How To Dress For Old Age
How to Dress for Old Age
A Braided Memoir
By David Carlin and Peta Murray
Room 306. Level Three. Rathdowne Place Residential Aged Care Facility. Melbourne. David Carlin’s mother, Joan, is settling in. Five doors away, on the same floor, Peta Murray’s father, Frank is halfway through the statistically ordained 18 months he is likely to live post entering “care”. Each is 86. He—an ex-builder and sometime bon vivant—is shrinking into his grey marle tracksuit but can still fit his Sixth Form blazer. She— a widowed mother of three since the age of 31, turned activist, community leader and doer-of-many-things—is throwing on colourful scarves and preparing to re-invent herself once again.
It's 2018, pre-pandemic. A stone’s throw away on a city campus Peta is moving in to the “Paris end” of what has long been David’s private office. David is 55 and a newly minted professor. Peta is 60 and an early career researcher in a late career body. David longs to rebel against the extractive logic of the institution and perhaps ‘retire’, although he hates the word. After decades of precarity as an arts worker, Peta is digging in until she hits peak nerd and peak superannuation. Each is yet to fully imagine what comes next
At this confluence How to Dress For Old Age (HTD) unfolds along parallel tracks: queer and straight, female and male, breeder and non—. A work of narrative non-fiction-meets-braided memoir, HTD asks what it takes to live a meaningful life all the way to the finish line. Part valedictory, part costume parade, HTD charts the complex dance moves of Father and Daughter, and Mother and Son, as they escort one another into new phases of longevity, play out the fantasy of the nuclear family as the only natural mechanism for delivering care, and try on countermoves to the diminishments of elderhood and the pervasive forces of ageism, inside and out.
This is a work of love and reckoning, as adult children take up the labour of care for absent fathers and stoic mothers, while contemplating their own prospects for a “third age”. With its wry voicings and spirited characters, How To Dress for Old Age will engage the reader who seeks fresh takes, beautifully crafted, on contemporary —life and death!—concerns.
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