Now that I’m Old: Life Writing, Women and Ageing

ABSTRACT

Life writing can provide a chronicle of experiences, but for many women as they age, it also presents an opportunity to find meaning. My written story began in my mid-forties, in contrast to my mother who wrote her autobiography during her mid-seventies. In this essay, I explore how my mother’s inability to give voice to certain memories impacted on my own ability to write my life. Her efforts to stay on the surface drove me deeper. Our writing becomes a way of holding onto earlier versions of ourselves, however much these versions might contradict later perspectives. The process of life writing interacts with the experience of ageing in a way that can reinvigorate the writer, and the reader by association. We can achieve so much more on the page than our ageing bodies will allow in the physical world. This includes an overview of our lives and a way of making meaning out of the patterns we perceive with each passing year. Such patterns become more apparent with age. Secrets can reach the surface, particularly events such as incest, a central factor in my family story. Or they can remain hidden, as in my mother’s attempts to sanitise the past.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory
• ageing
• foreclosure
• exposition
• denial

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Elisabeth Hanscombe is a psychologist and writer who completed her doctorate in 2011 on the topic “Life writing and the desire for revenge.” She has published a number of short stories, book chapters, and essays in the areas of autobiography, psychoanalysis, testimony, trauma and creative non-fiction in psychotherapy journals and magazines throughout Australia and in the United States. Her memoir The Art of Disappearing was published in 2017. Elisabeth blogs at http://sixthinline.com.