‘Sixty’ candidly looks at one’s life

In 1950 psychoanalyst Erik Erikson proposed that we tender, fallible humans pass through eight stages of development, each defined by a different conflict. The final stage: Ego Integrity Versus Despair.

The idea is that when we’re older, we face an existential reckoning: We can either make peace with our choices, dunderheaded as some might have been, or we can spend our final years in a hair shirt of our own regrets.

Though Ian Brown never says it outright, this struggle lies at the heart of “Sixty: A Diary of My Sixty-First Year,” a great, fat rosebush of a book that’s beautiful and pungent and, at moments, deceptively prickly.

He writes about sex. His fantasies, jealousies, occasional combustive failures: “The engine’s turning over, but the alternator won’t catch.” He writes about memory, particularly the middle-age brain termites that make you scramble dates, grope for words, delay your departure from the house: “Clothes. Wallet. Keys. Phone. Phone? Keys? Wallet? Book bag. Yes. Out the door. Forgot the car keys. Back in.”

But the questions he really addresses — the substantive, tricky ones that give this book its prickle and its pith — are Eriksonian in nature. “At 60, after all,” Brown writes, “you are suddenly looking into the beginning of the end, the final frontier where you will either find the thing your heart has always sought, which you have never been able to name, or you won’t.”

Mistakes at this stage seem devilishly hard to reverse. It jars Brown to realize he may no longer have time to get around to everything he wished to do, a notion his young self blithely took for granted.

These admissions are the strength of “Sixty” — such introspection and candor are rare elements on the periodic table of writerly assets — but they are also its weakness.

I recognize diaries are a place for uncompromising honesty. But this one has been written and shaped for public consumption; I wish Brown’s editor had noted there’s a moment, as imperceptible as the changing of the seasons, when repeated self-criticism morphs into a twitchy self-loathing.

I also feel protective of him. He hasn’t sufficient compassion for himself.

When he’s not thrashing about in a tub of self-disgust, however, Brown is charming, thoughtful and edifying company. There’s loads to identify with in “Sixty.” More than that: There’s loads to flat-out adore.