AFTERNOON: Settling Scores with Aging and Mortality

About the book

What does it actually feel like to grow old, and what should we do about it? Written from the inside of what Carl Jung called “the afternoon of life,” the years between fifty-five and eighty-five, AFTERNOON is a calm, unsentimental, and occasionally ironic guide to aging for readers who prefer honesty to comfort. Eva Tombak, author and yoga teacher writing from Vilnius at sixty-six, looks directly at what most books about aging avoid: the real fear of dementia, the cruelties of ageism, the illusions of the longevity industry, the burden of caregiving, and the strange, quiet freedom of having less time ahead than behind. Drawing on conversations with doctors, caregivers, dementia specialists, and people in their eighties and nineties, she weaves personal memoir with cultural criticism, neuroscience, and philosophy. This is not a how-to guide. There are no ten steps to a happy old age. What AFTERNOON offers instead is rarer: the courage to face aging without euphemism, and the wisdom to find meaning in it anyway. Illustrated with darkly comic drawings by Viktor Tombak. For readers who are done being talked down to about getting old.