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Tatler Asia
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Tatler Asia
7 honest books on ageing that are good for the soul
2. 'This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage' by Ann Patchett Above 'This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage' (Photo: Bloomsbury Paperbacks) Though this isn't a book on ageing, the undercurrent of time's passage runs through every essay. Ann Patchett brings a novelist's discipline to nonfiction: her sentences are crisp, her stories layered. She writes about the long arc of friendship, the slow-building nature of creative work and what it means to live alone by choice. Her reflections are rarely framed as epiphanies; instead, they unfold gradually, shaped by age, habit and hard-won self-knowledge. For readers seeking quiet insight rather than dramatic reinvention, this collection offers exactly that. 3. 'No Time To Spare' by Ursula K Le Guin Above 'No Time To Spare' (Photo: Mariner Books) Ursula K Le Guin, best known for her speculative fiction, turned her sharp gaze inward in her final years, publishing essays that read like conversations with a brilliant, slightly irritable aunt. She writes about cats, breakfast and the arrogance of youth—subjects that seem small but reveal her larger argument: that old age is not a diminishing, but a different kind of richness. Her tone is brisk and occasionally cranky, especially when addressing ageism or internet culture. Among books on ageing, this one is notable for resisting both complaint and inspiration; Le Guin is simply living, and thinking, out loud. 4. 'A Life's Work' by Rachel Cusk Above 'A Life's Work' (Photo: Picador Paper) Ostensibly a book about early motherhood, A Life's Work is in fact a study of identity breakdown—a theme that mirrors the emotional terrain of ageing. Rachel Cusk interrogates the body's mutiny, the evaporation of former selves and the awkward collisions between expectation and reality. Her prose is spare and confrontational, stripped of the usual maternal glow. What makes it relevant to ageing is its unsentimental treatment of transformation: the sense of becoming unrecognisable to oneself. If you're looking for a book that insists on intellectual and emotional honesty, even when it's uncomfortable, Cusk delivers. 5. 'This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism' by Ashton Applewhite Above 'This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism' (Photo: Celadon Books) Ashton Applewhite isn't interested in gently guiding readers into acceptance, but in dismantling the entire system of cultural ageism. Backed by research and fuelled by righteous irritation, her book calls out the ways society marginalises older people, especially women. She tackles everything from workplace discrimination to the cult of youth in media with sharp wit and unflinching analysis. Unlike many books about ageing that focus on coping strategies, this one demands structural change. It's energising, at times confrontational, and deeply clarifying—particularly for readers tired of being told to age 'gracefully'. 6. 'Late Migrations' by Margaret Renkl Above 'Late Migrations' (Photo: Milkweed Editions) Margaret Renkl, a columnist for The New York Times , blends personal essays with observations from the natural world in this quiet but resonant book on ageing. She writes about the deaths of her parents, the slow rhythm of her Southern backyard and the brief but meaningful rituals of family life. There is a calm attentiveness to her voice, even when describing loss. The book doesn't offer solutions, just presence. Its approach to ageing is reflective rather than corrective—Renkl lets the reader sit with time, rather than race against it. Among books on ageing, this one stands out for its stillness. 7. 'The Year of Magical Thinking' by Joan Didion Above 'The Year of Magical Thinking' (Photo: Vintage) A clinical, unsparing portrait of grief, this book is often shelved under 'bereavement', but it also speaks profoundly to ageing's disorienting effects. Didion documents the year after her husband's sudden death with the precision of a surgeon. She tracks her irrational thinking, her physical exhaustion and the ways time can warp under trauma. There's no comfort here, no platitude—just the cold light of loss. What it offers is not catharsis but clarity. For anyone facing ageing as a series of absences—of people, of faculties, of certainty—Joan Didion's account feels devastatingly accurate.
Irish Times
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
American Dirt author Jeanine Cummins: ‘I felt like the entire world was against me but I knew I would emerge'
In 2020, after her book tour for American Dirt was cancelled owing to threats of violence, Jeanine Cummins found herself staying in the home of fellow author Ann Patchett, whose Nashville bookstore she had been visiting, and who thought it best she didn't stay in a hotel alone. As they tried to work out the best thing to quell the anxiety, the pair got talking about antidepressants. Cummins had once taken Lexapro, but didn't like how it made her feel. 'I didn't like that I didn't have access to the full range of my emotions,' she told the older author. And Patchett just looked at her, put a hand on one hip. 'Well,' she replied, wryly. 'Aren't you glad you have access to all of them now?' READ MORE The events surrounding publication of Cummins's third novel, American Dirt , are by now legend. First, the book sold in a multipublisher auction for a reported seven-figure sum. It was tipped as one of the hottest books of 2020 and chosen for Oprah's book club. For Cummins it was the kind of career jackpot most authors only ever dream of. But with the wave of good fortune came a tidal wave of backlash, when, in the fire cauldron of Trump's identity-politics-steeped US, she found herself at the centre of a debate over who gets to tell which stories. As a white American (her heritage is part-Irish, part-Puerto Rican), she was accused of cultural appropriation, insensitivity (an event that included barbed-wire flower arrangements caused especial furore), and of appropriating the work of Mexican authors. Many were also uncomfortable with an American being granted such a large sum for this Mexico-set story, when Mexican authors rarely if ever receive such large advances. With the online torrent reaching fever pitch, Cummins's extensive book tour was cancelled. Still, American Dirt went on to sell millions of copies, and was translated into 37 languages. [ 'It was a witch hunt': Jeanine Cummins's novel changed publishing. But not how she hoped Opens in new window ] 'My husband always says that it was like launching a cruise ship from the top of a cliff,' says Cummins when we meet in the Merrion Hotel in Dublin. 'It felt like winning the lottery until, all of a sudden, it wasn't. When it turned, it turned so quickly. It was like it curdled. And the experience of enduring the aftermath of the curdling was brutal.' She adds that the conversation over publishing's shortcomings were 'long overdue'. 'Should I have been the poster child for it? No.' Cummins appears, despite everything, happy and healthy as she sits in the outdoor terrace with large sunglasses on her face and her signature Latina-style hoop earrings hanging beneath her curls. We've met in the run-up to publication of her fourth novel, Speak to Me of Home, but she's also in Ireland on a family holiday – the aforementioned husband hails from Mayo, where the pair will spend some time, along with their teenage daughters, Aoife and Clodagh. 'I'm okay now,' she says of her mental state. 'It was not my first rodeo. It was not my first trauma. I've had lots of grief in my life, so I knew that I would emerge, somehow or another, from the other end of it. But in the moment, I felt like the entire world was against me.' [ Jeanine Cummins: 'I didn't know if I had the right to tell the story' Opens in new window ] The entire world with the exception of some crucial people, including Winfrey, who refused to capitulate to the pressure to withdraw her support for the book. 'Had she done that, I don't think I would be sitting here today – like, I don't think I would have been able to write another book,' says Cummins. Five years on the book she might not have written sits between us on the table. Speak to Me of Home is a family saga about three generations of women – Rafaela, who grew up in a wealthy family in Puerto Rico in the 1950s; her daughter Ruth, a social media influencer who moved to the US aged five; and Ruth's daughter, Daisy, who has returned to her ancestral homeland of Puerto Rico, and who, in the opening pages suffers a severe accident owing to a terrible hurricane. 'It's a fictional hurricane, that is very important,' says Cummins. 'People were mad [when they thought] I wrote about Hurricane Maria, which I did not do.' Beyond hurricanes, the book is about family, identity, class, displacement, the lives we leave behind, and the pull of home. The characters are based in part on Cummins's own family – Rafaela, in particular, mirrors Cummins's paternal grandmother, who grew up in a wealthy family in Puerto Rico, but who, aged 16, was shipped to a naval base in Trinidad to get a job, after her father lost his fortune. 'It was a very shocking circumstance for her to find herself in need of a 'j-o-b' and she never really recovered,' says Cummins. 'She spent the rest of her life being like 'Don't you know who I am?' And then it was even worse when they moved to the United States, because people treated her like she was Puerto Rican, and she was like 'I'm not that kind of Puerto Rican'.' These layers of prejudice were something Cummins found fascinating to unpack. 'It wasn't until I was like 30 that I [realised] well, there's probably a reason why she was so insistent on making sure everyone around her came from wealth, because she was constantly experiencing prejudice and racism in [the United States]. It was her way of signalling to people that she was a human being. And of course, she was also hella racist, and didn't recognise that in herself.' At the heart of the novel are the different, often conflicting, relationships these three women of different generations have with who they are, and what their culture, heritage and language mean to them. Cummins says that in writing the book, she was channelling 'a lot of the questions that were raised by the experience of the publication of American Dirt and sort of having my ethnicity adjudicated on Twitter'. 'I think when you're a person of mixed ethnicity, which is many Americans, it's a tricky thing to unpack, even when you're not being called on to the carpet by the New York Times. I always had a confusing relationship with my identity. I've always been super proud of my roots on both sides, but I didn't know how to articulate it. I'm generation X. We did not grow up with this kind of language of entitlement that younger generations have about insisting on their own identity.' My cousin Julie was a writer – she was incredibly talented … I think after she died ... I wanted to do the things that she could no longer do Born in Spain, Cummins moved around a lot as a child, owing to her father's naval career, but calls Gaithersburg, Maryland, her hometown. She had what she describes as 'a typical happy American childhood', infused with elements of Irish and Puerto Rican culture. When she was 19, her mother signed her up for the Rose of Tralee, and she competed as the Washington DC Rose. 'I ended up making lifelong friendships. One of my best friends was the girl who was the Paris Rose that year – she was the first ever black Rose. Her father is from Senegal, mom from Sligo. We were in each other's weddings. She visited me in December for my 50th birthday.' Later Cummins would return to Ireland and spend time bartending in Belfast (she had friends there from childhood, having hosted them as part of the Belfast Children's Summer Programme, which sent Troubles-era Belfast kids to stay with American families). She wrote 'terrible poetry' during this time, but it wasn't until she moved to New York to work in publishing that her writing began in earnest. 'I had this notion that I could infiltrate the publishing industry and learn about writing,' she says. 'And I found that everyone who was in publishing had that same idea ... But I would read a ton, and frequently I would be reading these books and [think], I know what this writer got paid, and I think I could do better, or at least as well.' Novels are the greatest generator of empathy we have available to us as human beings Her first book was a memoir, A Rip in Heaven , about a terrible tragedy that befell her family when she was 16: two of her cousins, Julie and Robin Kerry, were brutally raped and murdered in an assault that only Cummins's brother, Tom, survived. 'It was such a formative experience in my life that I have no way of knowing how I would be different if it hadn't happened,' she says, when asked how the incident shaped her. 'I will say, I don't think I would be a writer. My cousin Julie was a writer – she was incredibly talented ... I think after she died, I felt all the ways the world lost her. I wanted to do the things that she could no longer do.' Following A Rip in Heaven came two novels about Ireland: The Outside Boy, about a Traveller boy set in 1959, and The Crooked Branch, set during the Famine. Then came American Dirt, and with it, pandemonium. But the only thing to do was return to the quiet of the page and finally explore the Puerto Rican side of her heritage. Speak to Me of Home was written in the hours when her kids were at school, and during writing trips to Puerto Rico, where she might sit for 14 hours a day, cranking out word after word. For Cummins, novels are 'the greatest generator of empathy we have available to us as human beings', and the best space to explore difficult topics. 'What I love about a really good novel is it allows you to have a conversation without getting stuck in the vocabulary. You don't have to use words about identity to talk about identity – you talk about the characters and their experiences.' Speak to Me of Home is published by Tinder Press
BBC News
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
'In my novels, there is more kindness than you might see in other books': Author Ann Patchett on writing amid chaos
In the latest episode of Influential, US writer Ann Patchett shares how seeing kindness around her influences the way she approaches her characters. The world needs "life-changing books", Ann Patchett once wrote in an essay in The New York Times. She wasn't referring to her own works, yet admirers of the best-selling US author would argue that this is exactly what she has achieved, with acclaimed novels including Bel Canto, and the Pulitzer Prize-shortlisted The Dutch House, along with her award-winning 2005 memoir, Truth and Beauty: A Friendship. Patchett, who cites John Updike and Roxane Gay as influences on her deep body of work, brushes off praise. Reflecting on her books, she says that it took her years to finally feel like she was a successful writer, even when The New York Times included the prize-winning 2001 novel Bel Canto in its best books of the 21st Century list. "I just didn't think you could make art and be successful," she tells the BBC's Katty Kay. They sat down at Parnassus Books, the bookshop Patchett she opened in 2011 in Nashville, Tennessee, a city which is also the setting for her 1992 novel The Patron Saint of Liars and her 2013 memoir-fiction hybrid, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. "[It] never occurred to me." Some may see an author opening a bookshop as self-serving, but Patchett explains that she approached it like a civic duty. She didn't want to live in a city without one, and after she saw her local bookshops shutting, she co-founded her own. "It wasn't that I wanted to open a bookstore – I really fell into it backwards," she says. "It's been a wonderful thing. It's been a huge joy." Patchett rose to prominence in the world of fiction, crafting stories that brought together unexpected situations, and even more unexpected characters. Take, for instance, the home for unwed mothers in The Patron Saint of Liars or the depths of the Amazon rainforest in 2011's State of Wonder. She describes the scenarios in her books as "people in confinement", even though the stories span everything from events on a meditation retreat to hostage situations – and her own memoirs. "The setting is the fun," she says of that commonality, though she's quick to point out that there's always something deeper going on. Readers have been transported to Alpine peaks, the jungles of South America, the cities of Los Angeles and Chicago – but Patchett points out that within those far-flung places, it's first and foremost the characters that she hopes fans connect with. "The setting is the frosting, but it is always the relationships." More like this: • Misty Copeland is 'not scared' to face a career beyond dance • Ina Garten on her internet appeal: 'Young people don't have mom in the kitchen' • Entrepreneur Jane Wurwand on why 'high-touch will overshadow high-tech' in business Patchett has said before she doesn't watch television and that she has resisted the siren song of social media. "I am very interested in protecting my brain and not just being constantly interrupted," she tells Kay. She uses a flip phone, she doesn't remember her number and she avoids both smartphones and social media. "I've never texted. That seems like a really bad idea. I don't want people to be able to get me all the time." She may not participate, but she is aware of the digital world – and it does make its way into her work. When Kay asks her how she captures readers' attention when they all have feeds to scroll, Patchett doesn't see this as an issue. "There are always going to be people who want to read," she says. "There isn't one truth about the way people are, how they get their entertainment, how they get their education." Reflecting on the characters in her books, Patchett explains that she is more drawn to kindness than anything else. When she looks at everything happening around her, she doesn't just see chaos and doom. "In my novels, there probably is more kindness than you might see in other books, but not more kindness than you might see in your daily life," she says. When Commonwealth, her seventh novel, was published in 2016, she spoke to fellow writer Zadie Smith, who offered an insight that Patchett had never considered. "'Autobiographical fiction isn't what has happened to us. It's what we're afraid of happening. It's what we fixate on and think about and worry about,'" Patchett recalls Smith saying. "In that moment, I thought, what am I afraid of? Who am I afraid of being? What do I think about all the time?" Addressing those questions head-on has allowed Patchett to craft characters that have resonated with readers. She says that her fans bring her first-edition hardcover copies of Bel Canto at festivals (she's quick to remind everyone that every hardcover of Bel Canto is a first edition), and tell her that she's managed to create something very special with every book. As ever, she downplays such praise. "I do it because I love to do it, I don't feel any pressure," she says. "If I never wrote a book again, the world would keep going just fine." Influential with Katty Kay airs on Fridays at 21:30 ET on the BBC News channel. -- For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
