Books

Joan Didion’s follow-up to The Year of Magical Thinking turns to the death of her daughter Quintana and to Didion’s own aging body — the blue nights of the title, when daylight lingers longest but dark is coming. A meditation on parenthood, time, and the losses that accumulate as we grow older.

New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast turns her signature anxious wit on the hardest subject: her elderly parents’ final years. This graphic memoir is funny, wrenching, and utterly honest about the mess of aging parents, overwhelmed adult children, and the things families can’t quite say out loud. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Drawing on her PhD in cellular immunology, Ehrenreich argues that much of modern preventive medicine, wellness culture, and the anti-aging industry sells false control over a body and a mortality we cannot ultimately command. She examines how the immune system can itself abet disease, and makes the case for accepting the limits of medicine and the certainty of death rather than killing ourselves to live longer.

When her charismatic, difficult mother Jane chooses to end her life at seventy-five, Susannah Kennedy inherits forty-five years of secret diaries. Over a year of reading them, she reckons with memory, grief, and the mother she thought she knew.

After feminist poet Marge Piercy suffers a medical emergency in 2022 and is revived, she spends the following year taking stock. Written at ninety in the Japanese zuihitsu form, this luminous journal braids diary, recipes, garden notes, and poetry into a celebration of a life in its ‘resurrected’ old age.

Joan Didion’s masterpiece on grief after the sudden death of her husband of 40 years. A lucid, devastating, and ultimately illuminating account of what it means to lose a life partner and face the future alone. Essential for any woman navigating widowhood or profound loss.

Palliative care physician Kathryn Mannix has spent her career helping people die well. In this luminous book she shares the stories of patients and families navigating the end of life — and makes the case that dying, approached with honesty and preparation, can be peaceful rather than frightening. Essential reading for anyone who intends to grow old.