Better with age?

KATHI WOLFE
Friday, January 09, 2009

Gay-penned book explores wisdom that comes with advancing years

Gay author Henry Alford’s new book ‘How to Live: a Search for Wisdom from Old People,’ released Jan. 2, explores the wisdom the author says comes with age. (Photo by John Woo; courtesy of Twelve Books) Gay-penned book explores wisdom that comes with advancing years

Few things are more feared in this culture than growing old.  Particularly in the youth-obsessed queer community, where 40 is the new 90. 

Yet elders are leading vital, interesting lives. “How to Live: a Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They Are Still on This Earth)” by gay writer Henry Alford, is an illuminating, poignant and amusing collection of interviews with a wide range of older people from playwright Edward Albee to comedian Phyllis Diller to Althea Washington, a Katrina survivor.

Alford, 46, has written for Vanity Fair and other publications. He’s the author of the humor collection “Municipal Bondage” and received a Thurber Prize for “Big Kiss: One Actor’s Desperate Attempt to Claw His Way to the Top.” “The Knowledge,” Alford’s spoof of the idolization of poet W. H. Auden, appears in the new anthology “Disquiet, Please: More Humor Writing from the New Yorker.” 

“We humans are one of the few species with an average life span that extends beyond the age at which we can procreate,” Alford writes in “How To Live.” “... Maybe it’s because old folks have something else to offer.”

That something else, Alford believes, is wisdom.

Alford doesn’t think older people have found the answers to the big questions of life (Why do we die? How should all of us live? Why do bad things happen to good people?). He knows that there’s no (definitive or prescriptive) answer to these complex conundrums. “And I set my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly,” Alford quotes from the biblical book of Ecclesiastes. “I perceived that this also is grasping for the wind.”

Elders are wise, Alford writes, because “the older we get, the more life experiences we are likely to have — and the more experiences we have, the greater the body of information we have to work from.”

There are some wise 30-somethings, Alford observes, but an 80-year-old is more apt to know “something important about life.”

“How To Live” is a mix of musings and quotations on wisdom as well as mini and more lengthy profiles of both famous and unknown older people.   

The most touching parts of “How To Live” are Alford’s conversations with his mother and his stepfather, Will. The couple, who’ve been together more than 30 years, got divorced while Alford was writing the book. His parents “had taken different approaches to aging,” Alford writes. “Mom was … more eager than ever to create a whirlwind of travel, while Will had grown increasingly … sedentary … As my brother once put it ‘Will sleeps 14 hours a day. He’s like a male lion.’”

You’d have to have a heart of stone to be unmoved by Alford’s profile of Althea, a 75-year-old black woman whose husband and home were lost to Katrina.

Alford’s interviews with author and guru Ram Dass, 75, and Albee, 79, are especially revealing. Dass, normally reticent about his sexual orientation, speaks about being gay. When Alford tells him he lives in the West Village, Dass with a “slightly sheepish smile” says, “I used to cruise that area.”

Albee talks movingly about his grief after the death of his long-term partner. “I never thought about being old until my lover Jonathon died,” Albee told Alford. “He and I were together for 35 years … All of a sudden I found myself bereft.”

Other pieces in “How To Live” bring to life a potpourri of elders from vivacious (if self-obsessed) actress Sylvia Miles to Granny D, who at 89 walked across the country to advocate for campaign finance reform.

Some of the interviews (such as the piece on Diller) seem incomplete.  Reading them is like being offered an appetizer when you’re hungry for a meal. While the quotes on wisdom were interesting, they didn’t seem well-integrated with the interviews.

But these are minor caveats.

“How To Live” is a must read for anyone interested in living wisely.

 

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