This Way Up
Old Friends, New Love, and a Map for the Road Ahead
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A funny, closely observed, and briskly honest guide to the pleasures and perils of living life fully as a woman on the road to the far side of mid-life.
At the age of sixty-eight, with children well-launched and husband long-exed and recently retired from a demanding career, Cathrin Bradbury realized she needed a map—several in fact, some physical, some of the mind and heart—to guide her through the coming milestones and all of the inevitable "comes with age" stuff.
This book is her report from the road; a joyful, polished, often hilarious, sometimes heart-wrenching exploration of the questions and (some) answers that arise when you hit the three-quarter mark of a busy life.
How do you stop shaming yourself about an aging body? (Hint: listen to the kids!) What are you willing to give up to pursue the creative passion you long ago put aside—and what might you gain in return? How do you become someone who allows the day to unfold after decades of list-making and agenda-managing?
And what might happen if one day, after nearly fifty years, you suddenly get a text from your first true love?
Drawing on her own life and conversations with siblings, younger family members, friends, as well as authorities in social science, philosophy, and literature, Cathrin Bradbury carries us with her as she explores this territory that we all hope to reach, taking on new ideas and adventures with insight, soaring optimism, and a bracing dose of humor.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Toronto Star columnist Bradbury (The Bright Side) shares an affecting account of taking stock of her life in her later years. After retiring at 68, Bradbury found it hard to imagine her future, so she decided to retrace her steps in search of answers. She visited her childhood home, where "the past and present were pressed together inside its walls"; reconnected via email with a high school sweetheart, with whom she struggled to bridge the gap between "who we were, young, at seventeen, and who we were becoming, old, near seventy"; and returned to her small South Ontario hometown of St. Catherines. That trip brought her the closest to an answer, she writes, explaining that it provided less a blueprint than a reminder that "the world was available to me right here. Not as an idea of a compromise or a choice between staying put or setting out, but as the defining truth of where I was." Bradbury details in graceful prose the uncanniness of considering one's life in retrospect, capturing the wisdom and surprise of a liminal state where "past and present" are more like neighbors than distant relatives. Sensitive and self-aware, this is a captivating meditation on what makes a life.
