The fresh book aims to understand what aged age is for, but is this the right question?

“Memory boom” of the last few decades has brought an unusual extension in the types of work written in the first person. Some offer fresh approaches, focusing on the aspects or stages of the author’s life or feelings.

In addition to them, a kind of hybrid form has developed, in which the authors, although they do not try to produce memories, include an extensive discussion about their personal experience and reflection to illustrate various topics and problems.

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Bloomer – Carol Lefevre (Afirm Press)

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Bloomer is a hybrid work of the latter kind. The author tells us a lot about himself and her current life, especially her experience in aging. He deals with his regret when the loss of his mother and his own health problems. He explains his reluctance to growing invisibility, which is such a common experience for older women, and her irritation of patronage and discounting due to her age while engaging in journalism.

Nevertheless, Bloomer is not and does not introduce himself as a diary. As we were told very clearly at the beginning, a book about women and aging in a society in which age is universal – and directed especially at women. I am also looking for offering paths that allow you to flourish in aged age, written by a woman who uses herself as an example.

From the very beginning you can see negative ways in which aging, especially women’s aging, can be seen in contemporary Australian society from the very beginning. He finds the perspective of “aging in the time and place that do not value aged people” “discouraging”. By devoting a lot of her life to various activism, she decided to take part in the age.

The book itself is a form of activism, it concerned not only criticism and raising awareness about many different forms of age that abound, but:

question the narrative age about the fall and scene, aging as a road that only runs down.

Lefevre emphasizes that today women come in aged age with laptops and mobile phones and a number of fresh possibilities. In this framework, the concept of flowering is so critical.

Looking after your garden

For Lefevre, gardening is a great consolation and antidote for aging. He writes about her great pleasure from the care of a petite, surrounded by a garden wall, which allows her to observe the flowers of her flowers, herbs and trees. Her enthusiasm of gardening is one of the most addictive aspects of the book.

It contains several sections from its own gardening magazines interspersed between chapters. Some of them present the changing seasons, ensuring the structure of the book. There are also discussions about the ideas and practices of other gardeners and writing about the gardens of several authors, including Vita Sackville-West, Sylvia Towsend-Warner and the author, who seems to be one of the favorite: Lefevre: Colette.

In a more critical illustration, how this book aims to offer a path that others should follow, Lefevre points out how beneficial gardening is. We were told that studies have shown that hammering hands in the soil “increases serotonin levels and that serotonin, a natural antidepressant, strengthens the immune system.” No other group of people needs garden therapy, he insists “just like those of us are considering over half an empty glass.”

When he wonders about the whole question about aging and tries to reconcile with his experiences, Lefevre turns not only to gardening, but to literature. Although insistence has no novel with older women as heroines or central characters, he quotes several writers, memories and writers of stories who turn to aging in their work, sometimes in an insightful way.

Garden writers are also critical here. Lefevre deals with his pain at the changing sense of time and loss of self-esteem at a youthful age, for example not only through gardening, but also reading Sackville-West, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Virginia Woolf. The petite one, which she receives as an elderly woman who tries to photograph two youthful men to the magazine (including throwing a line about “aged grandmothers”) leads her to reflection on aging and discussion about others who wrote well about aging: May Sarton and Doris Lessing.

In addition to his own experience, Lefevre deals with some earnest problems and problems that older women are facing. While he has a house and a garden, many other women are in the face of a crisis in terms of shelter and finding a place to live. By introducing the end of multiple families, in which older people live at home, he discusses the disturbing occurrence of homelessness among the aging lonely women. Housing care is sometimes available, but not without problems.

Particularly applies to her unexpected intimacy, which sometimes is an affront for adult children and administrators of nursing homes not accustomed to thinking about love in relation to the aging of bodies. Loneliness is here and inevitably, there is death and a matter of voluntary dying.

The book contains useful information and reflections on many problems that older women encounter in a very accessible way. But it is not always straightforward or addictive reading. Hybrid form is clearly a problem here, because combining personal experience and general discussion is sometimes a bit awkward.

They still bloom

Speaking of the author’s life, we are always kept from her at a distance. Sometimes you miss the intimacy that allows the reader to share the author’s feelings, as we find in some memories of aging, Diana Athill’s Somewhere at the endFor example.

There is also something a bit problematic in Lefevre’s main care. Trying to understand and overcome age, he not only wants to write nicely about women and aging, but “understand what he is used for.”

I have to admit that it is complex to understand exactly what this statement means. The stages of life generally do not seem “anything”. They are a necessary part of life and move to the next stage. In the case of aged age, it is complex to see that it can be something other than moving one to a very aged age – and inevitably death.

This concern for finding the meaning and goal for aged age is associated with a sense of activism against age, which the author claims not only for herself, but also requires other flowering. Stepped in the social and protest movements of the sixties, she wants us to all “do something with a change in aging narrative”, speaking about age and “saving the word” aged “from the position of insult.”

There is no doubt as to the scope and nature of the age in Australia – especially in relation to women. There is also no doubt that many elderly people, especially women, suffer from homelessness and isolation.

At the same time, there is no recognition of many social facilities and organizations available to the elderly or to them, including the University of the third age or national seniors Australia, or many ways of organizing “seniors” – in walking, traveling, theater, film and books.

The slightly tired senses that the author has and ordering others to become dynamic in protests against the negative narrative of aging, it seems that many ways in which other older women still bloom.