A Memoirist Who Told Everything and Repented Nothing

no narrative is more marketable than metamorphosis Hilary Kelly

talking about writer Diana Athill

How did I get this way?” is one of memoir’s primary questions.

“I believed,” she writes, in “Somewhere Towards the End,” “and still believe, that there is no point in describing experience unless one tries to get it as near to being what it really was as you can make it, but that belief does come into conflict with a central teaching in my upbringing: Do Not Think Yourself Important.”

Photos of her (Athill), with her snow-white hair and velvety, folded skin, fomented interest in a nonagenarian who would “run through all the men I ever went to bed with” instead of counting sheep.

"She watches her own diminishment with a sharp eye. “We tend to become convinced that everything is getting worse simply because within our own boundaries things are doing so,” she writes. “We are becoming less able to do things we would like to do, can hear less, see less, eat less, hurt more, our friends die, we know that we ourselves will soon be dead. . . . It’s not surprising, perhaps, that we easily slide into a general pessimism about life, but it is very boring and it makes dreary last years even drearier.” This isn’t callousness or delusive optimism but, rather, a rebellion against the suffocating expectation that the elderly have foreclosed the possibility of joy."

She was still writing when she was in her nineties. I hope I'm dead by the time I am ninety.