A compelling account by a literary star
To read this utterly delightful and brief memoir from Diana Athill is to revel in the joys of a woman looking back on a life of good fortune and few regrets.
Now 98, this erudite and independent woman is in an “old people’s home” and is as fiercely intelligent as ever. The move away from independent living was a choice she made herself, she writes, before someone made it for her. And it’s clear her new life has been a joyous revelation to her, including her mobility challenges: “Nothing could be more deliciously luxurious than being pushed around a really thrilling and crowded exhibition in a wheelchair.”
Athill first came to prominence in 2000 with Stet: An Editor’s Life about her life editing such literary stars as V.S. Naipaul, Mordecai Richler and Norman Mailer. She followed this up with the more personal and awardwinning Somewhere Towards the End in 2008, in which she began detailing her experience with getting old. If there is a bit of overlap with that book in Alive, Alive Oh!, it matters little — there is plenty to savour here.
For instance, in the book’s best essay she writes about her near-death experience at age 43, following a miscarriage, having decided against a third abortion. (Athill never married. “What I was really happy with was a lover who had a nice wife to do his washing and look after him if he fell ill, so that I could enjoy the plums of love without having to munch through the pudding.”)
Another gem is her rumination on what she saw and felt being in Tobago. She calls the white minority there poisoners, and takes herself to task as well for “getting pleasure as a result of other people’s degradation.”
These and the other essays — vignettes, really — make a nice wrapup to what has been an extraordinary life, and a much-deserved run of literary stardom.