The Second Half: Forty Women Reveal Life After Fifty

By Ellen Warner and Erica Jong

A frank, honest, and insightful look into the lives of women over fifty. 
 
The Second Half explores, in photographic portraits and interviews, how the second half of life is experienced by women from many different cultures. From a French actress to a British novelist, from an Algerian nomad to a Saudi Arabian doctor, and an American politician, Ellen Warner traveled all over the world to interview women about their lives.  She asked them what they learned in the first half that was helpful in the second, and what advice they would give to younger women. Their revealing and inspiring stories are enlightening for all readers, and are illustrated by Warner’s stunning portraits which tell their own story.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Release date: Mar 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781684580873

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

ELLEN WARNER

In 2003, I first went to Patmos, a Greek island that I fell in love with and now return to every year. The way I get to know a place is to take portraits of the people who live there. Fifteen years ago, I asked Jacqueline Délia Brémond, a beautiful French woman who had been coming to Patmos for thirty-five years, if I could photograph her. She had just turned seventy, and while I was taking her portrait, I asked her what it felt like to be seventy. I found myself listening attentively, not in the abstract way I usually do when talking to a subject while really focusing on the composition of the picture. I had been thinking about aging, myself. This is what I want to know, I thought. What does it feel like to be seventy, eighty, or one hundred years old? How will I feel when I lose my looks or my ability to be independent, to travel alone to remote parts of the world? What is it like to know that the end of life is approaching? And that was the birth of The Second Half.

I’ve spent my career taking pictures. Interviewing was new to me. I had to decide what questions to ask. What did I really want to know? I narrowed my questions to the following:

• How would you describe the second half, i.e., life after fifty?

• What did you learn in the first half that’s been helpful in the second?

• How do you feel you’ve changed, including your interests, values, and your sense of who you are?

• What used to give you the greatest pleasure? What gives you the greatest pleasure now?

• What was your happiest time? Your saddest time?

• How do you look to the future?

• How would you like to be remembered?

• What advice would you give younger women?

After several interviews, I decided that the reader needed to know more about the women. What kind of family were they born into? What had their childhood been like? So I began to start each interview by asking the woman to tell me her life story, starting from the beginning.

People often ask me how I found the women in the book. The answer is: usually through other women. Shortly after that trip to Patmos, my husband and I were invited to visit friends in Paris. I was chatting with our next-door neighbor across our garden wall, wondering how I would find women. You must photograph the woman who was married to my husband’s uncle! my friend said. That was Odette Walling. Our hosts in Paris recommended a few women, and Jacqueline Délia recommended others. On another trip, walking down a little street in village of Ubud in Bali, I saw a beautiful woman. Who is she? I asked my companion. She’s my Auntie, was the response. That was Ni Ketut Takil. (I was later told that in local villages, it’s customary to call every older woman an Auntie.) In southern Algeria, I was crossing the desert with five friends to visit the prehistoric paintings of the Tassili. I asked our Berber guides if they could keep their eyes open for a nomadic woman—which is how I met Fatma Doufen.

In general, I had two criteria for the women I photographed and interviewed. They had to be interesting looking—not necessarily beautiful, but interesting looking. And they had to be willing to open up and be honest in the interview. And, with a couple of exceptions, I didn’t want to photograph friends—I wanted to approach each person with fresh eyes and ears. I looked for diversity, both geographic and socioeconomic, within the limits of how much of the world I could