Late-Life Love: A Memoir

(Hardback, Large Print Edition)

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Description

During a difficult year, acclaimed writer Susan Gubar celebrates her lasting partnership and the reciprocity of lovers in later life.

On Susan Gubar's seventieth birthday, she receives a beautiful ring from her husband. As she contemplates their sustaining relationship, she begins to consider how older lovers differ from their youthful counterpartsand from ageist stereotypes. While her husband confronts age-related disabilities that effectively ground them, Susan dawdles over the logistics of moving from their cherished country house to a more manageable place in town and starts seeking out literature on the changing seasons of desire.

Throughout the complications of devoted caregiving, her own ongoing cancer treatments, apartment hunting, the dismantling of a household, and perplexity over the breakdown of a treasured friendship, Susan finds consolation in books and movies. Works by writers from Ovid and Shakespeare to Gabriel Garca Mrquez and Marilynne Robinson lead Susan to appraise the obstacles many senior couples overcome: the unique sexuality of bodies beyond their prime as well as the trials of retirement, adult children, physical infirmities, the multiplications or subtractions of memory, and the aftereffects of trauma.

On the page and in life, Susan realizes that age cannot wither love. A memoir proving that the heart's passions have no expiration date, Late-Life Love rejoices in second chances.

Reviews

"'Age in love loves not to have years told, ' Shakespeare wrote, explaining the elaborate game of lies that enabled him to pretend that he was still young. But what if one loves and stops pretending Susan Gubar's Late-Life Love is a tender, unsparing, poignant answer to this question, a love story that braids together intimate self-revelation with a rich meditation on the literature of aging."- Stephen Greenblatt
"A deeply personal and bittersweet paean to love 'immune to the vicissitude of time.'...[A] book filled with wit, candor, and poignancy."- Kirkus
"Gubar's wise, honest, and frequently humorous work reveals that even amid the inevitable struggles of old age, personal and conjugal reinvention is not only quite possible, but also quite possibly lovelyboth in literature and in life."- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Author Bio

Susan Gubar was awarded, with Sandra M. Gilbert, the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Book Critics Circle. She is the author of Memoir of a Debulked Woman and has authored and edited numerous works of criticism. She writes the monthly online New York Times column "Living with Cancer" and lives in Bloomington, Indiana.