GRAND FINALES

Feisty ladies of a certain age.

Award-winning memoirist and literary critic Gubar was 63 when, in 2008, she was diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer and given three to five years to live. After debilitating surgeries and chemotherapies, she enrolled in a clinical trial that proved successful, giving her an unexpected chance to experience old age—and to wonder how other women navigated this period of their lives. Although older women are stereotypically depicted as feeble, discountable, and unremarkable, Gubar has discovered that many found new bursts of creativity in the “grand finale” of their lives. As evidence, she offers succinct biographies of nine creative women—selected from a host of others appearing in the book—whose later years she groups under three categories: Lovers (writers George Eliot and Colette, artist Georgia O’Keeffe) who took younger men as companions; Mavericks (writer Isak Dinesen, poet Marianne Moore, artist Louise Bourgeois) who cultivated their idiosyncrasies; and Sages (jazz musician Mary Lou Williams, poet Gwendolyn Brooks, dancer-choreographer Katherine Dunham) who devoted themselves to the needs of their community. For Gubar’s stubborn mavericks, “roguish old age” offered a time “in which they flaunted their deeply eccentric spirits.” As different as they were from one another, Dinesen, Moore, and Bourgeois donned “odd outfits” and engaged in blatant self-mythologizing, leaning into their personas as “sly old ladies.” Gubar’s three sages were Black women influenced by religion, the Civil Rights Movement, and social injustice to find new outlets for their talents and new ways to engage with the world. Gubar cites many other aging women—artist Faith Ringgold and designer Iris Apfel, and writers Grace Paley, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, and Annie Ernaux, among others, to ring in on the lively possibilities—of productivity, connection, and reinvention—in one’s last years.

A sympathetic portrait of old age.