How to Live: A Search for Wisdom From Old People

New books illuminate wisdom, pathos and humor of old age
By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY
At 46, Henry Alford has written a book about old age, How to Live: A Search for Wisdom From Old People (While They Are Still on This Earth), which prompts a question:

Is he old enough for this kind of work?

"I'm preparing," says Alford, an "investigative humorist" who writes for The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. "I'm getting ready, battening down the hatches, girding the loins."

He has company. If bookstores were organized more like hospitals, the geriatric section would be crowded.

Also out next week is Somewhere Towards the End, a memoir on aging by Diana Athill, the 91-year-old British editor and writer.

Jane Brody's Guide to The Great Beyond: A Practical Primer to Help You and Your Loved One Prepare Medically, Legally, and Emotionally for the End of Life arrives in February.

And Andrew Zuckerman's Wisdom: 50 Unique Portraits, photos and thoughts of 50 celebrities 65 and older, was released in October.

Alford says his book is different. Unlike Athill, whose memoir he calls "glorious," he thinks of himself as "a youthful 28 who in real life happens to be 46."

And despite his title, he says, "I'm not proposing a way for others to live. Rather, I'm the listener." (He interviewed more than 100 people 70 and older.)

But he didn't want "to just open the floodgates" to what he calls "one of those open-mike books, where people of a certain age get to natter on."

How to Live is an amusing first-person account of his research and conversations with old people, famous and unknown.

When he asked Harold Bloom, 78, the acerbic Yale scholar, what he has gained with age, Alford was surprised by Bloom's tender response: "A healthier respect and affection for my wife than I used to have."

Althea Washington, 75, a retired teacher who lost her husband and house in Hurricane Katrina, discussed coping with a new life in a small apartment close to train tracks.

"Can you hear that train?" she asked. "As long as it stays on its track, I'll stay on mine."

In the course of his research, two of Alford's subjects — his mother and stepfather — broke up after being together for 36 years.

"It was like stepping into a bear trap," he says. "But then I thought, 'I'm writing a book about bear traps.' "

Their divorce became a subplot and leads to Alford's final piece of wisdom: "Maybe it's not until you've grown old that you realize you've picked the wrong person to grow old with."