A Question of Age: A groundbreaking and powerful book about women, ageing and the forever self for readers of Lisa Taddeo, Julia Baird and Annabel Crabb

By Jacinta Parsons

A beautifully written, searing and powerful examination of women and ageing that you will not be able to put down: intense, compelling, poetic, raging.

Warning: this is not a self-help book. Or, a helpful book, necessarily. No one really needs 'help' with ageing. It will happen no matter what we do. Neither is it a book to guide you through these stages of ageing. This book will not ask you to love your lines. Or to post on social media that you feel privileged to age. This book is, instead, a howl of rage.

Grappling with ageing is one of the most confronting elements of being a woman. When we become invisible, when we lose our sexual currency, when we lose that elasticity in our skin, when our bodies soften and change, when our perceived 'value' to society dramatically falls, when our notion of self-worth takes a radical shift.

What do we do when our outside self doesn't match our inside self? That old woman staring back at her reflection in the mirror doesn't understand why she feels so young. So how do we adjust our perceptions of getting older? What does it mean to age as a woman? How do we adjust our thinking about being in the world? What is our currency now?

Jacinta believes that midlife is a crucial reckoning with despair and hope, a time when you are naked in the centre of the world and no-one notices or perhaps cares to look. Midlife is a time when you take stock – to look back and understand how you were made as a woman, and to look forward into the future, to see how you might unmake yourself to live the life that perhaps you should be living.

A Question of Age is incendiary, raging and raw, but also compassionate, insightful and powerfully energising. It is a book for every woman looking in the mirror thinking she no longer recognises herself. It is a book for our times.

PRAISE FOR A QUESTION OF AGE

'ABC presenter Jacinta Parsons is by turns poetic, angry, and circumspectly detached in delivering an intriguing, often moving, collective portrait. A rumination on the female condition and ageing through the generations and beyond ... there is an epic quality to the book. This is distinctive and resonant.' Sydney Morning Herald

'A rich, first-person exploration of an issue common to us all. Parsons mines her own experiences in what becomes an immersive, often brutal, always honest 'the only way out is through' approach to ageing. Readers who enjoyed Annabel Crabb's The Wife Drought should enjoy A Question of Age for its depth, research and straight shooting. It is an insightful and thought-provoking read.' Books+Publishing

'Heartfelt, deeply thoughtful, blazing with truth-filled rage.' Peggy Frew

'Deep, honest, beautiful' Julia Zemiro

'It's hard to explain the relief one feels when an author tells the truth like this. This is a work of love.' Clare Bowditch

'At once lyrical and searing, A Question of Age is a book of both power and vulnerability. A uniquely honest take on what it is to age in a woman's body; how age deconstructs us, and how we can also see it as a rebuilding, and a reinvention, it is the perfect antidote to the relentless stream of sexism and ageism that women ultimately contend with. Furious, lyrical, tender and ultimately inspiring, this is a book that should be read by all women, whatever their age.' Monica Dux

'A life affirming and necessary read, Jacinta Parson's illumination of womankind devours our female silence and complicity. I was equal parts proud and appalled, validated and illuminated - this book gets personal and goes deep into our collective female experie

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Sep 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781460714492

Jacinta Parsons

Jacinta Parsons is a broadcaster, writer, speaker and author of memoir Unseen: The secret life of chronic illness. She currently hosts Afternoons on ABC Melbourne, delivering a popular mix of art, culture and ideas.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Chaos: Before We Began

THIS IS NOT A self-help book. Or a helpful book, necessarily.

No one really needs ‘help’ with ageing. It will happen no matter what we do – we have been ageing since we first cried out in this world. When I was young, I would look at ageing as some kind of oddity as I traced my finger along the lines on the faces of my grandparents. ‘Who are these strange people?’ I wondered.

I noticed that I was transforming into something new. That I had slowed down and that my face had changed. What was strange to me was that I didn’t feel much different on the inside. Nothing felt like I thought it might. There is no sense that suddenly you change at a fundamental level and become someone who is older – someone else.

I noticed a while ago that I was becoming see-through, like I have always imagined ghosts to be. And so I took it upon myself to find ways to lessen the impact of what happens when you are an ageing woman. I bought new creams and highlighting dust so that my skin wouldn’t look as tired. And I was quietly terrified of what I believed I would be forced to become.

We have been taught to be repulsed, frightened and ashamed by the prospect of ageing. Older people, middle-aged people, people older than ‘youth’ experience ageing in a western society as a barrier and a deficit. We have internalised ageism, and we confront it in the world around us every single day of our lives. Ashton Applewhite, one of the leading activists speaking out about ageism, believes that we have been active in the discrimination against our future selves: ‘With ageism, we have internalised it. We have been complicit in our own marginalisation and it will require active consciousness-raising to correct that.’¹

I am no better, of course. I have othered older women and quietly prayed that my skin would defy the inevitability of sagging. I was wary of the women who surely must have always been like this: Old. Tired. Sick. Angry. How could my self ever become like that? It was inconceivable to consider such a fundamental shift from the me as a young person and the me that would one day be old. How does it happen, this shift?

But now that I’m embarking on it, I want to sink down into ageing, to find a way to reconcile with the past that has brought me to the start of this process. To understand how I was made so I can unmake myself in time to live the life that perhaps I should be living.

This is not a book that will ask you to reclaim your life, now that you have been discarded on the scrap heap. Nor will it tell you to scream into the void where you now reside, that ageing doesn’t matter. You’re right, of course, it doesn’t matter, but not for the reasons they force us to claim. Rather, it doesn’t matter because the way we’ve been taught to think about ageing is a lie.

This is not a book to guide you through these stages of ageing. We will all do this in our own way and in our own time. We may skip stages, do some twice or thrice, or stay in one stage until we die.

This book will not ask you to love your lines. Or to post on social media that you feel privileged to age. Of course, this is all true; it truly is a privilege to age. This book primarily endeavours to understand our rage. Why, as women get older, do some of us seem to get really fucking mad? It doesn’t seem to take much, if you push us even slightly, to find ourselves wanting to flip the fucking table (metaphorically, of course). I was beginning to understand that the rage I felt as I aged could not be separated from how it felt to live as a younger version of this person.

This is not simply a rage fuelled by the hormonal changes that I am yet again undertaking, this time through perimenopause and the state of menopause. I had long been told that I was wild and that when the force of fertility left my body I would become wilder. But surely this is a lie. This is not the source of my rage. It is something else altogether.

I want to trace a line back through my life to see if I can find where this all began.

***

When telling people that I was writing a book on ageing, I have mostly been in receipt of an incredulous ‘but what would you know?’ eyebrow or two. It is true – what would I know about ageing? This book is not about knowing; I am only at the early stages of what ageing will mean to me. Rather, this book is about asking how I might endeavour to do this well. Properly well. Not the kind of well that you might do if you want to overcome it or rise above it.

This is a meditation that is informed by my own experience as a white cisgendered woman from the often-obscured vantage point of the middle. The point in life when you perhaps have not yet hardened your bones to what might lay ahead. You see a blank canvas when imagining what this ageing self might look like. You have not yet been bestowed with the full golden cup of wisdom that has been promised as you cross this older person threshold, but you have begun the journey of loss, change and deep meditation on this.

For me, the landscape around ageing is not yet clear. How do I do it well and not get sucked further into the seemingly inevitable relationship with myself as a social and cultural utility?

For much of our lives, the relentless objectification we have experienced has coerced us into believing that we knew what a woman should look like since we were old enough to saunter down that road in just the right way. So just how does this pressure to conform impact the way we might see ourselves as older women? Who do we feel we need to become now?

To have lived as a woman we have functioned for the purpose of sexual gratification or for nurturing – or both, simultaneously. The maiden, the mother, the crone: the three supposed stages of our lives neatly packaged into archetypes that render us useful . . . or not.

After writing this book, though, I don’t think I even know what it really is to be described as old. We are always getting ‘older’, but when do we get ‘old’? And who and what determines that you are now such a beast? It is clear that it is damaging to see the world through the binary of old and young.

There has been a slew of literature written about the positive aspects of ageing, and that has an important place, but it demands that we arrive at acceptance immediately. I am interested instead in the time needed to reflect on ageing and to push back against the lies that we’ve been told. To grieve, to be mad, to work out what the hell has happened. I am interested to understand how, for many women, getting old is dangerous.

This book is a clarion call to rise up and burn the building. To refuse to continue to maintain it. This book wants to demand that our girls do not inherit the silence and shame of living in this way.

In this book, I am created by the elemental forces that live within me and outside of me. The forces that mess with the neutrality of life to make sure that we are subjected to change and renewal. From droughts to floods to fires, from birth to death, these are the conditions in which the human is forged.

In the fire, water, air and earth, I want to ask the question of age.

ELEMENT:

Fire

Casting the Woman

Fire

Introduction

I FIRST HAD A sense of the colour and heat of fire when I was eight years old. It was the day that would become known as Ash Wednesday. It was a day when the humidity in Melbourne made it hard to breathe. Sweat poured from my skin as I sat in our weatherboard house in front of the oscillating fan that hummed in a panic, trying in vain to neutralise a 43°C day.

On that Wednesday, 16 February 1983, there was a warning in the stillness. The feeling of danger hummed under the sounds of our regular day as fires grew around the states of Victoria and South Australia. We were hundreds of kilometres away in the city, and I was too young to understand, but I felt the danger unsettle me as I watched my parents listening to the news on the radio.

The wind came from the north, screaming down the Hume like a road train, hot and fast, gusts reaching over a hundred kilometres per hour. Suddenly, on nightfall, it changed direction and south-westerly winds sent a firestorm through Victorian and South Australian towns and lives. The city of Melbourne was surrounded, trapped by a fire that looked to ring the perimeter.

Forty-seven people in Victoria died. Twenty-eight in South Australia.

We saw photos of what was left. Most of the time it was just a chimney surrounded by rubble, as if fire somehow knows how to look after its own.

There have been other fires in my life. Those fires form part of this story.

***

There must have been a moment, or even a particular year, when I stopped being young and they suddenly thought of me as old. Or at least ‘older’. But try as I may, it’s hard to put my finger on exactly when it happened. It’s difficult to know, because ‘not being young’ isn’t quantified by an easy metric such as reaching a certain age. It’s an ephemera. Or perhaps a witchcraft.

One of the first stages of getting older was the experience of becoming invisible. Or perhaps see-through, like a body of water you dive into with only your eyes trying to see to the bottom. When it first happened, I didn’t understand how I was suddenly rendered not of this world. And then, when I understood I had been discarded, I didn’t know how to respond to this kind of disappearance.

The moment when I became invisible happened surprisingly suddenly as a deliberate act of erasure. As the mafia would say, I had been ‘disappeared’. Out of sight, out of mind.

To understand how I disappeared, I knew I must go back to the beginning, to the day when I was first cast in the fire. A day, millions of years ago, when I was formed. The iron cast cut around my heart and mind, when my dreams were made from me. It’s the same cast that people like me have been fired in for eternity. We have been built as this idea of woman. I had been made from the same mould in the same way that many women have been made. I had the same story of those who have been loved and mourned, who were tortured and hunted and burnt.

I am not new. Instead, I am the continuation of a certain kind of story. A story that has been on an eternal loop. I have been subjected to the same fate as so many women before me – to be lost on this earth. And then to be found again, but different.

I was cast in the same fire that was first lit by my ancestors. And now I want to understand the story that I am continuing. I understand more keenly now that I harbour a life force, a secret key to the worlds that have existed before me. I know about my ancestors in the way my breath moves, in and out, in and out. I am riddled with the pain and the imaginations of the lives that live within me. Lives that I might only know by the way my head tilts slightly, just as my great-great-great-grandmother may have tilted hers.

***

Fire is where this story begins, the place where I start to look for answers about how I might age. In the ash and the heat. In the embers and the smoke. In what it might mean to be reborn again from the razing as new life shoots from the stillness, from the blackness.

I want to understand how age is going to impact me and what it means for me to live inside a body that changes, that is changed and that makes it difficult to live as simply as I might want. When did this change happen? And is it possible, as a woman, to speak about it as a shared experience with other women?

I am spending more and more time thinking about what ageing will mean. How I will be transformed. How well I might adapt. How much change I can withstand before I try to alter it somehow, to push back. How vulnerable I will become. But also, will I now be free?

I know that I must go back to the beginning, to the time when they tricked me into believing that I was indeed new, to find out just how they convinced me to disappear.

The fire is where I am cast and it is the rage that burns inside my belly.

CHAPTER 1

Cast in Fire: The Maiden

I WATCHED HIM PLACE the glass in the furnace. ‘As hot as Hades,’ he said as it heated up to two thousand degrees. Impossible to imagine that anything can survive that type of heat. The heat changes the shape of the glass and transforms it into something that can be worked with so it can become something new, something that he was already imagining. ‘People have been blowing glass since around the first century BC,’ he tells me, his eyes on the gob of glass that he is pulling out of the furnace. Soon enough, this simple lump would be blown and transformed into something almost unrecognisable. Something beautiful.

***

I walked to the strip of shops down the hill and along the main road. Lined up like a gang of scruffy children were a milk bar, a fishmonger and a computer parts store. They were covered in a grime that had been layering for years, and the once proud white paint had soiled to grey. I had three dollars tucked into my jeans to spend on some salt and vinegar chips and maybe a chocolate Big M.

I took this walk as much as I could. I was fourteen, bored and desperate to feel my skin against the world. I hungered to find myself somewhere new, or at least I wanted to be new myself.

I was dressed for the occasion, my favourite singlet top with the tiny flowers and the new white jeans that my mum had bought me. I had teased my fringe up and flipped it over so that there was a quiff at the front so that it looked like I had more hair than I did. I did the best I could with the tiny amount of makeup I had hidden in the bottom of my bathroom drawers, just enough so that no one would notice.

And sitting on top of my skin I would wear a vulnerability that burnt when the wind blew across it. ‘Shhhh,’ I would hiss. ‘Hold it together, you idiot.’

My entry into this world happened, it seemed, when I had not been watching. I had sensed it coming, I think, when it was just rolling in over the hill. But I didn’t understand what it would be like to be part of this new world. My teenage performance so far had been a hopeful shot in the dark for something I wasn’t sure about. What would it mean to be loved?

I spent hours daydreaming in a dark bedroom. I would close the door, like a caterpillar taking to its cocoon. Closing my eyes to the transformation that was taking place within me. I would imagine what might emerge when the transition was complete. I squeezed my eyes shut, hoping that when they sprang open I would be different. Beautiful. Wild.

I studied other girls in my year at school like a naturalist observes the behaviour of plants. What had those girls conjured to look as they did? Their hair so perfectly placed. Their eyes dewy and alive. Their clothing a perfect measure of rebellion and attraction. How was it that they performed this transition into the world with such confidence? Who told them how to make this change seem so effortless? Their leaves twisting and turning, knowing instinctively that they needed to follow the light. How were they taught to intuit the path of the sun?

The older women weren’t much help. I heard their whispers and giggles, surely enacting a shared ritual of horror masked in play at what might be ahead for us as we entered their world. I felt their eyes upon us as they observed that our bodies were beginning to look more like theirs. There was fear in those eyes, because now that we looked like them, there were secrets they knew they should share. There were whispered stories here and there about things that didn’t really matter, but they didn’t share the most violent secrets, the ones that we should have been told. Those secrets remained held within lips that had calcified with silence, becoming still like stone.

I felt the gap between the old women (anyone over thirty years old) and us young girls widen as they tried and failed to bring us safely into their world. We should have known their secrets before we painted our lips and hoped to be loved. Why didn’t they tell us? Why don’t we now tell little girls what it’s like to live like this? To be watched. To grow old. To carry such pain and to experience such enormous pleasure.

I have hidden my own secrets. And kept my own silence. Many times.

The old women hid their discomfort, too, by laughing at our attempts to fit in. ‘Gee, you’ve spent enough time doing your hair, haven’t you? Who are you trying to look pretty for, hey?’ But under their laughter sounded a warning, an alarm that told us we were foolish to even think of ourselves this way. Underneath their words sat the real meaning: ‘You’re only going to get hurt.’

Were they trying to protect us from what lay ahead in this new world? Or did our likeness trigger a hatred that brewed somewhere deep inside?

The old women would talk about us while we were within earshot, like we were toddlers unable to understand what was being said. They would point out the bodies that had developed too fast. Or the ones whose clothing revealed too much skin.

They knew those girls would be dangerous if they had ideas about what they might do with those bodies. These were the bad girls, unafraid of showing their skin to this hungry new world. I was cautioned to keep away from those ones – they were asking for it. Sluts.

And silently, almost through some sort of secret code, the old women shared the shame of inheriting what it was to be a woman. We have been passing our shame from one generation to the other, hidden like a stowaway inside our skin. The tugging embarrassment of its shape. The discomfort of the attention that it receives. Its power. Its allure. Its destruction. Its pain. Its pleasure.

***

Recently, the walk to the shops had changed. I could feel the rumble, a vibration under my feet, but couldn’t quite tell where it was coming from. The energy had shifted around me. The change was small to begin with. Like the way air starts to feel heavy all over you when it’s about to rain. Or when you notice that the ants are changing direction, frantically returning home.

But something was different. Something imperceptible had shifted. The wind had swung around and changed direction, and the fire front was now heading towards me.

The changes in my body had laid a pathway to a new world. Men had started to notice me. Men who had an uncanny ability to break your daydream and make you look back at them. The older men, with fat stomachs and broken teeth, would make a small noise so you’d look up. And then they’d smile and look you straight in the eye. ‘You’re beautiful, baby.’

They were masterful at the game they had likely been playing for decades. Their words would twist and travel down my spine like a current, warning me that there was danger somewhere close. The same words that might have been innocent coming out of another mouth, but here, dripping off their fat lips, you could smell violence on their breath, coiled up tight and ready to explode.

At first I would jump in fright. I had been lost in other thoughts, the kinds of thoughts a child might have before she knows that it’s not safe to daydream anymore. I might have been lost in how the trees moved in the wind. How the smell of eucalyptus swings on a current of air.

Soon enough, the calling on the street became so familiar that I had started to expect it. Like an animal watching, I had become alert to it, trying to sense even the tiniest change in my environment that would suggest it was about to happen. And slowly and quietly, I had become hopeful for it. Reliant on it.

Sometimes I would catch his eye before he had caught mine. If he didn’t look, or call at me from his car, I wondered what I had done wrong. If the boys on the bus didn’t make comments as I got on, did they think I was ugly? Were my legs too fat?

I watched as other girls were yelled at. Whistled. Tooted. And wondered what they had that day that I didn’t. I would try to see them as the men saw them. I shifted my gaze and wondered what it would be like to feel desire for these bodies. And I learnt to look at the world like these men might. I learnt to see myself as these men might.

I noticed that it wasn’t just young women or teenagers who were being catcalled. I was fourteen when I was first whistled at like a dog, but for many girls catcalling starts much younger. Girls as young as eleven are being pulled out of their daydreams and forced to enter a new world.¹

I watched as young girls looked around them, confused, trying to make