“Lumpy, Aged, and Wrinkled Bodies”
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“They did not know that lumpy, aged, and wrinkled bodies were as needy as their own young, firm ones, that love was not to be tossed away carelessly . . .”
Today, I want to explore (just a bit) how an author might write about age. Not just write about it, but actually write age. I was motivated by a very recent Maine Crime Writers post, “Never Too Late?” (Thanks, Maggie Robinson!)
I found lots of authors who paused in the story to have a character give us some aging philosophy—as if from on high. Nope, not what works well I thought. Breaks the story, the tone, the plot’s trajectory.
So I went back to the Pulitzer Prize winning Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth’s Strout’s first Olive novel.
The novel still stuns me, but the first jolt happened many years ago when I read Olive’s lines about loneliness after her husband’s death. For the first time, I understood why my mother, alone after a long marriage, drove daily to the ocean to sit and stare at the water. With tears, I could feel her loneliness because of Olive’s loneliness.