The author on assignment in Afghanistan: living much longer “time becomes elastic. Sixty is halfway through, not some deadline” © Thomas Dworzak/Magnum
When I was 28, I distinctly remember thinking: shit I’m 28 and I haven’t written a book and I haven’t achieved anything. When I was 35, I panicked that I didn’t have a husband yet. Now I am 42 and I still haven’t bought a flat. My brilliant idea to write a bestseller just as the western economy tanked and house prices fell does not seem to be working out so well. Sometimes I think I am simply slower than everyone else at figuring this stuff out, but sometimes, in conversation with old friends (or someone I have just met who is slightly drunk and given to admission) others will confide a certain degree of existential crisis: we’re behind, we haven’t done what we wanted to do yet, we got waylaid in some cul de sac or marriage or job that took too long to get out of. Ten or 15 years ago I would console friends (and myself) with a homemade platitude: life is long and complicated, there was plenty of time for adventures and misadventures. But now, as Merryn, my best friend since I was 12, put it bluntly, worrying about the worry lines on her forehead, “we’re middle aged.” Shit. Blink and we’ll be 60, and it’s all over.
I have now published two books and am working on my third. It’s about the Egyptian revolution, since you ask. The first one was about Georgia (the country not the state) and I invented a little mantra to keep myself going through the year of self-doubt it took to write. You’re not wrong, I used to whisper to myself. I don’t know where this voice or phrase came from, except that it meant to me: believe in yourself and just maybe a little nicely written travelogue about a place no one can find on a map will turn out OK. My next book was about an Iraqi general in the time of Saddam, written against the backdrop of my reporting in Baghdad after the American invasion in 2003-5. Every journalist I knew was writing an Iraq book and mine took four years to figure out how to structure. This time my mantra, as the years and emails from my publisher scrolled through my inbox, was: you haven’t failed yet.
Being a writer is a naturally insecure state of existence and, along the way, when things haven’t been going so well, friends and family have tried to soothe my fears with their own soft platitudes: everything happens for a reason. It’s always darkest before the dawn, and the obvious lie: everything will be alright. People try to allay anxieties with the promise of a better tomorrow, but if the anxiety is caused by a certain accelerating sense of time, the terror of wasting time, running out of time, which is the definition of the ageing process, these blandishments wear out. Lies laid bare by experience; duvet too thin to keep warm under.
But if I allow myself to consider that I might expect to live, as the new female generation born now can, to 100, then time becomes elastic. Sixty is halfway through, not some deadline by which time I am supposed to have ticked all the boxes: made money, achieved professional success and partnered more-or-less happily for life. Extended life is extended time and with it, maybe, a diminished terror of there not being quite enough of it.
All of a sudden second acts are no longer the sole purview of the exceptional: Winston Churchill, Hillary Clinton, Gary Barlow. Maybe we can all have second acts and even third acts. There’s no reason we have to resign ourselves to a certain kind of life just because we are 50 when there are another whole 50 years in which to do something completely different. I think: maybe I don’t have to get up every morning and wrestle with sentences for the rest of my life; maybe I can open that little café-restaurant I always wanted to. Maybe it’s not insane to think about a medical degree. Maybe it doesn’t matter that I haven’t yet decided which country I want to live in because, when the time comes, I’ll still be able to settle down in the knowledge there are several more decades for me to establish myself in a new community. I met an octogenarian in Paris recently, a photo editor whose life had spanned much of the 20th century. He remembered the Spanish civil war; he talked about his recollections of D-Day. But most extraordinarily he told me that he had been married three times, each time very happily and each time for 20 years. His story impressed me with the idea that life does not need to be a single narrative arc. Even before I had begun to think about the possibility of living to be 100 I had started, in my more optimistic moods, to take heart from a new mantra: there’s time yet...
And if we suppose that health and sprightliness are extended too, if we can ignore for a moment worrywart Groaniad handwringing over the burdens of an ageing population, the cost of assisted-living arrangements and the lamentable state of retirement homes, we might hope that, unlike centenarians of today, we would still be surrounded by many of our friends and peers. It occurs to me that if there are a lot of people still active and engaged for the two decades between the ages of 70 and 90, that would represent a huge pool of elderly wisdom and experience. We could have pressure groups and societies. We could be our own productive demographic instead of a languishing appendix; volunteers in the community, helping with childcare, workshops, teaching, mentoring. Respected. We could be society’s grandmothers and great-grandmothers, keepers of culture and history, tenders of new generations. If I close my eyes and dream a little further ahead: could a cadre of older women break through feminism’s childbearing barrier? Careers could be established later, without the crunching pressures of work-life balance that young children born in your late thirties now foster. There could be more women in public service, in positions of oversight and wisdom, judges, ministers, council leaders. Would it be too much to imagine a society being led by the gentle wisdoms and ministrations of old women?
