Diana Athill
Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill is an elegant memoir by one of England’s most famous book editors. Athill was an editor for several decades at Andre Deutsch, Ltd, a London-based publishing company. She worked with famous authors and began writing her own work late in life. She was eighty-nine years old when she wrote this memoir. She died in 2019 at the age of 101.
Athill shares her thoughts about aging, death, and dying. She reflects on the changes in outlook, priorities, and opinions she experienced throughout the decades. She is intelligent, articulate, unflinchingly honest, charming, calm, and self-possessed. The force of her presence carries the memoir. No subject is off limits. She writes about her sex life, former lovers, preference for black males, atheism, gardening, reading, miscarriage, friendships, illness, and declining capacities. All are shared with the same degree of clarity and detachment. There is no hint of self-pity or emotional upheaval in her writing. Her sentences are elegantly phrased. She peppers her writing with the occasional lucid insight on aging and dying, nuggets of wisdom that whet the appetite for more of the same.
One of the pleasures she discovers about herself in her old age is the joy she finds in writing. She sees writing as a form of therapy, as a way of grappling with past hurts and failures. But she doesn’t wallow on feelings of guilt or shame, which she considers a waste of time. She embraces life as an adventure and perceives death as an event so ordinary that it is hardly worth making a fuss about. But her fearless attitude toward death does not extend to the process of dying. She expresses concern about burdening others with her incapacities after witnessing the care friends and family required during the final stages of their lives.
A book about aging by an octogenarian who is very conscious of time’s winged chariot drawing near may sound like fodder for depression. But Diana Athill is far from depressing. She embraces the good and the bad, the ups and the downs life has to offer with equanimity and good cheer.