The New Old Me
My Late-Life Reinvention
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4.3 • 12 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“A funny, seasoned take on dashed illusions.”—O Magazine
“I love everything Meredith Maran writes. She is insightful, funny, and human, and the things she writes about matter to me deeply. Her memoir, The New Old Me, is a book I don’t just want to read—I need to read it. So does everyone else who’s getting older and wants to live fully, with immediacy and enjoyment, which is to say, everyone.”—Anne Lamott, author of Hallelujah Anyway
For readers of Anne Lamott, Abigail Thomas, and Ayelet Waldman comes one woman's lusty, kickass, post-divorce memoir of starting over at 60 in youth-obsessed, beauty-obsessed Hollywood.
After the death of her best friend, the loss of her life’s savings, and the collapse of her once-happy marriage, Meredith Maran leaves her San Francisco freelance writer’s life for a 9-to-5 job in Los Angeles. Determined to rebuild not only her savings but also herself while relishing the joys of life in La-La land, Maran writes “a poignant story, a funny story, a moving story, and above all an American story of what it means to be a woman of a certain age in our time” (Christina Baker Kline, number-one New York Times–bestselling author of Orphan Train).
Praise for The New Old Me:
“High time we had a book that celebrates becoming an elder! Meredith Maran writes of the difficulties of loss and change and aging, but makes it clear that getting on can be more interesting, more fun, and a lot more exciting than youth.”—Abigail Thomas, author of the New York Times bestseller What Comes Next and How to Like It
“By turns poignant and funny, the book not only shows how one feisty woman coped with a ‘Plan B life’ she didn't want or expect with a little help from her friends. It also celebrates how she transformed uncertainty into a glorious opportunity for continued late-life personal growth. A spirited and moving memoir about how ‘it's never too late to try something new.’”—Kirkus
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
To reinvent means to change so much as to appear entirely new, but that's not what Maran (Why We Write About Ourselves) describes in this disappointing memoir. Instead,when Maran's marriage to the woman of her dreams fell apart when she was 60, she moved to L.A. and set about recreating her old life. She speed-friended, she found a character-filled bungalow in Silver Lakes to replace the character-filled Victorian in Oakland, and she found new love. Other changes were cosmetic: exercise, Botox, a Brazilian. She gives short shrift to the career switch from freelance to full-time writer for an office filled with chic (and much younger) women, the kind of nightmare experience many older women would equate with lecturing sans pants. What Maran does reinvent is her own history. In earlier discussions of My Lie, her book about the sexual abuse accusations she leveled against her father when she was in her 30s and later realized were not true, Maran has said those accusations led to an eight-year silence between her and her father. Here, she makes no mention of this past, saying instead that her father's rejection of her partner was what led to the freeze. Being a "perpetually oversharing memoirist" may have made it impossible for Maran to truly reinvent herself.
