3.0
Alive, Alive Oh!
ByPublisher Description
Several years ago, Diana Athill accepted that she could no longer live entirely independently, and moved to a retirement home in Highgate. Released from the daily anxieties of caring for her own property and free to settle into her remaining years, she reflects on what it feels like to be very old, and on the moments in her long life that have risen to the surface and which sustain her in these last years.
What really matters in the end? Which memories stand out? As she approaches her 100th year, Athill recalls in sparkling, precise detail the exact layout of the garden of her childhood, a vast and beautiful park attached to a large house; relates with humor, clarity and honesty her experiences of the First and Second World Wars and her trips to Europe as a young woman; and in the remarkable title chapter, describes her pregnancy at the age of forty-three, losing the baby and almost losing her life—and her gratitude and joy on discovering that she had survived.
is "so beautifully written and exquisitely detailed . . . [Athill] mines her memories of a life well-lived and generously lays them out on the page for the rest of the world to enjoy" (
"Witty, candid . . . If you haven't read Athill, and open her latest book expecting serene reflections from a nonagenarian sipping tea in her garden, you're in for a surprise."—
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesAlive, Alive Oh! Reviews
3.0
“I thrifted an Advanced Reading Copy of this book and was incredibly excited to read it. I enjoyed the first two sections, but then the author’s lifestyle and perspective on topics such as abortion, marriage/sex/commitment, and monogamy made it a little bit harder to digest the woman’s life story. I wanted to love this, and it’s my own perspectives, beliefs, and not being able to separate the book from the author and reader relationship that made the experience far less than I hoped for. I wanted to DNF this when I got to the “Alive, Alive Oh!” section, and I skimmed through the rest.
Someone else will probably enjoy this and hate my review, but I couldn’t love this book because of my own biases- oops.”
About Diana Athill
DIANA ATHILL was born in 1917. She helped André Deutsch establish the publishing company that bore his name and worked as an editor for Deutsch for four decades. Athill's distinguished career as an editor is the subject of her acclaimed memoir Stet, which is also published by Granta Books, as are five further volumes of memoirs, Instead of a Letter, After a Funeral, Yesterday Morning, Make Believe, Somewhere Towards the End, a novel, Don't Look at Me Like That, and a collection of letters, Instead of a Book. In January 2009, she won the Costa Biography Award for Somewhere Towards the End, and was presented with an OBE. She lives in London.
Other books by Diana Athill
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