, 2017) extends the position.

The novels referenced in this piece:

Virginia Evans, The Correspondent.

Jiyoung Han, Honey in the Wound.

Sofia Lundberg, The Red Address Book.

Isabel Allende, Violetta.