"This is the thing, you see: I am on my way to being an old man. But at
60, I am still the youngest of old men."
As Ian Brown's 60th birthday loomed, every moment seemed to present a
choice: confront or deny the biological fact that the end was now closer
than the beginning. True, he was beginning to notice memory lapses,
creaking knees, and a certain social invisibility - and yet it troubled
him that many people think of 60 as "old," because he rarely felt older
than he had at 40.
An award-winning writer, Brown instead chose to notice every moment, try
to understand it, capture it...all without panicking. Sixty is the
result: Brown's uncensored account of his 61st year and, informed by his
reportorial gifts, his investigation of the many changes - physical,
mental, and emotional - that come to all of us as we age.
Brown is a master of the seriocomic, and his day-to-day dramas - as a
husband, father, brother, son, friend, and neighbor - are rendered,
inseparably, with wistfulness and laugh-out-loud wit. He is also a
discerning, prolific reader, and it is a pure pleasure being privy to
his thoughts on the dozens of writers - including Virginia Woolf, Philip
Larkin, AJ Liebling, Wislawa Szymborska, Clive James, Sharon Olds, and
Karl Ove Knausgaard - who speak to him most at 60.
From an author on whom the telling detail is never lost, Sixty is a
richly informative, candid report from the line between middle-aged and
soon-to-be elderly. It perfectly captures the obsessions of a generation
realizing that they are no longer young.
