The Last Gift of Time

Life Beyond Sixty

Author: Carolyn G. Heilbrun
ISBN: 9780385313254

When she was a young woman, distinguished author and critic Carolyn Heilbrun made a solemn resolution not to live past "three score years and ten." Taking her own life at the age of seventy, she reasoned, would give closure to a life well lived. But on the advent of her seventieth birthday she realized that the past ten years, the years of her sixties, had been filled with unexpected pleasures. As a consequence, Heilbrun writes: "I find it powerfully reassuring now to think of life as borrowed time. Each day one can say to oneself: I can always die; do I choose death or life? I daily choose life the more earnestly because it is a choice." With the wry humor and clarity of vision that have long marked her work, Carolyn Heilbrun writes with honesty about the emotional and intellectual insights that brought her "to choose, each day for now, to live."

Publisher: Dial Press
Publish Date: 1997

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Women Authors

This book is available in the following Community Centers: Women's Center (Location: Mid-life/Older Women)