How to Be Old
Lessons in living boldly from the Accidental Icon
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- €13.99
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- €13.99
Publisher Description
How can we live boldly at any age?
This is the question Lyn Slater, known on Instagram as 'Accidental Icon', sets out to answer in this hopeful and empowering memoir.
When Lyn started her fashion blog, Accidental Icon, at 61, she soon realised that people were flocking to her account for more than just style advice. Her readers had found in her an alternative model of older life: someone who defied stereotypes, refused to become invisible and proved that all women can be relevant and take risks, no matter what their age.
Exploring the process of reinvention, Lyn shows readers that while you can't control everything, what you can control is the way you think about your age and the creative ways you respond to the changes in your mind and body as they happen. Rather than trying to meet standards of youth and beauty as a measure of successful ageing, Lyn promotes more inclusive and empowering criteria by which to judge our older selves.
Even with its unique challenges, being old is just like any new beginning and can be the best and most invigorating of all of life's phases, full of rebellion and reinvention, connection and creativity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Former social worker Slater celebrates her late-in-life successes and shares tips on aging gracefully in her punchy debut. Encouraged by her mother to live as a "belligerent woman," Slater entered middle age with a conviction that "how old I am is hands down the most boring fact about me." In her 50s, she supplemented a hip replacement with a PhD in social work and her first trip to Europe. At 61, she launched a fashion blog, Accidental Icon, which catered to older women who lived "interesting but ordinary" urban lives, and found a sturdy following for her photos and passionate musings on style and design. Now pushing 70, Slater notes that her @IconAccidental Instagram account has nearly 770,000. Much of the books is structured as a manual to help readers achieve the kind of confidence Slater radiates online ("I'm a badass in part because I'm an older woman who is decidedly not trying to look young"), but she allows for flashes of vulnerability, admitting, for instance, the shortsightedness of her onetime mantra that aging "isn't real" and disclosing her occasional insecurities about getting older. The result is a radiant self-portrait that will charm readers of any age.
