Retire? I'm just getting started!

by Sandra Parshall

A neighbor who just turned 100 asked me what I expect to be doing when I’m 100.

My answer? Writing, of course. At whatever age I reach ultimately, I hope I’ll still be killing people on the page and sending villains to a just punishment.

Novelists don’t retire in any conventional sense. We don’t decide that on a certain date we will walk away from our jobs forever. Nobody holds parties for retiring novelists and presents them with gold watches.

We may be involuntarily retired by illness, but only afterward do we look back and realize that A Particular Novel was our last. We’re likely to wish desperately that we’d known, so we could have made it better, more worthy of the honor of being a swan song.

The same is true for most creative people, who continue to paint or sculpt or create music into advanced old age, as long as their general health and mental state permit. Studies have shown that keeping our minds active and having work to do helps us live longer and more satisfying lives. Furthermore, the non-creative public expects artists of all stripes to go on producing their art, whatever it is, until they slam into that immovable object called death. Admirers are mystified when somebody simply stops for no discernable reason and drops out of sight.

I started thinking about all this while reading an article about Billy Joel in the May 26 issue of The New York Times Magazine. Maybe you saw Joel perform during the Hurricane Sandy relief concert, but you haven’t seen him on any other stage recently. At 64, he’s retired. After finishing a 2010 tour with Elton John that left him literally crippled by pain, Joel had double hip replacement surgery, and he feels fine now, but he has no desire to return to an active performing career. He gave up recording long ago: he hasn’t released an album in 20 years. He lives a quiet life in Sag Harbor with his dogs, his motorcycles, and his current girlfriend.

A lot of people seem puzzled when a celebrity chooses to give up the glamorous trappings of life in the spotlight. But if you read what Joel says about it, that life will seem much less desirable. He couldn’t enjoy an evening out with the woman in his life because he was constantly approached by fans. He couldn’t take his daughter to an amusement park or do any number of other ordinary things most people take for granted. Now he’s “an oldies act” who isn’t popular with today’s kids, and the longer he stays away from performing, the closer to normal his life becomes. He still writes music because he still has the creative urge, but it’s not rock music anymore. His term for the Rolling Stones, Pete Townsend, Paul McCartney, and others in their 60s and 70s who still perform is “rocking-chair rockers.”

Writing is an easier career than popular music for older people, as long as our minds stay sharp. We’re encouraged to get out and about and meet readers, but public appearances aren’t strictly necessary. Our publishers want us to do Facebook and Goodreads, but no one expects us to dance around a stage and destroy our hip joints by leaping off pianos. Only super-famous authors are recognized in public and treated like celebrities. Most writers can live perfectly ordinary lives while thousands of people are reading what we write.

Some authors don’t even begin their writing careers until they get the kids out of the house or retire from other jobs and, at last, have time to follow their hearts’ desire. Many – like myself – write for years before we finally get a toehold in the publishing world. Others my age may be settling into a life of leisure, but don’t talk to me about retiring – I’m just getting started!

What are you planning to do with your golden years? Relax – or pursue a long-deferred dream?

(And be honest: do you think it’s time for Mick Jagger, who will turn 70 in July, to hang it up?)

Homonym Aphasia and Other Signs of Age

Elizabeth Zelvin

Fellow mystery writer Cheryl Solimini and I, along with at least a handful of others I’ve located on the e-lists DorothyL and Murder Must Advertise, share a mysterious malady. Each of us, when the symptoms first appeared, thought we were the only one. And now Cheryl has given it a name: homonym aphasia. When it strikes, formerly perfect spellers and error-free keyboarders start thinking one homonym but typing another. We who prided ourselves on never needing Spell Check or proofreading suddenly render “two” for “too,” “wear” for “where,” and “their” for “they’re.” In addition to perfect homonyms, we screw up dissimilar words that share a syllable or even just a letter or two: “restaurant” for “residence,” “will” for “with.” This neurological stumble began for me when I turned sixty. One day, I hadn’t misspelled a word since 1955, when I flubbed a word in the New York City round of the National Spelling Bee. Blow out enough candles to set off a smoke alarm, and all of a sudden I have to double check everything that flies off my fingers onto the screen.

Those who don’t have it don’t understand. “I never could keep those little words straight,” they say. “I do that all the time.” That’s not it at all. Among the diagnostic criteria for homonym aphasia is a history of impeccable spelling and grammar and crackerjack typing. Like me, Cheryl was a spelling champ and has been a professional editor. If you always screwed up “its” and “it’s,” you’re not one of us. If you never did, but now you do and it embarrasses the hell out of you, you are.

Cheryl has proposed an organization to offer support and seek funding for a cure. She calls it the World Homonym Aphasia Treatment Society for Incomprehensible Spelling, or WHATSIS. Sign me up; I’m proud to be a chapter mental—uh, I mean a charter member.

Analogous to homonym aphasia is that far more widespread ailment of the aging, failing memory retrieval. Once again, the diagnostic criteria include not having had a lousy memory in the first place. Does anybody remember (no wordplay intended) the Fifties TV game show Name That Tune? I’ve always had an ear for music, and until my early forties, my completely reliable memory could always come up with a work and composer in the case of classical music or a song title and performer for popular music. That changed in my early forties. My first conscious experience of what many call CRS (for “can’t remember s**t”) occurred during a period when I listened to a country music radio station as I drove to work every day. They had a contest in which they’d plan (see? homonym aphasia: I meant “play”) a miniscule snatch of a song—just a couple of notes—and listeners had to name the song and artist. I recognized the songs all right. But I couldn’t recall the names.

Experts on aging often seem to believe that age-related memory loss is a delusion of the middle aged. They claim that if I keep my mind active and reduce my stress, my memory will be just find (did it again! I meant “fine”). These folks—who are probably under forty themselves—make me grind my teeth. Have I kept my mind active? Let’s see: in the past ten years I have gone from computer-illiterate online technophobe to online therapist and trainer of clinicians in online practice skills, written at least four novels and hundreds of articles if you include blog posts, stayed afloat in a society in which maintenance tasks like paying the bills and organizing one’s calendar have become increasingly complex and time-consuming—need I go on? And what was the rest of the prescription? Reduce stress? I run three miles a day. I sometimes meditate. I have a happy marriage, supportive friends, and delightful grandchildren. I eat healthy. I regularly leave the city for the peaceful country. I have terrific conflict resolution skills. I don't hold grudges. If stress reduction were completely within my power, I’d be blissfully stress-free.

Not that I think the mental acuity I used to have would bounce back if I could zap all my stress. I think it’s neurological. Besides, the source of stress today is not primarily within the individual. Oh, I can tell you how to get rid of it. One, fix the economy....

The Death of Amanda Cross

Elizabeth Zelvin

The other day on DorothyL, the mystery lovers’ e-list, the names of mystery writer Amanda Cross and her feminist academic sleuth, Kate Fansler, came up when somebody asked what mysteries readers consider contemporary classics. Amanda Cross was the pseudonym of feminist academic Carolyn Heilbrun, who made the news in 2003 by committing suicide at the age of 77. As her biography in Wikipedia puts it, quoting her son, “she was not ill, but felt that her life had been completed.”

I was angry at Heilbrun for throwing away what might have been as much as 20 years of life without even the excuse of declining health or faculties. I’m still angry, and when I said so in a post on DorothyL, a surprising number of people emailed me offlist to say they were angry too. Like me, they loved Kate Fansler and felt betrayed by Heilbrun’s choice. My favorite was the first in the series, In the Last Analysis, which came out in 1964, the year I graduated college and discovered mysteries, 20 years before I became a therapist myself. As the series developed, Heilbrun—the first woman to receive tenure in the English department at Columbia University—aired increasingly feminist views in both Kate and her published work as Heilbrun, including Writing a Woman’s Life, which I experienced as a companion volume to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. And it was a pleasure to watch her rip into the pomposities and rigidities of the fictional university that was obviously based on Columbia.

I’m 62, and my first novel (Death Will Get You Sober) will be published—a lifelong dream—when I’m 64. If I’m still a published writer 15 years from now, will I be ready to quit? No way! Not even to retire, much less to die. My mother, who went to law school at 21, got a doctorate in political science at 69, taught Constitutional law till 76, and lived to 96 (sharp as a tack until her stroke at 94 and still pretty funny after that), had a way of pooh-poohing the claims of younger women to be affected by aging. We spotted Betty Friedan having lunch in Sag Harbor (Long Island) one day shortly after I’d heard her give the keynote address at a conference on “conscious aging.” She had just published The Fountain of Age, declaring what my mother had known for a quarter of a century by that time: that there’s life after 60, after menopause and the empty nest. I described Friedan’s thesis as best I could.

“How old is she?” my mother asked.

“Around 70,” I said.

“Oh, 70!” she said.

The subtext: 70 is nothing—not even worth exclaiming over. I think she was 91 when she was told about some 86-year-old’s complaint about failing powers.

“Oh, 86!” she said.

The woman my mother most admired was Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. My mother was 92 when she called Ginsburg’s Washington DC office and wangled an invitation to meet her, describing herself as “the oldest living lawyer.” The two women hit it off and developed a friendship that was precious to my mother during the last years of her life. When she turned 95, Justice Ruth sent a card with a cartoon of herself and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. It said, “Happy birthday from the Supremes!”

One of the effects of any suicide is that it really pisses off the people left behind. Amanda Cross left not only her friends and family but many thousands of loyal readers. And she killed not only Carolyn Heilbrun, but the beloved and inspiring Kate Fansler as well. She did us all a great disservice for what I’d call a deeply inadequate reason. Any published writer is a public figure, whether or not it feels that way to those struggling to get into and stay in print. I believe Amanda Cross defaulted on an obligation by taking herself out of play while still healthy and relatively young. I also wonder if alcohol had anything to do with her decision, for no other reason—beyond my tendency as an alcoholism professional for many years to see it everywhere—than that Kate and her husband Reed were hitting the sauce pretty good in the later books.

As John Donne said so persuasively 400 years ago, “no man is an island…any man’s death diminishes me.” Any woman’s, too, Mr. Donne, and Heilbrun’s more than most. She did what she chose to do with her death, and presumably she thought she was right. But it was precisely because what she did with her life mattered—and continues to matter through the work she left behind—that some of us are still mad at her. As SF writer and editor Micole I. Sudberg put it in an Amazon review: “Carolyn Heilbrun is still talking to me. I'm still talking back.”