Books: "20 Over 60" By Weinhouse & Galef

 

20 Over 60

Edited by Beth Weinhouse & David Galef

Regal House; paperback, 266 pages; $21.99; available today, Tuesday October 6th

Beth Weinhouse has been an editor at many mainstream magazines, including Reader's Digest, Self, and Parenting. She has written articles and book reviews for New York Newsday, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, and Town & Country. Her first book was The Healthy Traveler, about maintaining health away from home. Weinstein then co-edited, with Leslie Laurence, Outrageous Practices, about how gender bias can affect women's health.

David Galef is an English professor and creative writing program director at Montclair State University. He has published over a dozen books, including the novel Flesh, the short story collection My Date with Neanderthal Woman, the children's book Tracks, Japanese Proverbs: Wit and Wisdom, and Brevity: A Flash Fiction Handbook. Galef is the editor of Vestal Review, the longest-running flash fiction magazine on the planet.

20 Over 60 is Weinhouse and Galef's new anthology that presents a portrait of later life that is consistently overlooked, as we are in a culture obsessed with youth. 

The twenty short stories included here come from authors including Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Theroux, Rebecca Keller, Maisie McAdoo, and Jane Gardam. These stories capture the full range of emotion, as they are vibrant, moving, and often hilarious.

Some of the characters are a retired couple who like to steal pepper mills form high-end restaurants, a woman whose husband and ex-husband are staying in the same hospital, a futuristic nursing home whose designers become its unhappy residents, and older woman trying online dating, and a grandfather helping his granddaughter scatter her mother's ashes. 

These smart and poignant stories shed line on how the years that come after one's sixtieth birthday can be just as strange, surprising, and vivid as what came before it. The readers who are living it deserve to see themselves reflected on the page.

Q&A With David Galef & Beth Weinhouse (provided by Regal House):

The short stories in 20 Over 60 span wildly different lives and circumstances, but what would you say emerges from the collection to unite the experience of being over 60? Not a shared circumstance, but a feeling or understanding? 20 Over 60 shows that being over 60 may unite a generation (or generations) in years, but life goes on in as many different directions as before. Work and retirement. Sickness and health. Marriages, divorces, widowhood. One commonality is greater life experience, which often lends itself to greater wisdom - though you can certainly make plenty of bad decisions at this age, too. In fiction, the added years make for more complicated characters and complex life situations. What's it like to have not one but two younger generations you have to listen to? To find after 40 years that you don't really know your spouse? To be treated like you're invisible, when you still have much to contribute? These stories deserve to be heard and the people in this age group engaged and recognized, not alone or ignored.

Was there a story in the collection that surprised you, that took the project somewhere you didn't expect when you started? We've got a ghost tale! And a science fiction story and a comedy about dementia and another about kinky sex. Read the one about two senior kleptomaniacs. Don't ask us to choose, or all the other stories will get jealous. But we do have a fondness for humor. Also for stories that overturn our expectations. Also for people who act out of line. Show us some misbehavior, cussedness, misapprehension, and two or three bad choices, and we'll be your audience.

Aging in America is typically discussed through the lens of policy (Social Security, Medicare), decline (health problems, end of life), or celebrity exceptions (Madonna, Mick Jagger). what does fiction do that those frames can't? Whoever proclaimed, "Truth is stranger than fiction," was wrong. Imagination can go places that reality can't. Instead of a news item about Medicare, why not a story about a woman who has to deal with both her husband and her ex-husband in the same hospital at the same time? Similarly, there are many articles about loneliness and boredom after retirement and how seniors are taking university classes, creating artwork, and learning new languages. But fiction can create a couple who've decided the hobby they want to pursue is stealing restaurant peppermills. That doesn't mean the stories in this collection are pure fantasy; as Picasso once claimed, art is a lie that tells the truth. Did these events actually happen to that character? They could have. How people over 60 find community, joy, and purpose as life progresses makes for some great stories. We collected 20 of them.

Younger readers are the demographic that publishers chase, but older readers are the ones actually buying books. Why do you think the industry has been slow to notice? Don't get us started! It isn't just books. Fashion designers court the young. So do music and film producers, restaurateurs - you name 'em. Most industries practice ageism while denying it. We've worked in publishing, and we know how many magazines are pitched to middle-aged or older readers trying to fool their advertisers into seeing a much more youthful demographic. The people working in these industries are younger and want their products to seem trendy or at least appealing to their own group. They leave publications aimed at older readers to scrounge for pharmaceutical ads or ads promoting adult diapers and walk-in bathtubs, when older readers still want to see things like fashion and beauty products. Publishers also annoyingly assume that older people are content to consume media aimed at a younger audience, but that younger people would never read a publication or watch a video or film aimed at an older audience.

Twenty years ago, you published 20 Over 40. What was the impetus to return to a project like this two decades later? We joked in the preface to 20 Over 40 that we might tackle 20 Over 60 someday, but being over 60 was never going to happen to us, you know? Yet the years passed, as they tend to do, and readers of the earlier book continued to wonder if we might tackle this new anthology. We looked at each other and realized that we still had the same impulse: to represent a too-often-ignored stage of life without all the aging cliches. The media compounds the problem, even when it tries to defy it: "You're only as old as you think." Try telling that to an octogenarian. Most people aren't trying to hide their age; they're trying to live their best life no matter their age. We wanted to set the record straight. We've already been asked - repeatedly - about when there'll be a 20 Over 80 collection. We'll get back to you on that.

Generational tension runs through many of these stories: adult children and aging parents, older people mourning lost relevance. What did the writers reveal about how those divides get bridged, or don't? We can talk about tension between the generations, especially when frustrated older parents can no longer say, "Go to your room, young lady (or man)!" But the theme isn't really tension and alienation. It's more an ache for reconciliation: mothers whose children can't see past their advanced age, to recognize the women they really are, or grandparents trying to connect with their grandchildren when neither gets along well with the middle generation. Sometimes the divides do get smaller and there comes a new-found understanding. But when the intergenerational tension remains, fiction is one way to show how the older generation handles it. In the story, "Old as Dirt," for instance, a group of 90-year-old women commiserate with each other about how their children infantilize them. Hearing each other's similar experiences brings the group a measure of peace.

Reading submissions for this anthology meant spending an extended period immersed in stories about aging written by people who are living it. Did that change anything for you - about how you think about your own life at this stage, or what you're expecting from the years ahead?  We admit, or half-admit, that we bought into stereotypes about old age. We expected to read story after story about illness, grief, mental decline, and loneliness. Thank God that's not what we found! The range of experience was amazing. The attitude was kick-ass. We could have edited a book called 100 Over 60 without the stories repeating themselves. These characters are an inspiration to us, not always as role-models but rather as people we can sort of admire...without necessarily wanting to turn into them. The two of us talk about this from time to time ("are these people us?") trying to reassure ourselves that it's fiction and we'll be writing our own kick-ass story as we age!