To live in the center of the moment

About this book

America's middle-aged population is reaching record numbers and this boom is having a significant effect on the popular marketplace. The effect is no less apparent in literature; whereas even twenty years ago, autobiographies often portrayed a youthful protagonist's coming of age, in recent years narratives of midlife and the elderly have become a popular literary trend. In To Live in the Center of the Moment, Barbara Frey Waxman examines the emergence of this evocative literature of aging and demonstrates how these autobiographies challenge negative cultural associations of old age. With such texts as Philip Roth's Patrimony, Madeleine L'Engle's The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, May Sarton's At Seventy, Howell Raines's Fly Fishing through the Midlife Crisis, Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals, and Doris Grumbach's Coming into the End Zone, Waxman has selected narratives that focus not on the broad sweep of a person's life but on the period when aging becomes central to the subject's definition of self. The author shows how assessing these literary autobiographies has changed her perceptions and helped her come to terms with impending old age. Coming to the topic "from an entirely interested perspective" as a 49-year-old reader, Waxman uses her own responses to the texts to demonstrate how these books present convincing alternative views of aging and may help modify our culture's negative attitudes about the elderly. To Live in the Center of the Moment is a thoughtful addition to age studies, literary criticism, and cultural studies.